Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 158-170). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 531-544).

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Donald Abenheim, Hans Eberhard Peters. Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-126). Also available online.

What explains the resilience of formerly nationally dominant parties at the subnational level? This dissertation demonstrates that factionalism is key. When intra-party factions are united, subnational dominant parties retain power even under adverse electoral conditions. By contrast, divisions and conflicts among internal groups lead these parties to lose even in favorable electoral contexts. I test these claims using a variety of quantitative and qualitative evidence from Mexico, focusing on the electoral performance of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in contemporary gubernatorial elections. Democratization potentially undermines unity in dominant parties because it provides politicians with viable exit options (i.e., joining the opposition) and because authoritarian central party committees no longer control subnational politics. Yet, I argue that factions can cooperate under democracy when they were more autonomous from the center during the authoritarian period. The negotiation skills acquired in the past help them "get along" in the absence of an external enforcer. By contrast, previously subordinated factions never acquired such skills and quickly became antagonistic to each other under democracy. As I show, collaboration had positive electoral consequences in subnational elections whereas antagonism had pernicious ones. / text

A bi-polar world emerged at the end of World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union were the world's superpowers and tensions between them spiraled consequently bringing about the Cold War. United States foreign policy during the Cold War revolved around containment policy. The Middle East during the Cold War was a region that the bi-polar world's superpowers wanted to influence, and protect. The United States during the Cold War warned the Soviet Union through presidential doctrines that it would fight to keep the Middle East from communism, and the Soviet Union's influence. The bi-polar international power structure did not allow the United States the ability to pick its battles. The power structure that constrained the Cold War forced the United States to react to the Soviet Union, and it forced foreign policy makers to always consider the Soviet Union's response to its policies. United States foreign policy in the Middle East during the Cold War threatened wit h military methods to solve local and regional instabilities. However, the United States was constrained by the bi-polar world thus, it was cautious of committing military troops in the region permanently and upsetting the region's delicate balance of power. United States foreign policy toward the Middle East has changed between 1981 and 2006. This change is in the direction of greater use of military methods to resolve what various administrations have perceived to be local and regional instability. This change in policy is partly attributable to changes in the United States power position in the world. A United States foreign policy shift in the Middle East occurred due to a change in the distribution of political power within the interstate system. This change has had the following result: the United States is no longer constrained by the bi-polar international power structure that characterized the Cold War period. The collapse of the Soviet Union created the uni-polar internationa l power structure. United States foreign policy is now capable of deploying the military to resolve local and regional instabilities in the Middle East, and that deployment has tended to become increasingly permanent in nature.

Political parties proliferated in Senegal and other competitive authoritarian regimes in post-Cold War Africa. This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of that proliferation. Why do so many politicians create their own parties in this context and what are the consequences of party proliferation for opposition party behavior and presidential turnover? The dissertation addresses these questions with original data collected over sixteen months of fieldwork in Senegal, including over one hundred interviews, material from party archives, local press clippings, political biographies, and data on elections and party behavior. Party formation, strategy, and competition are shaped by the "uneven playing field," a hallmark of competitive authoritarian regimes that entails systematic, deep advantages for the ruling party in terms of access to political finance, media, and the state. Focused on Senegal, a critical case of party proliferation, the dissertation traces how the uneven playing field not only empowers the president to create incentives for proliferation; it also renders life in the opposition so difficult that many politicians form parties to negotiate their way into the state. A significant subset of Senegalese party leaders is primarily concerned not with competing in elections; they focus instead on patronage negotiation, which does not necessarily entail vote-seeking. Moreover, because most party leaders minimize their involvement in elections that are difficult to win, they rarely function as the consistent opposition parties that bolster liberal democracy. Party leaders rarely possess the endowments that foster such behavior- namely, prior experience as high-level state administrators and access to international private financing. Finally, in the absence of consistent opposition parties, ex-regime insiders often constitute the president's most serious electoral challengers. Insider opposition candidates' previous access to the state provides opportunities for political advancement that outsiders lack. / Government

My dissertation focuses on the impact of oil trade ties and network on political instability: democratization, civil war onset, and coups. Oil is an important resource to most states, while a few states, especially autocratic states, can produce and export it. This implies that the break of oil trade ties may strategically or economically damage oil-importing states more than oil-exporting states. In the three essays of my dissertation, I argue that oil trade ties allow oil-exporting states to resist to external pressures and encourage oil-importing states to support important oil exporters in order to avoid losing access to a much-needed commodity. In order to measure the effect of oil trade ties on three political instability problems, I employ centrality indices in weighted networks of network analysis. Based on the centrality indices, I measure the effect of oil-importing states on oil-exporters’ abilities to resist international pressures and to obtain external support, and examine how an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties affect its three political instability phenomena: democratization, civil war onset, and coup risk. Empirical results reveal three ways in which an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties might affect its political instability; an autocratic oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties reduce external democratizing pressures and hinder democratization; an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties attract external prewar support for its government, and reduce the likelihood of civil war onset when the exporter experiences external prewar support for its government; an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties reduce the likelihood of coup.

