Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-42). / The Qweak experiment at Jefferson Lab aims to make the first precision measurement of the proton's weak charge, QP = 1 - 4 sin 2 9w at Q2 = 0.026GeV 2 . Given the precision goals in the Qweak experiment, the electron beam polarization must be known to an absolute uncertainty of 1%. A new Compton polarimeter has been built and installed in Hall C in order to make this important measurement. Compton polarimetry has been chosen for its ability to deliver continuous on-line measuremnts at high currents necessary for Qweak (up to 180pzA). In this thesis, we collected and analyzed electron beam polarization data using the Qweak Compton polarimeter. Currently, data from the Compton can already be used to calculate preliminary values of experimental physics asymmetries and also the electron beam polarization. These preliminary results are promising indications that Qweak will be able to meet its stated precision goals. / by David Zou. / S.B.

This study uses a random coefficient estimation procedure to analyze the U.S. gasoline market from 1960-1995 with three main objectives: (1) provide an empirical methodology that can estimate a gasoline demand function capable of performing well in prediction; (2) evaluate the elasticities of the models presented to determine which model is more accurate at capturing supply shocks that impacted gasoline demand; and (3) evaluate the behavior of the elasticites of the beta coefficients. This research will show that the variation from historical economic patterns was a result of supply shocks. I argue that when the OLS model of the gasoline market developed by William H. Greene is used supply shocks are not well captured because the coefficients are fixed. If the random coefficient model developed by P.A.V.B. Swamy is introduced, the coefficients vary over time, and thereby, enable supply shocks to be included in the model and more accurate forecasts are produced, as well as, meaningful time patterns in the beta coefficients. / Master of Arts

Much of the political punditry in the United States discusses the notion that facing a primary election results in legislators voting in a more partisan fashion in the legislature. A common refrain of this analysis is that facing the primary election constituency (Fenno 1978) or even the threat of facing the primary election constituency causes the senator to vote with the ideological extremes of the party in following sessions of congress. The literature on congressional elections has examined this area of research as it applies to the U.S. House, but few studies fully examine the impact of primary elections on roll call voting in the Senate. This study examines Senate primary elections to see how facing a primary, specifically a competitive primary, influences how a senator votes in the legislature in the first term following the election. This study specifically asks if senators who face a competitive primary challenge and win reelection vote with their party more often in subsequent congresses than senators who do not face a competitive primary challenge. Using OLS regressions and a number of control variables shown in the literature to impact roll call voting patterns, I examine the percentage of the vote that a senator received in her primary election compared to her party unity score in the Senate after the election. While my models demonstrate that facing a competitive primary correlates with a senator having a higher party unity score than senators who do not face a competitive primary, in all of my models the coefficient on this variable is not statistically significant. However, serving in the majority party and being elected in certain election years did have a statistically significant impact on a senator's partisan voting behavior. When testing an interaction effect between facing a competitive primary and serving in the majority party after the election, I also did not find a significant relationship between the interaction and a senator's change in party unity score. These findings add to our understanding of congressional elections by exploring an under-studied aspect of elections in the United States, and future research that adapts and refines the methodology of this study could further develop these results. / Master of Arts / There is a common perception that facing a primary election makes it more likely that a member of congress votes with her party more often. The idea is that the primary voters want their representatives to be more radical, and therefore push incumbents to the extremes, resulting in more polarization in the legislature. While studies on elections to the House have shown mixed results when examining this question, few studies examine if these patterns exist in elections to the Senate. This study examines Senate primary elections to see how facing a primary influences how a senator votes in the legislature. However, because of limited data, this study examines competitive primaries, based on how much of the vote the senator receives in her election, rather than ideological primaries, based on the senator being challenged from the extremes of the party. This study specifically asks how facing a competitive primary influences a senator's partisan voting patterns in subsequent congresses after their election. In order to study this, I examine the percentage of the vote that a senator received in her primary election compared to her partisan voting patterns in the Senate after the election. I did not find that senators who face a competitive primary respond by voting in a more partisan fashion in the congressional sessions following the election. However, serving in the majority party and being elected in certain election years did have a significant impact on a senator's partisan voting behavior. When testing if the impact of facing a competitive primary was conditioned by serving in the majority party, I also did not find that serving in the majority party conditions the impact of facing a competitive primary on a senator's partisan voting patterns. While these findings did not support the notion that facing a competitive primary influences a senator's partisan voting behavior, future research could alter this study to further examine this question. Such additional research is necessary in order to more fully understand Senate elections.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election results surprised many, after several groups many believed to be surefire voters for Democrats based on previous elections voted for Republican Donald Trump (Bump, 2016). Whenever a change takes place in voter patterns, one begins to hear phrases like “critical election” and “political realignment.” A critical election is an election where there is a change of at least 10 percent in partisan alignment, but it does not persist in the next election. A partisan realignment is similar to a critical election, but the change is more durable. This research explores whether the 2016 election can be classified as a critical election and whether and how key groupings of Democratic voters voted in the election compared to their votes in the 2012 election. Using data aggregated at the county level, regression analyses suggest that voters’ education, access to health care, union membership, racial/ethnic diversity, and income level all had statistically significant relationships with votes in both elections and with the change in vote between 2016 and 2012, all were substantively significant or in directions consistent with the presence of a critical election when viewed either from the national or even regional viewpoint. Evidence suggests that 2016 was a critical election. / M.A. / If 2016 proved anything about elections, it is that at times they can be difficult to predict. Predicting voter behavior based on past elections is not straightforward, in part because at times voters can make sharp changes in their party alliance over the course of four years. Sometimes those changes are lasting, but they also can fade by the next election cycle. This study examined whether the 2016 U.S. presidential election constituted such a sharp and sudden change from the 2012 election, an event social scientists term a “critical election.” Conducted at the county level, the study examined whether and how voter groupings (based on education, access to health care, union membership, income, and race/ethnicity) changed notably between 2012 and 2016. What was found was that as expected Democrats experienced a negative change in support among union, white, and impoverished voters. What was not expected was the negative change in Black votes for Democrats between 2012 and 2016. Another unexpected, though smaller, change was a drop in Democratic support by the college educated. No significant change in Democratic support was found among Hispanics or those with access to healthcare. Based on these findings 2016 can be considered to have been a critical election for Blacks.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran has visibly increased its work towards developing a nuclear program. This is alarming to many because Iran's ambitions for its nuclear program are unclear and whether it is on a quest for nuclear weapons is unknown. The Iranian government is largely anti-West, anti-Israel, and now, with the downfall of Iraq, is in a position to spread its influence throughout the Middle East. This thesis examines the evolution of the Iranian nuclear program, the relationship between the United States and Iran and how this relationship will likely have a significant influence on the ability of Iran to develop a nuclear program. The goal is to assess the current status of the situation and examine the possible policies the United States could implement towards Iran and its nuclear program. / Master of Arts

