# Political Science Commons™

Articles 1 - 30 of 75

## Full-Text Articles in Political Science

#### Multi-Level Governance Of Climate Change Adaptation: United Nations Negotiations And Adaptation Project Implementation In Nicaragua And Samoa, Anna E. Mcginn

##### Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid entry into force of the Paris Agreement reaffirmed, with certainty, that the international community would continue its efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts opening a new era of international cooperation on climate change. This thesis explores how both negotiations around climate change adaptation and adaptation project implementation have evolved in this post-Paris Agreement era (from adoption in December 2015 to present). Using the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Adaptation Fund as the central lens, the chapters explore international negotiations around the Fund as well as two Adaptation Fund ...

Every Data Point Counts: Political Elections In The Age Of Digital Analytics, Julian Kehle, Samir Naimi May 2019

#### Every Data Point Counts: Political Elections In The Age Of Digital Analytics, Julian Kehle, Samir Naimi

##### Honors Thesis

Synthesizing the investigative research and cautionary messages from experts in the fields of technology, political science, and behavioral science, this project explores the ways in which digital analytics has begun to influence the American political arena. Historically, political parties have constructed systems to target voters and win elections. However, rapid changes in the field of technology (such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the prevalence of social media) threaten to undermine the integrity of elections themselves. Future political campaigns will utilize profiling to micro-target individuals in order to manipulate and persuade them with hyper-personalized political content. Most dangerously, the average ...

Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo Feb 2019

#### Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo

##### Master's Theses and Project Reports

In our current political climate, state level legislators have become increasingly impor- tant. Due to cuts in funding and growing focus at the national level, public oversight for these legislators has drastically decreased. This makes it difficult for citizens and activists to understand the relationships and commonalities between legislators. This thesis provides three contributions to address this issue. First, we created a data set containing over 1200 features focused on a legislator’s activity on bills. Second, we created embeddings that represented a legislator’s level of activity and engagement for a given bill using a custom model called Democracy2Vec ...

Jan 2019

#### Examining Partisan Advantage In Congressional Maps Using Simulations Based On Election Data, Zachary James Morgan

##### Online Theses and Dissertations

Partisan gerrymandering has been and will continue to be a topic of interest in the coming years. States will soon begin their redistricting process following the 2020 Census. We introduce a method of simulating Congressional elections which provides a new way of examining and visualizing the votes-to-seats relationship for a state Congressional map using past election data. We are able to build upon Mira Bernstein's method of uniformly simulating elections by injecting a data-driven component of variation into the simulations. Additionally, we are able to directly evaluate the accuracy of our simulations using a type of cross-validation. We compare ...

Jan 2019

#### Allocative Poisson Factorization For Computational Social Science, Aaron Schein

##### Doctoral Dissertations

Social science data often comes in the form of high-dimensional discrete data such as categorical survey responses, social interaction records, or text. These data sets exhibit high degrees of sparsity, missingness, overdispersion, and burstiness, all of which present challenges to traditional statistical modeling techniques. The framework of Poisson factorization (PF) has emerged in recent years as a natural way to model high-dimensional discrete data sets. This framework assumes that each observed count in a data set is a Poisson random variable $y ~ Pois(\mu)$ whose rate parameter $\mu$ is a function of shared model parameters. This thesis examines a specific ...

Gerrymandering And The Impossibility Of Fair Districting Systems, Danielle Degutz Jan 2019

#### Gerrymandering And The Impossibility Of Fair Districting Systems, Danielle Degutz

##### Senior Projects Spring 2019

Voting district boundaries are often manipulated, or gerrymandered, by politicians in order to give one group of voters an unfair advantage over another during elections. To make sure a system of voting districts is not gerrymandered, the population size, the shape, and the voting efficiency of each party in each district should be taken into consideration. Following recent work of Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon, we discuss mathematical criteria for each of these three aspects, and we prove how problems arise when attempting to apply all three at once to a districting system--first to a simplified districting system and ...

