In this dissertation, I investigate two key questions: 1) What are the specific conditions under which economic inequality undermines democratic legitimacy; and 2) How does inequality map onto individuals’ perceptions of fairness and subsequently affect satisfaction with democracy and trust in political institutions? I first argue that individuals’ perceptions of distributive unfairness are key factors whereby economic inequality undermines democratic legitimacy. Inequality - and subsequent perceptions that the economic distribution is unfair - undermine political support by signaling that the democratic process is not functioning properly and by challenging people’s normative expectations about what democracy should do in practice. I next draw from a diverse literature on social and political psychology, as well as governance quality, to derive new hypotheses about how people form their fairness judgments and use them to evaluate democracy. Right-leaning and upper-class individuals should be less upset with inequality in the first place, but even when these individuals perceive distributive unfairness, they should be less likely to express political dissatisfaction as a result. Additionally, the context in which individuals form their fairness perceptions should condition the relationship between fairness judgments and political support. In a context of good governance, individuals should be less likely to perceive inequality as unfair, and subsequently less likely to express political dissatisfaction for any perceived distributive unfairness in society. Governance quality provides alternative evidence that democracy is in fact functioning properly and should allay citizens’ concerns about inequality and distributive unfairness, at least when it comes to evaluating democratic legitimacy. To test my theory and hypotheses, I take a mixed-methods approach that combines large-N analysis of public opinion data and original survey experiments. To contextualize my quantitative results, I draw on motivating examples from original open-ended surveys, newspapers, and elite interviews. In the first empirical chapter, I conduct a multilevel analysis of data from 18 Latin American and show that perceptions of distributive unfairness are negatively correlated with trust in government and satisfaction with democracy, yet good governance significantly mitigates this negative relationship. In the second empirical chapter, I use original survey experiments in Argentina, Mexico, and the US to show that perceptions of distributive unfairness are key causal factors linking inequality to political dissatisfaction. In the third empirical chapter, I use a second set of survey experiments to investigate how governance quality moderates the relationship between inequality and political support. When individuals are presented with information about declining corruption, they are less likely to perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair, and less likely to link inequality to political dissatisfaction.

Involvement in collaborative partnerships in natural resource management has become a popular method for natural resource management agencies to collect public input, cope with conflicts, and develop ecosystem management plans. This thesis evaluates various collaborative processes, emphasizing multiple-owner partnerships. Qualitative interviews of 46 landowners in Utah were conducted to reveal concerns and suggestions regarding multiple-owner landscape-level collaborative partnerships. Landowners were concerned about private property rights infringement and losing control of their private land. Landowners were primarily concerned about the fairness and effectiveness of any partnership in which they were involved. However, they were willing to consider participating if certain procedural and group composition elements were met: realistic goals; compromise or consensus-based decision-making; time efficiency; participant commitment, especially by public land management officials; more weight given to local concerns than non-local concerns; participant knowledge of local ecosystems; and respect among participants. A follow-up study with participants of eight collaborative partnerships in four western states examined the importance of the procedural and group composition elements identified from the landowner interviews, plus one from a literature review, i.e., that participants feel that they have some control and/or a voice in the process. Analysis revealed that all but one of these elements - more weight given to local concerns - were associated with participants' perceptions that their partnership was fair and effective. These elements can be used as guidelines for emerging collaborative partnerships. Participants were overwhelmingly positive in their evaluations of their partnerships, suggesting that there are real benefits of using collaborative processes.