This study examines German-U.S. relations during the George W. Bush administration. It utilizes Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane's theoretical framework of anti-Americanism to examine German perceptions of U.S. foreign policy. Katzenstein and Keohane distinguish four distinctive types of anti-Americanism. Liberal anti-Americanism is a reaction to unpopular U.S. foreign policies. Social anti-Americanism occurs in response to U.S. style capitalism and U.S. society. Sovereign-nationalist anti-American is a nationalistic response to the superpower's perceived intrusion on state sovereignty. Radical anti-Americanism is a Leninist or radical Islamic response to U.S. power. I hypothesize that anti-Americanism in German is primarily a political reaction to the policies of the Bush administration. However the negative attitudes towards U.S. foreign policy also manifest themselves in the form of the social and sovereign types of anti-Americanism. / Master of Arts

This dissertation studies the relationship between output growth rate and its volatility. This study sheds light on International, Regional, and Development Economics literature. In the first chapter, we revisit the relationship between output growth rate and its volatility using cross-section techniques for our panel data set from 60 countries from 1970 to 2019. In addition to the conventional volatility measurement of the standard deviation, we incorporate the higher moments, such as skewness and kurtosis, as volatility measures. Higher moments further sharpen our understanding of the volatility and growth rate relationship. We also examine the role of the irreversibility of investment, a purported proximate factor for increased volatility in theory but not applied to empirical models, on the growth rate. We find that a higher level of the irreversibility of investment tends to reduce the growth rate. In the second chapter, we examine the growth-volatility relationship covering manufacturing activities at the two-digit level in 32 countries. In particular, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to reveal the long-term relationship between output growth rate and volatility over 1970 – 2019 within countries and across sectors. We have data for each manufacturing subsector for each country over a long period. We have redefined the growth rate and volatility measures with alternative definitions such as cross-country and cross-sector across time. This offers additional advantages from an econometric perspective, as the large cross-sectional dimension is beneficial when estimating the determinants of growth rate. Moreover, our study assesses the evolution of the long-term relationship between economic sectoral growth rate and sectoral volatility over time. Overall, we find that growth rate and volatility are negatively related, with a few exceptions. The third chapter investigates the relationship between regional growth rate and volatility in U.S. state regions. We use disaggregated data for manufacturing activities over the period 1977 – 2021. We find a significant positive relationship between sectoral volatility and GDP per worker growth rate across the U.S. states regions, meaning that manufacturing volatile sectors for the U.S. are growing faster. This finding is also robust in including additional control variables in the analysis, thus confirming that volatility does not capture the effect of other potential determinants of GDP growth in the manufacturing sectors. We further examine how policy structure and geographical similarity affect regional growth rates, in which we distinguish between the Democrat and Republican Parties and Coastline and Non-Coastline states. We find that the growth rate and volatility relationship has been weaker for Democrat-leading states and geographically more open states (states with a coastline). This suggests that the growth rate and volatility relationship can be altered by having a supporting fiscal policy or having a more open economy.