#### Framing Climate Change As National Security: A Survey-Experiment On Climate Change Perceptions., Adam Lyons

##### Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The issues surrounding climate change continue to have polarizing effects on many Americans. In this thesis I offer a potential bridge to this divide with a comprehensive study on how issue frames can impact how individuals shape their opinions on environmental issues. Focusing on a national security frame, I ask the central research “Will the public perceive issues of climate change differently when they are framed as threats to national security?” For this thesis I design an original experimental survey to measure the impact security framing has on participants’ perception of both climate change and environmental policy options. The survey ...

#### Generalized Non-Inferential Approach To Modeling Restricted Discrete Choice For The Case Of The Spatial Random Utility, Elena Labzina

##### Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Multinomial logistic regression model (MNL) is a powerful and easily tractable way for measuring the probabilistic impact of input variables on individual categorical choices. Crucially, the standard MNL assumes that all subjects of the study have the same choice sets. In the meanwhile, especially in political science and economics, this condition is frequently violated. Probably, the most graphical example of varying choice sets (VCS) is partially contested elections. Furthermore, the MNL implicitly implies the Independence of the Irregular Alternatives (IIA) assumption by requiring i.i.d errors that contrasts the MNL and the multinomial probit (MNP) and mixed logit (MXL ...

Jul 2018

#### Future Melting Away: Water Stress As A Threat To Human Security In Bangladesh And The Role Of International Community, Farzana Afroz Chowdhury

##### Theses and Dissertations

Bangladesh is considered as one of the frontline states in the global climate change; its policy agendas attempt to respond to the perceived security threats emanating from such changes. Water stress is one of the key problems the country is facing. Yet, links between glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, Bangladesh’s climate, growing water stress, and its implications for human security have seldom been studied. Drawing on the concepts of climate change, human security and water stress, the thesis examines the causes of Bangladesh’s freshwater crisis and its contribution to the human insecurity. Here in this study, the ...

Mineral Warfare: The Dark Side Of Technology And International Mediation, Priyanka Basnyat May 2018

#### Mineral Warfare: The Dark Side Of Technology And International Mediation, Priyanka Basnyat

##### Master's Theses

Conflict surrounding the extraction and trade of natural resources is not an uncommon phenomenon. Especially in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has historically suffered from the negative impacts of the resource curse since their mineral wealth was first discovered by their Colonial administrators. The importance of Congo’s minerals has fluctuated over the years but has peaked during recent times, as their use in technological advancements are becoming more vital. The global demand for these mineral ores have sky rocketed and consequentially, the largely informal trade has benefitted certain rebel groups, playing a pivotal role ...

#### What’S At Steak? The Political Discourse Of Emissions Intensity And Implications Of Animal Agriculture, Kalyn Simon

##### Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the international discourse of greenhouse gas emissions in relation to livestock production. Specific government ministries, research institutes, and multilateral organizations are framing a new strategy to mitigate emissions by using emissions intensity metrics. Emissions intensity is a ratio comparing emissions produced per unit of animal product as oppose to measuring absolute emissions. This research is acknowledged as a win-win scenario which allows for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions while continuing production more efficiently. This thesis outlines the emergence of this metric in international discourse and the implications this shift has on the livestock sector globally. Ultimately ...

Degrowth Lessons From Cuba, Claire S. Bayler May 2018

#### Degrowth Lessons From Cuba, Claire S. Bayler

##### International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

Cuba is the global leader in practicing agroecology, but agroecology is just one component of a larger climate-ready socio-economic system. Degrowth economics address the need to constrain our total global metabolism to within biophysical limits, while allowing opportunity and resources for "underdeveloped" countries to rebuild themselves under new terms. Degrowth recognizes the role of overdeveloped countries in surpassing the ecological limits of our planet at the cost of wellbeing for billions of dispossessed people within and between countries. Cuba's circumstances during and following the Special Period exemplify both sides of the degrowth scenario, as well as demonstrating policy and ...

