This thesis investigates and interprets the origins and political discourses of the post World War II population movement in the United States. It argues that this movement, in part, was artificially created by members of the upper social class. Its most important representatives were the founder of the Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III and the owner of the Dixie Cup Company, Hugh Moore. Reasons for their interest in population control can be found in their concern for the national security of the United States which, they believed, was challenged by Communist expansion. Equally important was their attempt to perpetuate their upper-class privileges by ensuring the continuation of the existing political and social order in the United States. The ideology employed was "overpopulation." But while the image was overcrowding, it was not the industrialized, densely populated countries that were accused of being overpopulated but rather the poor, underdeveloped, often sparsely populated nations in the Third World. Or, similarly, the poor in the US were accused of being the main cause of all kinds of social ills. As poor countries had a higher population growth rate and as poor people tended to have more children than rich people, the poor were the main target of population control. This study, then, shows how pronatalism and antinatalism, the two variants of the population movement, capitalized on the political and social setting of their time in the United States. Although the antinatalists' apparent goal was population control in general, the poor were their main target while the wealthy population, as supporters of American values, did not have to be controlled in number. Similarly, the pronatalists seemingly desired to increase US birth rates, but mainly addressed the more privileged portions of the American population. The attitude toward the poor, and here explicitly toward the Third World, remained antinatalist. / Master of Arts

The racial composition of elected officials in the United States has significantly diversified in recent decades. Nevertheless, the proportion of candidates of color still fall far short of the underlying voter population, particularly as the minority demographic continues to grow at a rapid pace. To explain the source of racial disparity in government, scholars have long examined various political opportunity structures under which minority candidates arise, suggesting that whether candidates of color emerge or not is a strategic matter: minority candidates enter politics when they perceive high electoral viability, which they estimate using information such as the racial composition of a district and prior electoral success of co-ethnic candidates. However, absent from this scholarship is a comprehensive understanding of how minority individuals enter the emergence process in the first place and how the factors that advance them through the pipeline to power evolve over time. This dissertation investigates the process by which racial minorities decide to enter politics, examining the entire pipeline to power from developing an initial interest in running for office to officially becoming a candidate. First, I examine political ambition among the general American public, focusing on the racial differences in the development of political ambition and the factors uniquely influencing ordinary minority voters' entry decisions. Through an online survey on a sample of ordinary American voters, post-stratified to be representative of each racial population, I find that factors commonly used to predict political ambition, such as encouragement from personal or political sources, political efficacy, and community participation, operate differently between minority respondents and their white counterparts as well as across different racial groups. A conjoint experiment designed to examine entry decisions among ordinary minority voters both confirms existing theories and offers a new insight. I find that the perceived electoral viability is higher in electoral districts with larger share of co-ethnic populations, which aligns with conventional wisdom that minority population is often used to gauge the primary voter base among minority candidates. Furthermore, I find that among politically ambitious minority respondents, perceived electoral viability is higher when an incumbent shares the respondent's ethnicity. However, this effect is reduced when both the incumbent and the challenger share the same ethnicity, indicating that minority status is no longer a comparative electoral advantage. Second, in two field experiments embedded in real-world candidate recruitment efforts, I investigate the relative influence of intrinsic and extrinsic appeals on developing nascent interest in running for office. I find that intrinsic motivation to run, such as a desire to bring about social change, increases not only the immediate information-seeking behavior but also a longer-term commitment to candidacy, including applying to and attending a campaign training program. On the other hand, extrinsic appeals intended to increase the perceived likelihood of winning generate a significantly smaller effect on the immediate consideration of political candidacy while exerting a modest amount of influence on the longer-term commitment. Third, through a conjoint experiment on minority individuals situated at different stages of the emergence process, I study how the motivation to run evolves as they progress through their political journey. I find modest evidence of a shift in priority, from intrinsic to extrinsic, as minority individuals advance through the pipeline to power. Specifically, those with low levels of political ambition prefer to run in districts that have undergone a surge in violence targeted toward co-ethnic groups. In contrast, those with a high level of political ambition prefer districts with a substantial share of their co-ethnic population. Fourth, I examine how both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to run play out in real-world elections. Leveraging city-level exposure to police brutality, I find that the share of Black candidates running in municipal elections increases in cities after a fatal police shooting of a Black resident, suggesting that racial violence politicizes group consciousness among the Black community, which, in turn, influences their desire to enter politics. However, exploring individual cases of who those candidates are and when they appear on a ballot reveals that Black candidates emerge for both intrinsic and strategic reasons: political veterans emerge immediately after the incident as they take advantage of increased minority voter turnout and open seats, whereas political newcomers arise several years later as they require more resources. The empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom that attributes minority under-representation to strategic calculations alone. Instead, they highlight the importance of examining both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations at each stage of the emergence process to fully understand why racial minorities run for office. In doing so, this research offers new insights into the nuanced dynamics of minority candidate emergence and, in turn, minority representation in the United States.