This dissertation investigates the extent to which between Islam and democracy are compatible in the Muslim world. While some scholars have argued that Islam is inherently incompatible with democracy many have found, in contrast, that Islam has many resources to accommodate a successful democratic state. If Islam is compatible with democratic governance at a doctrinal level, why then are the majority of Muslim countries largely authoritarian? To address this question, I introduce a refinement on this discrepancy by focusing on the coexistence of emerging Islamic institutions with democratic transitions in 49 Muslim-majority states. Traditionally, Islam has been operationalized as a "dichotomous" variable based on demographics or an "attitudinal" measure based on survey responses. Both measures have failed to account for an inherent variation of Islam's role across the Muslim world. I developed a new index to assess the variation in Islam factor across Muslim countries: <italic>Islamic Institutionalization Index</italic> (III). This new index avoids the shortcomings of the current approaches to quantifying "Islam" and captures the range of variation in Islamic Institutions across 49 countries by allowing scholars to gauge the density and level of Islam in each country. With the index I designed, I rely on three different levels of analysis to examine under which circumstances Islam and democracy can coexist. More precisely, by looking into three categories of Islamic institutions (educational, political, and financial), I raise the following question: "To what extent and in what levels do Islamic Institutions support the coexistence between Islam and Democracy?"Analyzing 49 Muslim-majority states, I utilize mixed methodology by using <italic>Configurational Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis</italic> (FS/QCA) and focused case study analysis. FS-QCA offers an innovative and robust approach to identify configurationally complex factors while discerning the emerging patterns displayed by medium size (N=49) cases. To further explain the complex interplay of conditions, I focus on two case studies in greater detail: Kazakhstan and Turkey. I find a strong empirical association between the density and scope of Islamic political, educational and financial institutions and the existence of democratic norms (civil and political liberties and democratic institutions). Findings further suggest that Islamic institutions can coexist with civil and political liberties when governments allow Islamic institutionalization to function in society with no stern political restrictions. Among the three categories of III, Islamic states with higher levels of <italic>Islamic political institutions</italic> manifest <italic>particularly</italic> higher levels of democracy. Conversely, states that ban the emergence of a range of Islamic institutions in politics, education, and interest-free banking exhibit low levels of freedom and stunted democratic institutions.

The Press in Transition adopts a comparative approach to transitional print institutions worldwide. It is based on some 150 interviews and archival research on four continents, over a decade of unprecedented global transformation and upheaval. The dissertation seeks to fill a serious gap in the existing literature on democratization and political transition. Theoretical chapters advance a comparative model of press functioning (Chapter 1) and a more tentative model of transitional media, with a strong focus on the mainstream press (Chapter 6). The bulk of the work consists of four case-studies, each drawn from a different geographical region (indeed, continent) and a markedly different "type" of liberalization or transition process. The case of Nicaragua (Chapter 2) stands out somewhat. It concentrates almost exclusively on a single newspaper, Barricada, the former official organ of the Sandinista Front. The newspaper's transformations in the 1990s are, however, set against the backdrop of Barricades history since 1979, intra-Sandinista politics during and after the revolutionary era, and the more general interplay of media and politics in Nicaragua. The remaining three case-studies (South Africa, Jordan, and Russia: Chaps. 3-5) combine system-level analysis with micro-level portraits of transitional institutions and individuals. The core of the theoretical analysis lies in a delineation of "mobilizing" and "professional" imperatives. The former I attach mainly to sponsors and managers of media institutions; the latter mainly - not exclusively or universally — to the editorial side of the operation. The interplay of these variables I see as integral to an understanding of events at the case-study newspapers. The opening theoretical chapter situates mobilizing and professional imperatives as both dependent and independent variables. I argue that they reflect and respond to variables like underdevelopment, authoritarianism, and pre-existing media culture. But they also serve as founts of important and interesting initiatives, whether professional, political, or commercial. Significantly, too, they regularly conflict. The dissertation struggles to avoid heroicizing, but it also tries to show that tensions and upheavals — both small-scale and radically transformative - tend to derive from the clash of mobilizing and professional priorities.

Demokratizacija ar liberalizacija – ilgi ir sudėtingi procesai. Tai labai gerai atsispindi Centrinės Azijos regione. Čia po SSRS žlugimo, kaip ir kitos po-sovietinės valstybės taip Kirgizija bei Kazachstanas, turėjo sukurti naujas arba stipriai modifikuoti senas konstitucijas bei rinkimų sistemas. Oficialiai abi šalys pasirinko demokratinius režimus. Tai pažymima abiejų valstybių konstitucijų pirmosiose pastraipose. Tačiau reali valstybių politika iki šiol koncentruojasi ties jų lyderiais ir „klanais“ bei atskirais regionais. Aptariamose valstybėse de Jure ir de facto demokratija įkūnijama įvairiais būdais. Iš principo esminės demokratinės teisės, tokios kaip: žodžio laisvė, spaudos laisvė, religijos ir bendravimo laisvės yra uždraustos arba iš dalies suvaržytos. Šiame darbe bus pristatomos skirtingos demokratinės tranzicijos teorijos, bei jų taikymo galimybė Kazachstano ir Kirgizijos atvejais. Peržvelgiama ne tik teorijų raida, bet ir pateikiama demokratizacijos ir liberalizacijos klasifikacija. Trumpai pristatomi abiejų valstybių istorinės raidos ir dabartinis kontekstai. Darbe dėmesys labiausiai sutelkiamas rinkimų sistemos ir konstitucijų formavimuisi pokomunistinių laikotarpiu bei tolimesnei jų raidai. Išskiriami atskiri valstybių valdymo atvejai, kuriuos įteisino kintančios konstitucijos ar rinkimų įstatymai. / Democratization and liberalization are very elaborate processes. This is very obvious in the region of Central Asia. Just after collapse of USSR countries like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan had to create new or completely modify old constitutions and electoral laws. Officially both countries had chosen democratic systems. That is also marked in the first articles of their constitutions. However real politics in these countries is based on their leaders, “clans” and separate regions preferences. De jure and de facto democracies are accomplished in many different ways. Traditionally democratic freedoms such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of association – while provided for in the constitutions - are suppressed and/or severely limited. Several democratic transition theories and their adoption in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan will be presented in this study. It will be overviewed not only their development but also marked different classification. Most of the study will be concentrated into electoral systems development and development of each country’s constitutions after collapse of USSR. It will be marked different types of ruling systems, which have provided each electoral law or constitution amendments.