An Analysis Of International Agreements Over Cybersecurity, Lucas Ashbaugh Apr 2018

#### An Analysis Of International Agreements Over Cybersecurity, Lucas Ashbaugh

##### Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research into the international agreements that increase cooperation over cybersecurity challenges is severely lacking. This is a necessary next step for bridging diplomatic challenges over cybersecurity. This work aspires to be push the bounds of research into these agreements and offer a tool that future researchers can rely on. For this research I created, and made publicly available, the International Cybersecurity Cooperation Dataset (ICCD), which contains over 350 international cybersecurity agreements and pertinent metadata. Each agreement is marked per which subtopics within cybersecurity related agreements it covers. These typologies are:

• Discussion and Dialogue

• Research

• Confidence Building Measures

• Incident Response

• Crime ...

#### When The Wind Blows: An Evaluation Of Key Factors That Enabled The Proliferation Of Wind Energy Generation In The United States Through 2016, Mary Sodini Bell

##### Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Increasing CO2 emissions have led to extreme weather phenomena labeled as climate change. Energy consumption and the burning of fossil fuels are primary contributors to climate change, which necessitates finding ways to decrease fossil fuel consumption critical to preserving the planet while helping nations reduce dependence on costly fossil fuels. Renewable energy is one part of the solution to reducing CO2 emissions. Wind energy is the fastest growing form of renewable energy across the world and within the U.S., but the key factors that enabled the U.S. wind industry to grow from zero installed capacity at ...

Apr 2018

#### Throw Me A Lifeline: A Comparison Of Port Cities With Antithetical Adaptation Strategies To Sea-Level Rise, Claudia Marie Risner

##### Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Sea-level rise (SLR) is a manifestation of climate change that is particularly hazardous to port cities that must remain on the waterfront to function, yet are increasingly battered and flooded by encroaching storms, and sinking into the rising saltwater. Despite sharing a common high level of risk, port cities are choosing antithetical adaptation strategies that range from hard-engineered structural flood protection, to behavioral modifications, to innovative soft-engineered measures, to doing nothing at all. Why is this? Are transnational city networks, such as C40 Cities, a lifeline to drowning cities? Do differences in governance structure, financial capacity, risk tolerance to the ...

#### Assessment Of Drinking Water Quality Management And A Treatment Feasibility Study For Brick By Brick Water Storage Tanks In Rakai Uganda, James V. Murduca

Reliable access to safe drinking water is one necessity for humans to live without concern for major health risks. The overall goal of this research is to improve the public health, through improved drinking water, for communities in the Rakai District in Uganda, directly, and other communities in the world, indirectly, via dissemination of knowledge. This study specifically assessed the knowledge of drinking water quality in regards to public health, their sanitation measures, and water treatment methods for users of Brick by Brick rainwater harvesting tanks in the Rakai District (N = 28) by using a knowledge, attitudes, and practice survey ...

Jan 2018

#### Inclusion Of Blocking Power For A Complete Voting Power Analysis In The Imf, Shiwani Varal

##### Senior Independent Study Theses

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculates the voting power of a country by dividing the total of one member's votes by the total of all members' votes. This method of calculating the power of a state judges power as voting weight. However, voting weights are the total number of votes a country has in an institution, while voting power is the influence a country has on a policy decision. A better approach to calculate this voting power within an institution is by using voting power indices. However, literature only calculates the winning power, while voting power is defined as ...

#### Water Demand, Adaptive Capacity, And Drought: An Analysis Of The Upper Klamath Basin, Oregon And California, Patricia Snyder

##### All Master's Theses

Freshwater demand and scarcity issues are an issue of global concern, in particular for the American West as global climate models suggest precipitation regime changes and an increase of drought. This research conducts a case-study of the Upper Klamath Basin, located in south-central Oregon and northern California, a microcosm of the arid and semi-arid American West that experienced an economically, socially, and ecologically impactful drought in the early 2000s. Through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods this research: 1) identifies key stakeholders, their goals and key policies; 2) conducts an adaptive capacity assessment of water management within the basin ...

