This dissertation investigates social conservative activism in the American Republican Party and in four parties of the Canadian right: the Progressive Conservative Party, Reform Party, Canadian Alliance Party, and Conservative Party of Canada. While issues like gay and lesbian rights and abortion became politically contentious in both countries during the late 1960s, American social conservatives emerged earlier than their Canadian counterparts and enjoyed considerably more success. Understanding this contrast explains an important part of the difference between Canadian and American politics and explicates a key aspect of modern conservatism in North America. The argument developed here focuses on different norms about the boundary of politics held in right-wing parties in the two countries. Norms are embedded components of institutions that codify the “logic of appropriateness” for actors within a given institution (March and Olsen 1989, 160) and both construct and regulate the identities of political actors (Katzentstein 1996). The recognition of norms has been an important development in organizational theory, but one that has never been applied to modern office-seeking parties (Ware 1996, Berman 1998). Qualitative case studies establish that many Republicans understood both sexuality and appeals to religion as politically legitimate throughout the period under investigation. In Canada, alternatively, Progressive Conservatives saw such questions as being inappropriate grounds for political activity. This norm restricted social conservative mobilization in the party. It was only when the Reform Party upset both the institutions and ideology of Canadian conservatism that social conservatives began to gain prominence in Canadian politics. Since then, the success of Canadian social conservatives has been limited by Canada’s political culture and institutions but they are now, as their American counterparts have long been, consistently recognized by other Canadian conservatives as partners in the conservative coalition.

This paper examines and ultimately objects to a version of political Conservatism as described in Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin’s paper “Analytic Conservatism.” Brennan and Hamlin’s argument makes several claims about economic forecasting and societal risk-aversion that ultimately uphold the status quo within society. This paper examines these claims and refutes them, while also considering counter-arguments Brennan and Hamlin could use to defend their theory. In conclusion, this paper supports the analytic dimension of Brennan and Hamlin’s theory while criticizing the trivial and arbitrary nature of valuing the status quo.

This dissertation investigates social conservative activism in the American Republican Party and in four parties of the Canadian right: the Progressive Conservative Party, Reform Party, Canadian Alliance Party, and Conservative Party of Canada. While issues like gay and lesbian rights and abortion became politically contentious in both countries during the late 1960s, American social conservatives emerged earlier than their Canadian counterparts and enjoyed considerably more success. Understanding this contrast explains an important part of the difference between Canadian and American politics and explicates a key aspect of modern conservatism in North America. The argument developed here focuses on different norms about the boundary of politics held in right-wing parties in the two countries. Norms are embedded components of institutions that codify the “logic of appropriateness” for actors within a given institution (March and Olsen 1989, 160) and both construct and regulate the identities of political actors (Katzentstein 1996). The recognition of norms has been an important development in organizational theory, but one that has never been applied to modern office-seeking parties (Ware 1996, Berman 1998). Qualitative case studies establish that many Republicans understood both sexuality and appeals to religion as politically legitimate throughout the period under investigation. In Canada, alternatively, Progressive Conservatives saw such questions as being inappropriate grounds for political activity. This norm restricted social conservative mobilization in the party. It was only when the Reform Party upset both the institutions and ideology of Canadian conservatism that social conservatives began to gain prominence in Canadian politics. Since then, the success of Canadian social conservatives has been limited by Canada’s political culture and institutions but they are now, as their American counterparts have long been, consistently recognized by other Canadian conservatives as partners in the conservative coalition.

Recent studies document that covenant violations intensify the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers, and lead to greater restrictions on borrowing firms’ financing and investment activities (Chava and Roberts, 2008; Roberts and Sufi, 2009b). Motivated by this literature, I investigate whether accounting conservatism, specifically conditional conservatism, mitigates the adverse consequences of debt covenant violations. I argue that conservative reporting can potentially ameliorate the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers. Therefore, I predict that accounting conservatism reduces the adverse impact of covenant violations on borrowers’ financing and investing activities and exhibits a positive association with operating and stock market performance after covenant violations. I obtain a sample of 312 violating and 5,327 non-violating firm-quarters observations from U.S. non-financial public firms during the period of 1998 – 2007 to test my hypotheses. Using three measures of conditional conservatism and a composite measure of the three individual measures, I find that the degree of increase in borrowing firms’ conservative reporting between loan initiation and covenant violation is associated with smaller reductions in firms’ financing and investing activities in the post-violation period. Furthermore, my analyses provide some evidence that firms that increase conservative reporting exhibit better stock market performance, implying that conservative reporting is beneficial for shareholders after covenant violations. I find no evidence that increased accounting conservatism affects operating performance after covenant violations. My results continue to hold after controlling for pre-contracting unconditional and conditional conservatism. Overall, my dissertation provides evidence that conservative accounting practices followed by borrowing firms ease the adverse consequences of debt covenant violations. My dissertation contributes to the emerging literature on the effects of accounting quality on re-contracting outcomes after covenant violations.

