1 Abstract CONSTITUTIONAL INSTITUTES OF PARDON AND AMNESTY This thesis deals with constitutional institutes of pardon and amnesty. The thesis aims to provide information on existing legal regulation of this area, closer explanation of the particular legal institutes, describe their historical development and show the way of their application during tenures of Czech presidents. The Introduction contains brief summary of the goals of the thesis, its structure and reasons for choice of the respective topic. The First Chapter is devoted to definition of elementary terms of pardon and amnesty and explanation of basic differences of their forms, i.e. abolition, agraciation and rehabilitation since correct understanding of these terms is crucial for understanding of the whole following text, The Second Chapter deals with historical development of the constitutional institutes in question before emergence of the independent Czech Republic. The Third Chapter contains analysis of current legal regulation in constitutional and general law. The Fourth Chapter is devoted to pardon, particularly more thorough analysis of transfer of capacity to grant pardons and procedural affairs related to granting of pardons in practice. Final part of this Chapter contains description of specific pardons granted during tenures of...

This is a rhetorical study of President George W. Bush’s use of the - ideographic dialectic in his appeals for support for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as reelection in 2004. I argue that President Bush’s use of the - dialectic in each case provided him with specific rhetorical resources that enhanced his ability to seek support from the four discourse communities that constitute the foreign policy public: unilateralists, multilateralists, regionalists and coalition builders. The terministic flexibility of the ideographic dialectic worked well enough to encourage meanings in each foreign policy discourse community that were consonant with that group’s worldview. This allowed Bush to appeal to the disparate groups and appear as though he advocated their desired policies, when in fact, he did not promote any specific policy. This project contributes to the theoretical understanding of the ideograph by complicating the concept of the public. Further, it adds credence to claims that the War on Terror is a never-ending war.

The concept of an apologetic president has only recently emerged in the United States. All presidents have made mistakes, but only recently have Americans come to expect apologies from them. The development of an increasingly critical media has necessitated that future presidents hone the art of apologizing. This thesis extrapolates lessons in this skill from the apologies of Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Watergate and Lewinsky-gate were cover-up scandals that rocked the nation in the 1970s and '90s. Although the presidential misconduct in both cases were similar, the way each president opted to navigate his controversy differed dramatically. Both presidents initially tried out the tactic of denying all accusations but branched off after taking that step. A comparison of their approaches offers insight into the possible ways of seeking forgiveness from a scorned public. The nuances of delivering a successful apology are dictated by circumstantial, structural factors as well as the personality of the president, which explains why no two apologies are the same. Although the art of apologizing will continue to evolve over time, future presidents stand to learn a great deal from studying Nixon and Clinton. This thesis finds that even though Americans get a certain degree of satisfaction from exposing presidential wrongdoing and making life more than uncomfortable for a wayward executive, the legacies of Nixon and Clinton are proof that a smattering of mistakes cannot completely overshadow a tradition of accomplishments. No matter how vindictive Americans may appear to be in the thick of a scandal, in the long run, the United States is a forgiving nation.