#### Search For A Heavy Resonance Decaying To A Pair Of Higgs Bosons In The Four B-Quark Final State With The Cms Experiment, Michael D. Krohn

##### Physics Graduate Theses & Dissertations

A search for a massive resonance decaying into a pair of standard model Higgs bosons, in a final state consisting of two b quark-antiquark pairs, is performed using proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb-1. The Higgs bosons are highly Lorentz-boosted and are each reconstructed as a single large-area jet. The signal is characterized by a peak in the dijet invariant mass distribution, above a background from the standard model multijet production. The observations are ...

#### Sum Over Histories Representation Of Chemical Kinetics: An Interpretive And Predictive Method For Modeling Chemical Kinetics Using Time-Dependent Pathways, Shirong Bai

##### Chemistry & Biochemistry Graduate Theses & Dissertations (1986-2018)

Chemical kinetics can be viewed as an intricate network of inter-related chemical reactions that work cooperatively to convert reagent species into product species. The network is in general time dependent reacting the non-steady state nature of the chemistry. When it comes to interpreting and predicting chemical kinetics, the history of chemical moieties can play vital roles. In order to study the histories of chemical substances using time-dependent chemical network, this thesis focuses on developing a Sum Over Histories Representation (SOHR for short) of chemical kinetics.

The description of time-dependent chemistry of a reaction network is provided by chemical pathways defined ...

Low-Rank, Multi-Fidelity Methods For Uncertainty Quantification Of High-Dimensional Systems, Hillary Ruth Fairbanks Jan 2018

#### Low-Rank, Multi-Fidelity Methods For Uncertainty Quantification Of High-Dimensional Systems, Hillary Ruth Fairbanks

##### Applied Mathematics Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Characterizing and incorporating uncertainties when simulating physical phenomena is essential for improving model-based predictions. These uncertainties may stem from a lack of knowledge regarding the underlying physical processes or from imprecise measurements of quantities that describe properties of the physical system. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a tool that seeks to characterize the impact of these uncertainties on solutions of computational models, resulting in improved predictive models. In practice, these uncertainties are either treated as random parameters to inform the statistics of the solution of interest (forward UQ), or their statistics are inferred from noisy observations of the solutions (inverse UQ ...

#### Money Matters: An Analysis Of Campaign Finance In United States House Of Representatives Elections, 2010-2016, Destiny Leitz

##### Honors Program Theses

Money in politics is the single largest threat to the democratic system in the United States. It influences everything in politics, from the candidates to the issues debated. Every American knows that running for office requires large amounts of funding, and being elected requires even more. People worry that only the wealthiest voices are being heard; of course, candidates who depend on money from wealthy donors for campaign strength would never support unfavorable policies for their donors. Clearly, money in politics threatens the core democratic principles upon which America was founded. However, few people discuss whether the money really makes ...

Analyzing Political Bias Through A User-Friendly Interface, Colin Lightfoot Dec 2017

#### Analyzing Political Bias Through A User-Friendly Interface, Colin Lightfoot

Many news outlets report stories shown with biased undertones that mislead readers to believe one story over another about the same event. To help people delineate between liberallyand conservatively-biased news articles, we created a website which uses a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory nodes trained to identify bias found in news articles. The network achieved an F1 Score of 0.76, and is used to provide one liberally-biased article and one conservatively-biased article side-by-side for a user to read when the user searches for a specific news story

Extending Difference Of Votes Rules On Three Voting Models., Sarah Schulz King Aug 2017

#### Extending Difference Of Votes Rules On Three Voting Models., Sarah Schulz King

##### Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In a voting situation where there are only two competing alternatives, simple majority rule outputs the alternatives with the most votes or declares a tie if both alternatives receive the same number of votes. For any non-negative integer k, the difference of votes rule Mk outputs the alternative that beats the competing alternative by more than k votes. Llamazares (2006) gives a characterization of the difference of votes rules in terms of five axioms. In this thesis, we extend Llamazares' result by completely describing the class of voting rules that satisfy only two out of his five axioms. In ...