Voice over IP and video applications continue to increase the amount of traffic over the Internet. These applications utilize the UDP protocol because TCP is not suitable for streaming applications. The flow and congestion control mechanisms of TCP can change the connection transmission rate too drastically, affecting the user-perceived quality of the transmission. Also, the TCP protocol provides a level of reliability that may waste network resources, retransmitting packets that have no value. On the other hand, the use of end-to-end flow and congestion control mechanisms for streaming applications has been acknowledged as an important measure to ease or eliminate the unfairness problem that exist when TCP and UDP share the same congested bottleneck link. Actually, router-based and end-to-end solutions have been proposed to solve this problem. This thesis introduces a new end-to-end protocol based on TCP SACK called SF-SACK that promises to be smooth enough for streaming applications while implementing the known flow and congestion control mechanisms available in TCP. Through simulations, it is shown that in terms of smoothness the SF-SACK protocol is considerably better than TCP SACK and only slightly worse than TFRC. Regarding friendliness, SF-SACK is not completely fair to TCP but considerably fairer than UDP. Furthermore, if SF-SACK is used by both streaming and data-oriented applications, complete fairness is achieved. In addition, SF-SACK only needs sender side modifcations and it is simpler than TFRC.

Communitarianism is an internationally contentious anti-liberal theory which is becoming increasingly popular in political philosophy. It commonly is employed to motivate and legitimate �identity politics� - a politics which is used to defend the rights of disadvantaged aboriginal minorities to maintain their traditional ways. Recently �identity politics� has been exploited in mainstream poltical/educational academic literature in New Zealand, especially in literature that deals with Maori issues. This is significant because in the recent history of New Zealand, liberal political theory has been dominant. Notions of rights and of fairness are fundamental to communitarianism and to liberalism, but communitarians and liberals hold very different ideas about what these notions involve. My PhD thesis compares their ideas and relates them to New Zealand. It views certain social and political issues in New Zealand, by way of liberal and then communitarian theories. It examines how liberalism and communitarianism have been, and can be, used to support and to legitimate particular policies and practices in terms of �fairness� and �justice�. My work considers the explanatory and the practical application of communitarianism and liberalism with respect to their conceptions of human nature, political ideals, rights and rationality. It defends liberalism against the communities the protections they �need� in order to flourish. With respect to New Zealand it recognises that Maori have been treated unjustly by the crown, but argues that much of the injustice happened, not because of liberalism, but because liberal values were not upheld. The thesis concludes that liberalism is better equipped than communitarianism to describe Maori and Pakeha relations, and to formulate a framework for positive and constructive trans-cultural policies that will respect both Maori and Pakeha cultures.

<p>The use of relays is seen as a promising way to extend cell coverage and increase rates in LTE Advanced networks. Instead of increasing the number of base stations (BS), relays with lower cost could provide similar gains. A relay will have a wireless link to the closest BS as only connection to the core network and will cover areas close to the cell edge or other areas with limited rates.</p><p>Performing transmissions in several hops (BS-relay & relay-user) requires more radio resources than using direct transmission. This thesis studies how the available radio resources should be allocated between relays and users in order to maximize throughput and/or fairness. Time and frequency multiplexed backhaul is investigated under a full buffer traffic assumption. It is shown that the system will be backhaul limited and that the two ways of multiplexing will perform equally when maximising throughput and/or fairness. The analysis results in a set of throughput/fairness suboptimal solutions, dependant on how many relays are used per cell. The results are verified by simulations, which also show the limiting effects on throughput caused by interference between relays.</p><p>It is also analysed how the resource allocation should be done given non-fullbuffer traffic. A resource allocation that minimises packet delay given a certain number of relays per cell is presented. The analysis is based on queuing theory.</p><p>Finally some different schedulers and their suitability for relay networks are discussed. Simulation results are shown, comparing the throughput and fairness of Round Robin, Weighted Round Robin, Proportional Fairness and Weighted Proportional Fairness schemes. It is shown that allocating the resource among the relays according to the number of users served by the relays improves the fairness.</p>

<p>In this thesis I present and discuss the phenomenon of ethical fading, and its association with biased assessment of a fair action. Ethical fading is an intuitive, self-deceptive, unconscious mechanism by which even morally competent agents are lead to disregard the ethical consequences of a particular choice. In engaging in this psychological mechanism, I argue, agents are also presupposing a biased assessment of entitlement. This biased assessment of fairness is intentionally dubious, and to be found in decision frames and reinforced by contexts. In the final part of the work I present an applied ethics case to show how ethical fading may be a quite prevalent pattern of behavior.</p>