This dissertation develops a theory of democracy based on the premises that a) there is no democracy in the 21st century without democratic control of technology, and b) democracy must be judged along three axes: 1) Democracy—Monarchy: how is political power divided? 2) Democracy—Oligarchy: how easily is money translated into political power? 3) Politics—Society: does democracy encompass the decisive processes of society? To satisfy these criteria, this dissertation proposes a democratic federalism grounded in the commons, which are not only integrated within larger governments, but constitute distinct and independent polities with an equal say in all matters concerning the physical organization of their territories. It integrates lottocratic selection within a system of direct (rather than representative) government, in which participation at higher levels of government is made possible by breaking open governing functions into their constituent parts, particularly in the legislature. Democratic federalism institutionalizes the tension between the center and the periphery, the collective and the community, the abstract benefits and concrete costs of modern technology through the dual relationship between the commons and all larger polities of which it is a part.

In the first essay of this dissertation, I argue that much of the observed variation in national climate change mitigation levels can be explained by a combination of national interests and the strategic constraints of the collective action problem. Specifically, the interactions between state costs and benefits and state size, a proxy for invulnerability to free-riding, strongly predict observed variation in national yearly emissions. I derive this hypothesis and connect it to extant literature with a theoretical framework that interrelates state climate change mitigation interests, preferences, behaviors, and outcomes. I test the hypothesis by predicting the difference between real emissions changes and a novel estimate for counterfactual emissions changes. The theoretical framework and the counterfactual estimation methodology developed in this paper will facilitate future work on climate mitigation politics, from both international and domestic politics approaches. In the second essay, I analyze the design of major climate change mitigation treaties, and outline how reliance on collective reciprocity undermines their ability to enforce participation and compliance. Collective reciprocity is limited in its ability to induce high cost actions among large numbers of states. I demonstrate this challenge with an empirical approach that first estimates treaty participation and then estimates compliance by comparing signatory emissions to a synthetic control that weights for both treatment propensity and pre-treatment trends. I find no evidence of success in climate treaties thus far, underlining the tensions in collective reciprocity designs and indicating the need for an alternative approach. In the third essay, I develop a novel institutional theory of long-term environmental good provision, particularly forest conservation. Long-term goods, or those for which payoffs are delayed or spread over time, are more likely to be provided by states with long-term institutions, or those with low discount rates and inter-temporal commitment mechanisms. Leveraging recent institutional theories, I argue that party institutionalization lengthens institutional time horizons while constraints on the executive allows inter-temporal commitment. Both features therefore predict long-term environmental good provision. Environmental goods are frequently long term because feedback from ecological systems creates tipping points or vicious cycles, meaning that current actions may be costless today but contribute to significant damage in future periods. Understanding the implications of the inter-temporal nature of many environmental goods is especially important because a large share of environmental goods, such as forest conservation, are not explained by traditional approaches which focus on public goods models for symmetric and non-excludable goods. I test my theory with cross-national time-series data on forest coverage, demonstrating that forest protection is not predicted by public goods theory but is well predicted by long-term institutions.

Unsettling Colonial Science: Modern Architecture and Indigenous Claims to Land in North America and the Pacific examines the contested landscapes of research infrastructure and settler colonialism. During the 1950s and 60s, as the Cold War accelerated, Big Science sought new frontiers both conceptual and spatial. While the alliance between modern architecture and postwar scientific research has been the subject of significant historical work, the settler colonial politics and land relations ingrained in these large-scale laboratories and research stations has gone under-discussed. Investigating federally-funded research installations constructed from the 1950s-1990s, this dissertation addresses how Cold War-era science participated in the settlement of landscapes perceived as inhospitable through discourses and practices of “modernism.” It also examines Indigenous opposition to these land occupations as acts of self-determination. Covering a wide geography—from the Kitt Peak Observatory on Ioligam Du’ag in the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Inuvik Research Laboratory in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories of Canada, to the Mauna Kea Observatories on the Mauna Kea volcano on the island of Hawai‘i this dissertation moves between spaces where the universalism, modernism, and colonialism of the postwar settler colonial project are contested through material practices in the landscape and built environment. These places reveal how settler colonialism contributed to US empire in the twentieth century. Importantly, they also broaden discourses of resistance and refusal, showing how traditional land use, material culture, and mobility practices give rise to resistance movements. This dissertation investigates how different resistance movements protested the construction of research infrastructures on their lands. Across these cases, modern architecture does not operate uniformly. In some instances it is part of a state-initiated modernization project; in others affiliated with military-industrial architecture; and others an aesthetic exercise in a romanticized landscape. But in all, architecture is used to reify a division between Western modernity and “traditional knowledge” that undercuts land-based claims to sovereignty. Tohono O’odham, Kānaka Maoli, and Gwich’in activists and practitioners, along with environmental advocates and allies, mobilized grounded forms of refusal to insist that land use is political. I argue that these places and their histories reveal how modern architecture orders the land and its political meaning within settler colonial contexts. In the mid-twentieth century, federal science agencies, engineering departments, and architecture corporations deployed modernism as an instrument to make public and trust lands productive and national. Architecture is also a site where jurisdiction, land use, and the relationship to land is contested. These contestations open on to anticolonial histories of the built environment.

