Interest in youth civic engagement continues to increase and a small but growing group of organizations are seeking to get young people involved in political activism. At the same time, researchers are giving more attention to the features of adolescent settings and how they relate to the overall development of young people. What remains to be absent is a contextual understanding of how the characteristics of adolescent settings contribute specifically to political development. The purpose of this study is to identify organizational level characteristics of youth organizations that promote the political development of adolescents. Semi-structured interviews and grounded theory analysis with 15 young activists revealed a “Big Six” of organizational characteristics and properties that influence participation in societal involvement behaviors. Post hoc analyses also revealed potential relationships between political development and the Big Six. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed and directions for future research are delineated.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 326-342). Also available on the Internet.

Government / Controversies regarding the slavery and the Constitution often turn on investigation of original intent: Is the Constitution an antislavery or proslavery document? The arguments of West, Storing, Graber, and Finkelman show that scholarly opinion is greatly divided on this issue. This study, however, will present the case that the status of the document need not be resolved in order to determine whether the Constitution inaugurated a proslavery or antislavery project. Instead of attempting to determine the intent of the founders or to derive constitutional principles directly from their document a different task will be undertaken here. This paper will examine the “political logic” of the Constitution, both in terms of specific clauses and the structure of the whole. This study shows that the political logic of the Constitution is hostile to abolitionist paths of national, political development. Instead of setting in motion a project that places the institution of slavery on the road to elimination, the Constitution’s concessions to slavery provided a permanent privileging of slaveholding interests in the further development of the polity. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 326-342). Also available on the Internet.

This project investigates how the emergent ideological, institutional, and political commitments of the national defense and security state shape the domestic programmatic agendas of modern presidents. Applying a historical and developmental analysis, I trace this dynamic from its origin in the twin crises of the Great Depression and World War II to examine how subsequent presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have navigated the intersecting politics of this warfare -welfare nexus. I use original, archival research to examine communications between the president and his staff, cabinet members, administration officials, and Congressional leaders to better appreciate how the interaction of these dual political commitments are reflected in the formulation and promotion of the president’s budgetary requests and domestic policy initiatives. More directly, I focus on the relationship between the national security politics of the Cold War and the efforts of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to support their objectives in either the expansion or retrenchment of the New Deal-liberal welfare state. My research suggests that Cold War concerns occasionally aided the growth of the welfare state in areas such as public health and federal aid to education, while at other times defense and security anxieties provided the backdrop for presidential efforts to diminish the political capacity of the welfare state. More specifically, I find that both Truman and Eisenhower constructed visions of national strength which framed their initiatives in national defense and social welfare as interrelated goals. In the end, I argue that the changing institutions, ideologies, and international commitments of the warfare state present both opportunities and challenges for presidents to articulate political visions in service of domestic policy advancement.

The purpose of this thesis is to establish what specific forces influence whether or not a democratic setback within one nation will diffuse to peripheral states. Past studies devoted to this topic have largely suggested that diffusion essentially functions like a contagious disease, where the likelihood of "infection" is primarily based upon the level of interaction between states. This thesis however proposes that the interaction of the signal generated from a democratic state's collapse and the receptiveness of neighboring nations to this signal ultimately determines when and where diffusion will occur. In order to test the validity of this thesis' claims, the level of democracy within the neighboring states of all failed democratic governments spanning the years 1842-2002 are examined during the first years following such system breakdowns within a large-N quantitative research design. Ultimately this study leads to the conclusion that the interaction of signals and receptivity play a major role in the diffusion of democratic setbacks.

The effort to balance coexisting (and often conflicting) institutional objectives is a recurring theme throughout the history of American higher education. Colleges and universities are spaces that provide academic (and co-curricular) experiences that can activate a political consciousness, but are also places that are vulnerable to outside influences (indicative of the broader political climate) which may compel the prescription of institutional goals that undermine or shift attention away from these nonmaterial aims. This project examines the functions of the university in American life and considers how institutional development impacts the political socialization of the student body. Previous scholarship on student politics has often focused on campus conditions during a specific time and location and therefore is not equipped to address how macro-level structural changes in the higher education system, the study of which would necessitate a longer temporal scope, may influence engagement. A longitudinal periodization analysis is employed to detect longer-term trends and discern critical junctures that can help explain variation in political involvement among college students of different historical time and to uncover the causal mechanisms that facilitate (or impede) political development on campus. By encountering distinct cultural expectations of higher education, we can assess how social values conveyed in particular missions may stimulate or inhibit student political engagement. The contemporary era is dominated by institutional functions and educational aims that have historically not been directed at political socialization and is populated by students who do not meet the "preconditions of recruitment" as expressed in earlier periods. The significance of formative experiences has been well documented; the lessons that are learned (or unlearned) during emerging adulthood will subsequently inform political behavior. This investigation of the relationship between student politics, national development, and the purposes of higher education in American life demonstrates that the institutional medium through which we socialize does a great deal to shape how we socialize. / 2019-08-11T00:00:00Z