<p>Traditionally, the promotion of socio-economic justice has been seen as an exclusive concern for the state and its citizens. Many contemporary political thinkers criticize this view and argue that the principles of justice which apply within a state also apply to the global level. Further, they often argue that this conclusion is strengthened by the increased level of interconnectedness between people and states created by globalization. It is said that even if principles of justice are constrained by institutional boundaries, these boundaries no longer coincide with state borders but rather extend transnationally, or even globally. In this thesis it is argued that the impacts on justice inferred from globalization are often seriously overstated. The demand for socio-economic justice is created exclusively by a special relationship between citizens. This relationship is constituted by a common membership in the kind of coercive institutional structure epitomized by the state. Under current state of affairs, state coercion has no counterpart in the global arena. The conclusion is that concerns of socio-economic justice should be reserved for the domestic arena. Yet, it is also argued that justice is pluralistic and other kinds of concern are applicable on a global scale. Issues of fairness in international trade are discussed as examples of such concerns, and it is concluded that the international trade regime should institutionalize a number of safeguards that reduce the vulnerability of developing states.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-417).

Differential item functioning (DIF) and differential distractor functioning (DDF) are methods used to screen for item bias (Camilli && Shepard, 1994; Penfield, 2008). Using an applied empirical example, this mixed-methods study examined the congruency and relationship of DIF and DDF methods in screening multiple-choice items. Data for Study I were drawn from item responses of 271 female and 236 male low-income children on a preschool science assessment. Item analyses employed a common statistical approach of the Mantel-Haenszel log-odds ratio (MH-LOR) to detect DIF in dichotomously scored items (Holland & Thayer, 1988), and extended the approach to identify DDF (Penfield, 2008). Findings demonstrated that the using MH-LOR to detect DIF and DDF supported the theoretical relationship that the magnitude and form of DIF and are dependent on the DDF effects, and demonstrated the advantages of studying DIF and DDF in multiple-choice items. A total of 4 items with DIF and DDF and 5 items with only DDF were detected. Study II incorporated an item content review, an important but often overlooked and under-published step of DIF and DDF studies (Camilli & Shepard). Interviews with 25 female and 22 male low-income preschool children and an expert review helped to interpret the DIF and DDF results and their comparison, and determined that a content review process of studied items can reveal reasons for potential item bias that are often congruent with the statistical results. Patterns emerged and are discussed in detail. The quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted in an applied framework of examining the validity of the preschool science assessment scores for evaluating science programs serving low-income children, however, the techniques can be generalized for use with measures across various disciplines of research.

The current study assessed the moderating effects of Age and the mediating effects of Job Satisfaction on the relationship between antecedents Employee Engagement and Compensation Fairness and the outcome variable Turnover Intent. The theory of reasoned action and a theoretical framework for examining age-effects on employee attitudes were used as the theoretical underpinnings for the study. The study utilized a secondary data set with surveyed population including faculty (n = 1,229) from a land-grant institution holding the doctoral/research-extensive classification from the Carnegie Classification and serving about 42,000 students each year with graduates totaling more than 9,000 per year. Findings confirmed that 11 of the 12 items of the Gallup Workplace Audit loaded on the Employee Engagement factor. Findings also confirmed a 3-item solution for the Compensation Fairness factor. Both Employee Engagement and Compensation Fairness demonstrated an inverse relationship with Turnover Intent as expected. Job Satisfaction was found not to mediate the relationship between both Employee Engagement and Compensation Fairness with the outcome variable Turnover Intent. Finally, Age was not found to moderate the relationship between antecedent variables and Turnover Intent. Recommendations for research and practice were made.