Accounting regulators are concerned about the potential threat of long-term auditor-client relationships on auditor independence, leading to lower audit quality. The main objective of this study is to examine the association between auditor tenure and an important feature of accounting, namely conservatism. Following Basu (1997) and Ball, Kothari and Robin (2000), I define conservatism as the quicker recognition in earnings of bad news about expected future cash flows. I investigate whether long-term auditor-client relationships are associated with less timely recognition of earnings to bad news, and a lower rate of reversal of negative earnings changes. The overall results strongly show that conservatism decreases as auditor tenure lengthens. The results are robust across various measures of conservatism and a series of sensitivity tests. However, auditors¡¯ litigation exposure appears to be able to mitigate the adverse impact of auditor tenure. In additional tests, I find that the reduced conservatism is not driven by the larger clients that auditors have incentives to retain. Moreover, I find that even industry specialists could not avoid the negative impact of longer auditor-client relationships on conservatism. The study provides some support to the regulators who are concerned about the potential negative impact of auditor tenure on audit quality and the rule of mandatory audit firm rotation.

The present study investigated the relationship between religiousness, conservatism and traffic behaviour. It was shown that, intrinsic religious orientation significantly predicted ordinary violations of both the drivers and the pedestrians. Religiousness seems to have a positive effect by orienting the individual to obey the rules and to refrain from risk taking behaviour. Moreover, components of conservatism (conservation of values and resistance to change) were found to affect the aggressive violations and the positive behaviours of the drivers. While conservation of values decreased aggressive violations of the drivers, it increased the positive behaviours. On the contrary, resistance to change decreased positive behaviours and increased aggressive violations. These contrary results were accounted for by using Wilson&rsquo / s (1973) explanations of these dimensions. To conclude, variables distal to traffic context were shown to influence traffic behaviour differentially.

This thesis analyses the position of the Ottoman Empire and the Italian penin- sula and their position in the international scenario during the 19th century. This work studies the developments in the Ottoman Empire and the Italian peninsula from the beginning of the Tanzimat (in the Ottoman Empire) and the Risorgimento (in the Italian peninsula), until the Crimean War, and eval- uates the consequences of these events for the European balance of power. These developments took place at a time when Europe was divided be- tween conservative and liberal states, the formers being represented by Russia and the Habsburg Empire, the latters by Great Britain and France. This the- sis, while focusing on the role played by these great Powers in influencing the Ottoman Empire and the Italian peninsula during the first half of the 19th century, also considers the international developments that followed the out- break of the Crimean War. The Crimean War in fact saw the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia allying themselves with the liberal forces, a choice consistent with the political path these two states were following in their internal reforms, which they were undertaking to allow them to meet the challenges of evolving times.

The key features of this dissertation pertain to limited investor attention and its indirect consequences of conservatism and representativeness biases that have impacts on the Taiwan Stock Market. Thus, this dissertation contributes to the empirical work on investors¡¦ limited attention and heterogeneous beliefs to public information, as well as representativeness heuristics. This study examines the market reaction of a sequential release of annual reports in Taiwan, in which different stages of attention-grabbing cause different market reactions. Moreover, investors with limited attention have an incomplete understanding about the content of the annual report, in which different years present significant positive or negative reactions of trading volume, and the evidence supports the hypothesis of limited attention. If people focus primarily on the strength of the evidence, they tend to neglect its weight and manifest representativeness bias. On the other hand, when people are unimpressed by the strength of the evidence, they focus too much on its weight and exhibit conservatism bias. Thus, this study distinguishes the behavioral biases between global representativeness bias and local representativeness bias. The results suggest that accounting performances globally have low strength but high weight features, leading investors to show conservatism bias, and other valuation ratios globally have high strength but low weight features, leading investors to exhibit representativeness bias. However, when global sequence is further decomposed into a local sequence, those behavioral biases disappear. This study also sheds light on how investors are sensitive to the streak length of performance, and the empirical evidence indicates that investors exhibit the gambler¡¦s fallacy to the trend of performance.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-143).

Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kansas, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-325) and index.