Bibliography: leaves 176-186 / The relationship between political, religious ideology and the interpretation of archaeological excavation in the Holy Land has faced criticism and has been debated by scholars since the beginning of biblical archaeology in the 19th century and up to the present day. These debates are not just academic but have manifested itself in the public narrative and are alleged to have consequences regarding the history of Israel and the physical space inhabited by both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Some of the current excavations in Jerusalem are viewed with suspicion. Archaeology is singled out to be biased in its interpretation and that it is being used for political ends. An investigation of the point of intersection between archaeology, politics and religion is important for the discourse and question whether archaeology in Israel has become complicit in the establishment and continued maintenance of nationhood and the Zionist project, as alleged by the minimalist scholars and opponents of Israel. Biblical archaeology has been drawn into this debate and its interpretation. The negative externalities of this discipline are the perceived use of the biblical text as a reference document and the subsequent findings of Late Bronze and Iron Age archaeology, which raise questions about the veracity of the biblical text and its impact on biblical scholarship and religion. Archaeologists and their interpretation of these spaces find themselves amid this paradigmatic revolution. The integrity of these scholars, their methodologies and their motivations are interrogated to the point of an ideological debate. The position of Palestinian archaeology hangs in the balance and there is no clear indication as to its future or whether any collaboration with Israeli archaeology is possible due to the politicisation in the region and the distrust that exists between Israel and the West Bank in general. This research reveals the extent in which these externalities of biblical archaeology and its interpretation have had an effect on ideology and its prevalence, and whether the questions and criticisms raised are justified. The views of archaeologists who have been actively involved in the excavation of the region provide these answers. / Biblical and Ancient Studies / D. Phil. (Biblical archaeology)

In response to the events on September the Eleventh, various media attempted to make sense of the seemingly radical altered political landscape. Comic books, though traditionally framed as low brow pulp, were no exception. This thesis is a work of rhetorical criticism. It applies Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm to a specific set of artifacts: John Ney Rieber and John Cassaday's six-part comic series, collectively titled Captain America: The New Deal (2010). The question that is the focus of this thesis is: Does The New Deal, framed as a response to the events surrounding September the Eleventh, form a rhetorically effective narrative? The analysis that follows demonstrates the importance of meeting audience expectations when presenting them with controversial viewpoints. / Graduation date: 2012

The purpose of this study is to analyze the events that occurred throughout the Egyptian Revolution from January 2010 to February 2010 through pragmatic humanism. Tweets will be looked at from the book Tweets from Tahrir to show how the process unfolded. Building on the previous research, the tweets will be looked at through the lens of pragmatic humanism. The study will show how individuals can better the world they live in by experimenting with different methods and adapting to any failures they may encounter. The study will also show how the reach of the individual has become faster and further than previously possible. The elements of pragmatic humanism will be broken down into five main tenets. The study will take a thematic approach in analyzing the tweets through the perspective of the particular tenet. The study will also show the power of individual desires when they are able to combine with the social context of the time. The advent of Twitter has allowed individuals to test and experiment with hypotheses much quicker than before and allows them to make monumental changes to their reality in a much shorter period of time. / Graduation date: 2013

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

HIV/AIDS is a deadly disease that needs to be addressed with immediate effect before serious damage can occur. Because the government has a responsibility over the health of its citizens, everybody expects the government to take a lead in the fight against this epidemic and from the look of things the government's strategies are not making the desired impact on the epidemic. The author attempted to highlight that the South African government has not played a satisfactory role in the fight against this pandemic, which threatens to alter history to a degree not seen in the world.