Diffusion Of Renewable Energy Policies, Khatera Alizada Apr 2017

#### Diffusion Of Renewable Energy Policies, Khatera Alizada

##### Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the global diffusion of renewable energy policies: feed-in tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS). Existing studies of policy diffusion have failed to differentiate between four possible mechanisms of policy diffusion: emulation, suasion, learning and competition. To test these competing explanations, the study uses a mixed-method research design that combines statistical analysis of time-series cross-sectional data with an agent-based model of diffusion processes. The findings of the statistical analysis show strong support for the suasion (European Union Membership, Clean Development Mechanisms) and emulation mechanisms (cultural similarity or common language) in the diffusion of FIT. In the diffusion ...

An Analysis Of China’S Regional Emissions Trading System: Challenges And Lessons, Ronghui (Kevin) Zhou Jan 2017

#### An Analysis Of China’S Regional Emissions Trading System: Challenges And Lessons, Ronghui (Kevin) Zhou

##### Bard Center for Environmental Policy

China, the largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world, has faced environmental pressures both internationally and domestically over the last ten years. In early 2011, the Chinese government approved a carbon emissions trading program in seven cities and provinces, and started planning a national emissions trading framework. This thesis reviews these pilot programs and examines the issues that underlie them. Drawing lessons from the U.S. Acid Rain Program, the European Union’s ETS, and California’s CAT, the three largest emissions trading frameworks in the world, I find that: (1) lack of trades in China’s pilot programs is ...

Jan 2017

#### An Evaluation Of Critical Realignment Theory: Comparing Bayesian And Frequentist Approaches, Tara A. Rhodes

##### Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prior to this study, critical realignment theory, which presupposes eras of substantial and sustained swings in American political party dominance, had only been evaluated using the classical, frequentist approach to modeling. However, potential for more information concerning these electoral phenomena exists given a shift in the design and approach to realigning elections. This study sought to explore those options through one particular alternative to the classical approach to statistics--in this particular case, the Bayesian approach to statistics. Bayesian methods differ from the frequentist approach in three main ways: the treatment of probability, the treatment of parameters, and the treatment of ...

Jan 2017

#### Resources, Race And Rights: A Case Study Of Native Title And The Adani Carmichael Coal Mine, Kate Arnautovic

##### Theses : Honours

This thesis examines the extent to which state institutions and government have taken into account Indigenous rights and interests during the approval process for a large mining development. This case study focuses on the various phases of approval for the proposed Adani Carmichael Coal Mine, a significant development that has challenged the native title system in Australia. It assesses the extent to which the rights and interests of the Wangan and Jagalingou people, the traditional owners that possess a native title claim over the region, have been upheld by the National Native Title Tribunal and the State and Federal Government ...

The Frontiers Of Technology In Warhead Verification, Henrietta N. Toivanen Jan 2017

#### The Frontiers Of Technology In Warhead Verification, Henrietta N. Toivanen

##### CMC Senior Theses

How might new technical verification capabilities enhance the prospects of success in future nuclear arms control negotiations? Both theory and evidence suggest that verification technologies can influence the dynamics of arms control negotiations by shaping and constraining the arguments and strategies that are available to the involved stakeholders. In the future, new technologies may help transcend the specific verification challenge of high-security warhead authentication, which is a verification capability needed in future disarmament scenarios that address fewer warheads, limit new categories of warheads, and involve nuclear weapons states other than the United States and Russia. Under these circumstances, the core ...