Traditional scholarship on the media effects of government activity focuses on the transfer of salience. Salience and priorities are conceptually distinct, although they are often incorrectly used interchangeably. Whereas salience refers to issue attention, priority pertains to issue preferences or importance. This paper offers that media effects are better understood as signals comprised of issue salience and importance in an environment characterized by variation in uncertainty and ambiguity. Using newspaper stories and congressional hearings datasets, unique measures are developed that incorporate the uncertainty and ambiguity of the information environment. The relationship between media signals and government problem prioritization is then examined. This research is important in situating media signaling within the context of the larger issue agenda, and helps to illuminate linkages between the public and government agendas. / text

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This is a biography of Roger Quarles Mills and his contributions to Texas history.

The period of ‘people’s power’ in South Africa from 1985-7 represented for many participants a form of participatory, and often prefigurative, democracy. In the post-1994 period South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has committed to participatory democracy alongside representative democratic government. There has, however, been no clearly articulated theory of participatory democracy within the ANC. Through a combination of interviews and analysis of primary documents (including policy frameworks, legislation, discussion documents, guidance and other commentary), this thesis analyses the ANC’s understanding of participatory democracy as both a liberation movement in opposition and a government in power. While making a contribution to normative democratic debate, the thesis also challenges arguments which suggest that the democracy established in post-1994 South Africa is unrelated to people’s power or that people’s power in its entirety represented a superior form of democracy. Instead, it is argued that people’s power constituted a variety of overlapping themes and discourses. Elements were rooted in radical democratic theory, community activism, and ideas of popular empowerment. However it was also markedly influenced by Marxist-Leninist thought and a dominant notion of vanguardism. Overall, people’s power embraced a largely unitary form of democracy in which participation could only be exercised within the framework of the liberation movement. Into the democratic era, many of the ideas informing people’s power were woven into policy on participatory democracy. What also emerged, however, were new ideas and influences from development theory, governance discourse and international best practice. While these strands have themselves created conceptual tension - between the dual demands of performance and efficiency and citizen participation - public policy nonetheless provides politically pluralistic mechanisms for citizen influence. This thesis argues that alongside public policy discourse is a separate and distinct discourse of participation from the ANC as a movement. Here, vanguardism remains the dominant conceptual thread in which participation is seen as a means of fulfilling the NDR and extending ANC hegemony. As such, the teleological nature of participation as conceived by the ANC risks undermining the public policy objective of increasing citizen influence.

Thesis advisor: Alan Rogers / The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has a long history of interacting with the United States government, including Congress and the courts. Its relationship with each has helped shaped the present state of the association. This thesis attempts to expose the laissez-fair attitude that the government has taken with the NCAA and the effects of this attitude. It will cover a spectrum of problems that have troubled the NCAA since the 1960s, including conflict with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), disciplinary procedure, education for student-athletes, title IX enforcement, diversity in college sports, a college football playoff, and various other complaints regarding intercollegiate athletics. Each of these issues appeared before Congress and the court system on many occasions and the usual approach taken was trust toward the NCAA. This trust has led to a lack of change or reform on the part of the NCAA. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: History.

Utah existed as a territory for some forty-five years, 1851-1896. During these years Utah continued to occupy an interesting and controversial position on the national scene. The fact that Utah was predominantly Mormon, and that the Mormons were unusual in their beliefs and practices, made the territory and its people a target for the law-making body of the nation as well as the general citizenry. Utah was made an integral part of the congressional discussions and debates in almost every session of Congress during the period of 1851-1896, and there were repeated attempts to punish the Mormons for their "anachronistic" practices. The major link and contact between Utah and the national government was the territorial delegate. It was his responsibility to represent fairly the interests of Utah in Congress and attempt to present the issues in a manner that would facilitate favorable action and legislation in behalf of Utah. This delegate was a voteless agent and was virtually without power or authority at the seat of government. Nevertheless, his constituents respected and depended upon him.

Presidential policy making in Congress is a lengthy, difficult process that involves developing a policy initiative, proposing it to Congress, and winning the legislature’s support. Recent empirical findings indicate that, although centralizing the policy making process eases a president’s managerial burdens, it may also decrease the likelihood of presidential policy success in Congress. Alternatively, decentralizing the process increases the likelihood of policy success, but constrains the president’s discretion over policy substance and incurs greater administrative burdens in the form of managing differing viewpoints, contradictory interests, and increased information flow. Such findings present an intriguing puzzle: how can presidents balance their managerial and information needs and costs to maximize their policy success in Congress? Solving this presidential dilemma can have substantial payoffs for the White House. I argue that agency input provides presidents with a degree of bureaucratic expertise and objectivity, process transparency, and agency support, which imbues presidential proposals with bureaucratic legitimacy and aids their passage into law. To test my hypotheses, I conduct a series of empirical analyses of pooled cross-sectional logistic regression models using a dataset on presidential legislative proposals over the period of 1949-2007. I find that agency input and presidential signaling are key components to increased presidential policy success in Congress. I also find that the employment of agency input for policy development decreases the number of changes made to the substance of a presidential initiative from its proposal stage to its passage into law. Because the substance of a proposal matters, sending a stronger signal for a proposal developed with agency input should have a stronger, positive influence on legislative success. To explore this possibility, I also incorporate the role that voluminous presidential signaling plays at high levels of agency input and find that it has a particularly potent, positive influence on legislative success and on lowering the extent of change to policy substance in the Senate. In light of these findings, I prescribe a new policy making strategy with agency input at its core. My conclusions should also provide an impetus for scholars to reconsider conventional wisdom regarding presidential-bureaucratic management and legislative policy making.

Polarization, defined as the ideological distance between the Democrat and Republican parties in Congress, has increased dramatically in Congress since the 1970s. Research on polarization in the U.S. Congress primarily focuses on the sources of this increase. Relatively little work has been done on the consequences of polarization for Congress? relationship with the president and the passage of legislation. This dissertation corrects this omission by examining the influence of polarization on several key aspects of the legislative process. It examines the impact of polarization on the interaction between Congress and the president, including the president?s strategy in supporting or opposing legislation and the success the president has on bills when he takes a position. It also examines the effect polarization has on the overall passage of legislation. An empirical examination was undertaken using significant bills in Congress over a sixty year time period (1947-2006). The results indicate that the effects of polarization on the legislative process are contingent upon the presence of divided government, defined as times when the president and a majority of members of Congress are from different parties, and the chamber of Congress under examination. As polarization increases, the president is more likely to support legislation and be successful when his party controls Congress, but he opposes more legislation and is less successful as polarization increases under divided government. Legislative gridlock, the inability of Congress to pass important or innovative legislation, tends to decrease in both the House and Senate as polarization increases under unified government. However, as polarization increases under divided government the overall passage of bills into law decreases. The dissertation also offers an improved method for modeling the impact of divided government on gridlock. Prior studies model divided government without regard for whether the president takes a position on a given bill. This study shows that when the president takes a position on a bill under divided government the probability it passes decreases, but the probability of passage increases when the president does not take a position. This finding implies that previous research may underestimate the true effects of divided government on gridlock.