This study excavates the history of the American reporter to explicate the development of journalistic independence from the 1890s to 1980s. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, American reporters fought in wars, assisted U.S. intelligence, engaged in secret diplomacy, shaped domestic policy, and extended the arm of police and federal agencies, monitoring U.S. citizens, solving crimes, and testifying in court. Before 1945, reporters traveled multiple routes into this “state work,” including during the War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution, the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two world wars, and domestic reform efforts. From the early Cold War to the 1980s, however, reporters increasingly sought, and mostly achieved, separation from the state. In the nineteenth century, a nonpartisan editorial stance and autonomy from party organizations defined journalistic independence. By the late 1960s, independence had evolved to prohibit reporters from engaging in military action and other forms of state collaboration, including espionage, court testimony, and propaganda, radically revising the acceptable limits of reporters’ activity to define the ideal of a modern independent reporter, which human rights groups began exporting globally in the late 1970s. Taking the form of a collective biography, each chapter of the dissertation spotlights a famous, infamous, or previously unknown reporter whose career exposed the usually submerged question of state collaboration and revealed wider changes within journalism at home and abroad. Expanding the scope of U.S. political and journalism history to document the hidden ways reporters served as instruments of national power, State Work challenges the idealized folk theory of the free press – which casts the fourth estate as a fully autonomous check on private and public power. In so doing, this study undermines the stubbornly persistent myth of a historically weak U.S. state. By exposing the reporter as a hidden agent of governance, State Work adds a new thread to the scholarship on public-private collaboration in American political development. Based on more than a dozen archives, including the papers of Sylvester Scovel (Missouri Historical Society), William Bayard Hale (Yale University), the New York Times Company and the Committee of Fourteen (New York Public Library), the New York World (Columbia University), Lorena Hickok, Ruby Black, and Harry L. Hopkins (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library), Woodrow Wilson (Library of Congress), Office of Strategic Services (National Archives), the Associated Press (AP headquarters in New York City) and others, State Work contributes to the ongoing reinterpretation of U.S. political and journalism history. / 2026-06-30T00:00:00Z

American civil religion is a topic in which there is a lot of interest but very little current scholarly activity. This is primarily due to there currently being no common understanding of American civil religion, hindering progress in the field. The first purpose of the dissertation is to rectify this situation by creating a solid theoretical understanding of American civil religion from which scholarship can progress. The second purpose of the dissertation is to examine the development of the American civil religion through history. This includes an interesting dynamic given the civil religion's purpose of promoting a shared identity. The process of promoting a shared identity involves defining the social group in question. When 'outsiders' enter the community, conflict ensues. Typically, the conflict continues until the parameters of the civil religion is enlarged, incorporating the new group. This is a continuing cycle within the American civil religion. Looking at this broad framework, one will able to see both the continuity and change from the founding period to the current version of the American civil religion. / text

This thesis focuses on the individual experience of being a migrant in the context of the development of local, municipal politics concerning immigrants, in Sweden during the time period between 1972 and 2002. The thesis is based on two different empiric materials. One consists of narratives from networks of Muslim women migrants in the suburban, immigrant- dense area of Fittja in the municipal of Botkyrka, located in the greater Stockholm area. The other consists of immigrant-centered policies and political decisions, found in Botkyrka municipal archives. The thesis focuses on a dynamic time period when big-city areas in Sweden have become increasingly heterogeneous and where integration policies have become a growing part of political agendas but where segregation and societal differentiation in many cases are increasing in spite of political efforts to achieve equality and multiculturalism. In this complex context, the thesis examines the relation between local political structure and individual agency. The study shows that subjective factors such as motherhood, background or future plans often are most important when defining an individual self-image in relation to the major society, which in turn impacts active, subjective strategies of inclusion or marginalization. Ethnicity, culture and gender are however, in almost all cases, the factors around which well meaning municipal immigrant-related political discourses are based in Botkyrka. The interviewed women are highly included in different areas outside of the political framework, although this activism often goes unnoticed in the hegemonic political system that reproduces unquestioned, collective categorization concerning immigrant women as passive “victims”. The findings in this thesis’ historical case study therefore indicate the development of a “non-meeting” between political structure and immigrated citizens, which leads to a critical discussion regarding the contents of inclusion and marginalisation as well as the meaning of political rhetoric like integration.