By now scholars, practitioners, government officials and others in the global community have witnessed a number of countries and their populations going through extreme destruction and trying to rebuild in the aftermath. Country case studies are invaluable for their in-depth, continuous look at how a nation-state collective and the individuals who make up that collective recover, regroup, develop, but also remain very harmed for a long time. They must live among and beside their former enemies. Studies of the resettlement of refugees in a third country offer a different view: there are varied populations arriving with different socio-cultural and economic histories and experiences, and different definitions of a normalcy to which they aspire. They are in a setting that is much different than what characterized their pre-war experiences, and they do not have to rebuild out of ashes in the place that they were born. Refugees from various countries resettling in a third country have so much in common with each other from the experience of extreme violence and having to resettle in a foreign land that one key informant suggested that we think about a "refugee ethnicity." Though they would not have wished for them, they have gained numerous new identification possibilities not available to those in the country of origin: U.S. citizen, hybrid, diaspora, cosmopolitan global citizen; refugee/former refugee survivors. But the "fit" of these identities vary, because the receiving society may perceive individuals and families along a continuum of belonging vs. "othering." In the post-9-11 era in the U.S., the "belonging" as a citizen and member of the imagined community of the nation that a refugee or former refugee is able to achieve may be precarious. Will refugees resettling turn out to be vectors of socio-political disease, infecting the new host? Or will they be vectors of development and agents of host revitalization as they realize adversity-activated development in a new environment? The U.S. "host environment" has changed considerably since the modern era of resettlement began in the 1970s and then passed through the dramatic incidents of 9-11. The "hosts" have now also undergone an experience of extreme political violence. U.S. institutions are responding to the events and subsequent wars, and have themselves been changed as they adjust practices and policies in response to the trauma experienced by the people they are meant to serve. Much is in play. The times beg for a better understanding of refugees' social experiences of resettlement in a new country, the forms of suffering and marginalization they face, and the healing processes in which they engage. We need a far better understanding of what it takes to assist refugees as they work to re-constitute social networks, recover economically, find opportunity and meaning, pursue goals, and - with receiving communities--express solidarity across social dividing lines. This dissertation calls out this problematic; and analyzes it at the multi-stakeholder site of refugee resettlement.

This thesis is an analysis of the motivations behind U.S. efforts to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program. It argues that U.S. actions must be viewed within a larger context; specifically it must be viewed from the perspective of the overall interests of the U.S. in the Middle East. These interests include ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil, protecting the state of Israel and eliminating security threats, to the U.S. and its allies, especially from terrorist organizations. The thesis examines U.S.-Iran’s relationship over the nuclear issues a historical context, beginning with Eisenhower Administration. It is guided by the insights derived from the realist paradigm in International Relations theory which stresses national interest, defined in terms of power as the major determinant in state behaviour. The study shows that the U.S. was quite supportive of Iran developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes only when relations between the two states were cordial. However, since the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s, the relationship has been marked by hostility on both sides, and importantly, by American attempts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, particularly its goal of developing a nuclear weapons program, and the latter’s efforts to circumvent these. An Iran in possession of nuclear weapons is seen as a dangerous threat to Middle Eastern stability and, of course, to U.S. interests in the region.

The major problem of this study is to identify through the use of the Critical Incident Technique the main requirements for successful ministerial service in the South Carolina Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, insofar as these requirements can be determined through lay observations and judgments. The following sub-problems are closely related to the major problem: 1. What special demands are made upon the minister by special subgroups within the church--e.g., youth, women's groups--in regard to pastoral behavior? 2. How important are the roles assigned to the minister by the church itself--e.g., preacher, teacher, counselor, visitor, administrator, priest? 3. Do churches of varying sizes differ in their expectations of the Ministerial office--e.g., do large churches place greater emphasis upon preaching? 4. Does educational training and/or the salary of the minister correlate with the number of successful incidents reported by respondents?