Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008. / Full text also available online. Scroll down for electronic link.

Thesis--University of Pittsburgh. / Bibliography: p. 129-135.

Thesis--University of Pittsburgh. / Cover title: Vocabulary control in L.C. classification. Bibliography: p. 147-55.

Democracy depends upon the competition between candidates or ideas. However, practices or procedures sometimes preclude the consideration of the full range of options. Can campaign spending predict who wins elections? What explains why incumbent electoral security is only rarely threatened? Can committees or individuals in Congress stifle the will of a legislative majority? Essay #1. Politicians spend vast sums of money in order to win or retain a seat in Congress; does it predict who will win? In this essay I present a forecast model for elections to the US House of Representatives that specifically includes a measure of campaign spending.The advantages of the new model are that it relies on publicly available data, its results are easy to interpret, and the forecasts are comparable to other models.Essay #2. For a variety of reasons, incumbents expect to win reelection. There are few explanations for why that advantage occasionally seems to disappear. In this essay, I synthesize the literature on incumbency advantage, congressional redistricting, and voter behavior. I present evidence from the 2006-2010 election cycles suggesting that congressional districts drawn with the expectation of consistent partisan loyalty rates left incumbents susceptible to national tides brought about by temporary asymmetric departures from partisan voting norms. Essay #3. Although there is a large literature devoted to analyses of legislative committee gate keeping, Crombez, Groseclose, and Krehbiel (2006) argued that formal gate keeping is explicitly ruled out in most deliberative bodies. In this essay, I examine the historical development of rules and procedures in the US House of Representatives which explain the lack of formal gate keeping rules. I present evidence of non-majoritarian outcomes in the House despite it being a majoritarian body. I conclude the essay by suggesting a new definition of gate keeping based on the ability to alter the probability of proposal success on the floor instead of the formal ability to kill legislation. / Government

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This thesis analyses the policy debate surrounding National Missile Defense in the US during the 1990s from the framework of strategic intelligence failure. It focuses on the Congressional reaction to the release of the national intelligence estimate "NIE 95-19: Emerging Missile Threats to North America During the Next 15 Years" and the establishment of a new interpretation of foreign ballistic missile threats to the continental US. The role that partisan politics plays in the oversight of the US intelligence community is a vital and inescapable one. Yet little academic investigation has been devoted to understanding the political nature of intelligence oversight and its potentially catastrophic impact on intelligence product. Instead most of the scholarly literature treats intelligence and its oversight as apolitical, objective processes and intelligence failures as 'sins' produced by human error or organisational dysfunction with little analysis of the essentially subjective nature of political debate. The debate between the Clinton Administration and the Republican Congress can be understood as a conflict between two competing policy frames, each giving their holders a subjective assessment of what threats the US faced from ballistic missiles. Both parties sought to use their competing power over the intelligence community to produce community support for their paradigm and undermine support for that of their rival. The production and release of NIE 95-19 highlighted these competing claims. The unambiguous nature of the NIE's threat projections caused Congress to wield its oversight powers in an ultimately successful attempt to overturn the findings of the NIE. This represented an unprecedented level of Congressional involvement in strategic intelligence interpretation. Most importantly however it highlights the inherent dichotomy produced by current conceptions of strategic intelligence failure. In building a system of oversight that protected US strategic intelligence from certain apparent sources of failure the ability for Congress to actively meddle in the production of strategic intelligence and arguably undermine the value of long-term projections such as the NIE were massively increased.

From 1978 on there have been a series of legislative acts that have placed substantial protectionist burdens on the American taxpayer to provide incentives, credits and mandates for the production and use of ethanol under the rationale of reducing U.S. dependence on foreign sources of oil while purporting to economically benefit the American economy and strengthening American security. While there has been much discussion about the economic benefits of ethanol policy, there is growing literature suggesting that in addition to being neither economically nor environmentally beneficial, ethanol policy may not be achieving its intended goals. Connection between political contributions, policy formation, and the actual outcomes of the enacted policies does not appear to have been addressed. Throughout the course of ethanol policy development the narrow interests of some stakeholders may have been met at the expense of others. Given the very large economic and social costs of ongoing ethanol subsidies and mandates an exploration of such a nexus would be illuminating and valuable. Hence the question of this research will be: Has the ethanol energy policy of the United States, as outlined in legislative actions, requiring subsidies and mandates from taxpayers, been reflective of a deliberative democratic process that after taking into account the input and influence of various competing viewpoints has resulted in a beneficial national policy? Consequently have the policy outcomes of the legislative stakeholders matched the stated intentions of those involved in the deliberative debate that enacted it or, where have those objectives not been met? Research that can increase understanding of how such an important policy may have failed can inform policy deliberation in such diverse areas as agriculture, national security and energy policy while illuminating how and why such public policy was made. Examination of a policy created and continuing which may have failed the most basic cost benefit analysis and does very little to enhance national energy security could demonstrate how a distortion of the legislative process resulted in outcomes that differ markedly from the stated intentions of those who enacted the policy.