<p>In this dissertation, I take a new approach to presidential scandal, which is frequently attributed to evidence of misbehavior. I argue instead that scandal is a socially constructed <italic>perception</italic> of misbehavior which opposition elites help create. I formalize this argument by developing a model of presidential scandal, which predicts that allegations of scandal by opposition legislators can influence the occurrence of scandal within some intermediate range of allegation scandalousness and credibility. I derive two comparative statics showing that the incidence of scandal should increase as the transaction costs of allegations decrease and as the critical mass of opposition legislators required to create a scandal decreases.</p><p>I then test the predictions of the model using monthly data from elite news reports for 1977–2006. I operationalized the critical mass comparative static using presidential approval among opposition party identifiers—a useful index of a polarized political climate. I find that the president is more vulnerable to the onset of scandal when his levels of opposition approval are relatively low. Conversely, when the president is relatively popular with opposition identifiers (during “honeymoons,” foreign policy crises, and wars), scandals occur much less frequently. In addition, scandals appear to have become more common over time, which could be the result of increased party polarization. Finally, I show that the underlying hazard of scandal was greater for second-term presidents than for first-term presidents. </p><p>Clearly, however, scandals vary widely in their size and significance. As such, I also create a dependent variable measuring the total quarterly volume of presidential scandal coverage in the <italic>Washington Post</italic>, which should capture the aggregate severity of scandals in a given time period. I show that lagged presidential approval among opposition identifiers is negatively associated with this measure. By contrast, more scandal coverage is published during presidents' second term in office and during election years. </p><p>Journalists and scholars frequently assert that divided government leads to a greater incidence of presidential scandal, but little systematic evidence exists to support these claims. An investigation reveals that divided government suffers from several important inferential problems, including a lack of comparable counterfactual data.. After addressing these issues, I estimate treatment effects for divided government and opposition control of Congress on both high-profile investigations of the president and scandal coverage, but none reach conventional levels of statistical significance. </p><p>Next, I explore the factors predicting when individual members of Congress will make scandal allegations against the president and the executive branch. Specifically, I test hypotheses developed from my formal model on a new dataset of scandal allegations against the president in the Congressional Record between 1985 and 2006. Results from multilevel event count models indicate that scandal allegations decline as state- and district-level presidential vote increases among members of the opposition party in both the House and the Senate. Members of the Senate are also more likely to make allegations as they gain seniority within the chamber. Finally, members who are up for re-election in the Senate make fewer allegations than those who are not.</p><p>Finally, I analyze the allegation data as a series of social networks. I present a new approach to analyze clustering in these data, which helps us to characterize patterns in allegations and member behavior. My analysis indicates that clustering among members—which suggests a convergence in scandal targets—is positively associated with increased scandal coverage at the Congress level. By contrast, I find that highly clustered allegations (i.e. those made by members who also made other allegations together) tend to receive less coverage than those that attract support from a broader coalition of members who would otherwise not be connected.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation is an analysis of how presidents make foreign policy decisions. Rather than explaining foreign policy decisions by focusing on individuals or institutions, I stress the role of political pressures and context faced by presidents. It shows that foreign policy decisions are not merely a reaction to stimulus from the international or domestic arenas but involve political considerations that affect policy choice. The dynamic elements in the argument are political resources and risk. The relationship between the risk propensity of the president and presidential political resources provides an important link to understanding foreign policy decisions. Within the realm of good public policy, a politically rational president can choose to act or respond to foreign policy disputes in various ways, including diplomacy, political coercion, economic coercion, covert action, or military intervention, based on his assessment of the political context and his willingness to accept the associated risks. The level of presidential political resources determines the risk propensity of the president. Presidential foreign policy decisions will vary depending on the quantity of available political resources. Thus, understanding the risk propensity of the president increases our ability to explain foreign policy decisions. The contribution of this research is the identification of a mechanism for understanding how the interaction between the domestic and international political environments, and individual decision-makers influence foreign policy decisions. My research bridges the gap between structural theories, “theories that make predictions about foreign policy outcomes without reference to the cognition and actions of the actors themselves,” and decision-making theories that stress the role of the actors (Ikenberry 2002, 5). Although the component parts of the foreign policy decisionmaking system are widely known, we lack theories that tie the pieces together.

This dissertation investigates how presidents build successful legislative coalitions and enact their agenda into law in the United States Congress. It argues that constituencies and electoral incentives cause members of Congress to respond to the president’s agenda in a systematic manner. The president’s strength in members’ constituencies interacts with members’ electoral incentives to determine whether members will vote for or against the president. The theoretical claims presented in this dissertation are supported by a combination of case studies and quantitative analysis. The empirical analysis utilizes a dataset with observations for every member of Congress from 1957 to the present. I find that constituency-level presidential strength causes systematic variance in members’ response to the president’s agenda. Vulnerable members of Congress are particularly sensitive to the president’s strength in their constituencies, while safe members of Congress are a bit less attentive to their constituencies. These findings contribute to our understanding of American politics by showing that the president’s ability to enact agenda items into law is affected by much more than mere party politics. This conclusion is especially relevant in the modern, polarized era in American politics. / text

