This dissertation analyzes the effects of Latino immigration on the representation of Latinos and African-Americans on school boards and attempts to explain under what conditions Latino immigrants provoke opposition among whites. I consider two measures of representation based on representative bureaucracy—the membership of Latinos and African-Americans on school boards and bias in the responsiveness of white school board members toward these two groups. Whites as the major racial group in the U.S. have been the subject of much intergroup relations research focusing on competition for scarce resources, perceived threat and group biases (e.g., Evans and Giles, 1986; Giles and Evans, 1985, 1986; Esses, Jackson and Armstrong, 1998), and I also focus on their racial behaviors as voters in school board elections and as school board members. I consider Latino immigration in this research because emerging evidence suggests that Latino immigration poses a growing threat to whites, leading them to shift their support from Latinos to a countervailing group, such as African-Americans (e.g., Meier and Stewart, 1991; Rocha, 2007). It is likely that the reactions of whites to Latino immigration are conditioned by their preexisting racial attitudes, so this dissertation also tests competing theories of community racial climate—group threat and group contact. I expect that racial tensions within a community should moderate the influence of Latino immigration on these two forms of Latino and African-American representation. Overall, this dissertation expands the study of representative bureaucracy by combining past research on community racial climates with conditions influencing minority representation.

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Diseases that infect wildlife populations pose a significant threat to public health, agriculture, and conservation efforts. The spread of these diseases can be influenced by the social structure of the population, and therefore often need to be accounted for in disease models. In this thesis I use high-resolution contact data to explore the social structure of a high-density population of European badgers (Meles meles). I explore how this structure might influence the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a debilitating disease of cattle for which badgers are a wildlife reservoir. Denning and home range data collected using radio tracking is also used to determine how this social structure is related to badger space use. I use social network analysis to identify the community structure of the badger population, revealing that badgers interact in fewer, more distinct groups than previously assumed. This is likely to inhibit the spread of disease through the population, given that the probability of infection entering a new social group will be reduced. However, among-group contact is still found to occur even between the most isolated groups. I show that this among-group contact is more likely to occur between less related individuals, possibly suggesting that breeding behaviour may drive among-group contact as a mechanism for inbreeding avoidance. To gain additional insight into this among-group contact, I determine how badger spatial behaviours are related. I show that the use of dens (setts) away from the social group’s main sett (outlier setts) in the spring is associated with extra-territorial ranging. I also show that this extra-territorial ranging is associated with more central network positions. The seasonality of this behaviour further suggests that this may be related to breeding activity. These findings suggest that behaviours associated with extra-group ranging may increase the risk of acquiring and transmitting infection. Therefore, use of outlier setts in the spring could act as a spatial proxy to identify high-risk individuals for disease spread, offering potential targets for disease control. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings in regard to what they reveal about badger behaviour, disease transmission, and the design of effective disease control strategies. The importance of understanding population social structure for the study of wildlife disease in general is also discussed.

Inter-group social trust is one of the main elements for peacebuilding and, as a common feature of civil wars, Forced Internal Displacement is creating further complexities and challenges for post-war inter-group social trust. However, research revealed that among the internally displaced people, some tend to have a higher level of post-war inter-group trust compared to the other IDP. Surprisingly, an analysis based on this topic revealed that only a small number of studies are focusing on the condition of Internally Displaced People’s post-war intergroup social trust in the long run. This study examines the inter-group social trust of internally displaced people to provide a theoretical explanation for the following question; under what conditions the internally displaced people tend to trust more/less the conflicting party in the post-war context? With an examination of the social psychology research, this thesis argues that under the condition of postwar the IDP who have experienced continuous pre-war inter-group contact the post-war intergroup social trust will be stronger than the IDP who do not have such inter-group contact experience. The reason behind this expectation is the expected effect of inter-group contact on eliminating the prejudices and promoting the ‘collective knowledge’ regarding the war and displacement, thus promoting inter-group trust. This research is collected data from two groups of internally displaced people of Cyprus; IDP displaced from heterogeneous areas and homogenous areas, using the method of qualitative single case analysis. The findings show strong support for the expected causal relationship.