Darbe siekiama apžvelgti Lenkijos žiniasklaidos pranešimus ir internautų komentarus apie 2010 metų katastrofą Smolenske. Stengtasi atskleisti kokius požiūrius ir klausimus jie suformavo. Darbų apie Smolensko katastrofą sukurta keliolika, tačiau yra atliktas tik vienas darbas, kurio tyrimo pagrindu buvo pranešimai ir visuomenės reakcijos. Darbo objektas: Lenkijos žiniasklaidos pranešimai apie 2010 m. katastrofą Smolenske. Darbo tikslas - peržiūrėjus Lenkijos žiniasklaidos pranešimus, susijusius su 2010 metų balandžio 10 d. įvykusią prezidentinio lėktuvo katastrofą Smolenske, išsiaiškinti, kaip žiniasklaida informavo apie įvykusią katastrofą. Vėliau išnagrinėti kokį poveikį visuomenei turėjo minimi pranešimai, t.y., kokius klausimus ir požiūrius apie katastrofą jie suformavo. Darbo aktualumo garantuoja vis neišaiškintos katastrofos priežastys ir klausimai. Darbą sudaro keturi skyriai. Pirmame analizuojami psichologiniai katastrofų aspektai, antrame apžvelgiamos nelaimės nuojautos prieš įvykstant katastrofai, trečiame skyriuje analizuojami straipsniai ką tik katastrofai įvykus, ketvirtame skyriuje apžvelgiami straipsniai kiek aprimus situacijai, o penktame nagrinėjamas visuomenės požiūris į nuolatinį pranešimų apie katastrofą egzistavimą žiniasklaidoje. Darbas analitinis, aprašomasis, lyginamasis. Atlikti duomenys padėjo atskleisti iškelta tikslą. Atlikus tyrimą paaiškėjo, kad pranešimai apie Smolenską sukėlė daugelį emocijų – tiek neigiamų, tiek teigiamų. Pirmieji... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / This work will review Polish new source announcements and internet commentaries about the catastrophe in Smolensk in 2010. It will reveal the opinions and questions that resulted after the event. There are several works regarding the catastrophe in Smolensk, however only one of them focuses on the public’s reaction as well as the announcements that were made. Work's objective: Polish new source announcements about the catastrophe in Smolensk in 2010. Work’s purpose: a review of the Polish new source announcements relating to the presidential plane catastrophe on April 10th, 2010 in Smolensk and how the news informed the public about this event. Then, to analyze the impact on the public that these announcements had, that is what questions and opinions arose. The work’s topicality guarantees a still unclear cause of the catastrophe and questions related to it. There are five parts to this work. The first analyzes the psychological aspects of the catastrophe, the second a review of the tragedies presentment before the catastrophe, the third an analysis of articles just after the catastrophe, the fourth an examination of the articles post the catastrophe, and the fifth an investigation of the public’s reaction to the announcements in news sources. The work is analytic, descriptive, and comparative. The material helped to reveal the intended objective. After completion of the investigation, it became clear that the announcements made regarding the catastrophe in Smolensk provoked... [to full text]

Thesis (M.Th.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009. / Full text also available online. Scroll down for electronic link.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Political Science, 2004. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-165).

During the last four decades, precisely from the early 1970s, U.S. foreign policy has played a dominant role in the U.S. political landscape. The current political discourse is predominantly marked by divided government, polarized politics and gridlock. Such a contentious political environment has proved to be detrimental for efficient and effective policy-making in foreign policy. There are significant factors that profoundly complicate the process of decision making and congressional-presidential relations. Partisan and ideological differences under the conditions of divided government are dominant in the current political process and in turn affect the prospects of legislative-executive consensus and dissension. Other factors such as media salience, public opinion, and electoral imperatives also complicate the dynamics of legislative-executive relations. In an era in which heightened political brinkmanship has enveloped Washington politics, continuum of consensus and dissension between Congress and the president on strategic foreign policy issues has virtually become a norm. This dissertation examines the dynamics of legislative-executive relations in two high politics U.S. foreign policy issue areas of treaty process and war powers. It appears that in contemporary U.S. foreign policymaking the trajectory of a continuum of legislative-executive consensus and dissension is a new normal and potentially irreversible, as Congress and the president try ardently to preserve their respective constitutional prerogatives. Empirical investigation across these two issue areas demonstrates a new era of a resurgent Congress marked by its greater assertive role and acting as a consequential player in the foreign policy domain. The passage of the War Powers Resolution in 1973 by Congress, overriding a presidential veto, has profound implications in the modern political landscape. It was a pivotal moment that permanently transformed the future road map of congressional-presidential relations. Since then the U.S. political system has been relentlessly experiencing an institutional power struggle in the foreign policy domain. Findings suggest that when Congress determines to confront the president and exercise its constitutional responsibilities it becomes very difficult for the president to overcome such congressional resistance. Interbranch competition has virtually created a consistent trajectory of a continuum of legislative-executive consensus and dissension in the foreign policy decision-making process.