Browsing by Author "Political Science, School of Liberal Arts"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
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    Back on track? Somaliland after its 2017 presidential election
    (Oxford, 2018) Pegg, Scott; Walls, Michael; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
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    Book Review: When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland
    (Sage, 2021) Pegg, Scott; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
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    Digital Segregation: Gender, Occupation, and Access to Politics
    (SAGE, 2019-05-26) Friesen, Amanda; Burge, Ryan; Britzman, Kylee; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    In the United States, women often show less interest in politics, and under some conditions, perform worse than men on political knowledge tests. In an age where education levels have reached parity, we suggest one of the explanations for gender differences in political engagement might be due to selection of occupation. Past research has shown women and men segregate into different occupations due to early gender socialization, differences in interest, and structural barriers. It is possible that due to these segregation effects, women in traditional female occupations (e.g., education, health care, service work) may have less access to personal Internet use and news sources during their work days. Using the 2014 General Social Survey, we create a new occupational typology based on access to the Internet to explore whether individuals in certain sectors differ in their political engagement and how these occupations are also divided by gender. Then, we apply the technology use measure to the 2016 American National Election Study and find that technology access on the job does not seem to be related to political knowledge, once we account for education, which offers some insight into the mechanisms by which individuals gain this knowledge. In addition, the interaction between total media consumption and tech use suggests that the gap in political knowledge between men and women is stubbornly persistent.
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    Diverse stakeholders create collaborative, multilevel basin governance for groundwater sustainability
    (University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, 2018-03-13) Conrad, Esther; Moran, Tara; DuPraw, Marcelle E.; Ceppos, David; Martinez, Janet; Blomquist, William; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is introducing significant changes in the way groundwater is governed for agricultural use. It requires the formation of groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) to manage groundwater basins for sustainability with the engagement of all users. That presents opportunities for collaboration, as well as challenges, particularly in basins with large numbers of agricultural water users who have longstanding private pumping rights. The GSA formation process has resulted in the creation of multiple GSAs in many such basins, particularly in the Central Valley. In case studies of three basins, we examine agricultural stakeholders' concerns about SGMA, and how these are being addressed in collaborative approaches to groundwater basin governance. We find that many water districts and private pumpers share a strong interest in maintaining local autonomy, but they have distinct concerns and different options for forming and participating in GSAs. Multilevel collaborative governance structures may help meet SGMA's requirements for broad stakeholder engagement, our studies suggest, while also addressing concerns about autonomy and including agricultural water users in decision-making.
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    Does Ignorance Matter? The Relative Importance of Civic Knowledge and the Human Tendency to Engage in Motivated Reasoning
    (2015-03-02) Dusso, Aaron; Kennedy, Sheila Suess; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    It has long been understood that political knowledge in the U.S. is very low. For those who care about the quality of American democracy, this is a big problem. In attempting to find a solution, many people often blame education. While increasing civic knowledge is a laudatory goal, increased political sophistication does not necessarily turn individuals into good democratic citizens. Research in cognitive and social psychology paints a picture of people as motivated reasoners. Instead of having an open-minded engagement with issues, individuals typically only seek, see, and understand information in a manner that reinforces what they already believe. Here, we examine motivated reasoning and argue that the strongest partisans and the most committed ideologues will be the most susceptible to holding contradictory policy positions with regard to same-sex marriage and religious freedom.
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    The Effects of Selective and Indiscriminate Repression on the 2013 Gezi Park Nonviolent Resistance Campaign
    (SAGE, 2020-05-05) Demirel-Pegg, Tijen; Rasler, Karen; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government’s use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing.
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    Generational Change? The Effects of Family, Age, and Time on Moral Foundations
    (DeGruyter, 2019) Friesen, Amanda; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    One way to uncover the persistent role of religion across generations is to look past traditional understandings of religious belief and denominational belonging and examine the presence of bedrock principles that could influence political beliefs in families. The Moral Foundations framework was developed for this purpose – to describe human behavior and attitudes in the moral realm without relying upon country, culture, or time specific labels. In an original and rare three-generation dataset, college students, their parents, and their grandparents were asked about political attitudes and preferences for the Moral Foundations of Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. The Foundations are not equally shared across generations as preferences for each Foundation increase with the age of the cohorts in this sample, with especially large differences on Authority and Purity. A follow-up survey reveals that Moral Foundations may not be stable across even short periods of time. These findings suggest that the political appeals that may work on older Americans may be less effective on the younger generations. If individuals indeed make moral decisions based on these types of bedrock principles, understanding which of these principles or Foundations drive particular age groups can help us better understand shifts in public opinion.
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    The Gezi Park Protests and the Escalation and De-escalation of Political Contention
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019) Demirel-Pegg, Tijen; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    This study argues that escalation and de-escalation processes lie at the heart of protest campaigns. These processes are largely determined by the interactions between protesters and governments, as well as the timing and types of strategies and tactics employed. The study examines the dynamics between the Turkish government and the protesters during the 2013 Gezi Protest Campaign. This campaign escalated quickly by generating massive support from different segments of the Turkish society in its earlier days, and then de-escalated and eventually demobilized without securing major concessions. By using original data collected from a Turkish newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the study illustrates how the trajectory of the Gezi campaign changed in response to the interactive dynamics between the government and the dissidents.
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    The Higher Power of Religiosity Over Personality on Political Ideology
    (Springer, 2019) Ksiazkiewicz, Aleksander; Friesen, Amanda; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    Two streams of research, culture war and system justification, have proposed that religious orientations and personality, respectively, play critical roles in political orientations. There has been only limited work integrating these two streams. This integration is now of increased importance given the introduction of behavior-genetic frameworks into our understanding of why people differ politically. Extant research has largely considered the influence of personality as heritable and religiosity as social, but this view needs reconsideration as religiosity is also genetically influenced. Here we integrate these domains and conduct multivariate analyses on twin samples in the U.S. and Australia to identify the relative importance of genetic, environmental, and cultural influences. First, we find that religiosity’s role on political attitudes is more heritable than social. Second, religiosity accounts for more genetic influence on political attitudes than personality. When including religiosity, personality’s influence is greatly reduced. Our results suggest religion scholars and political psychologists are partially correct in their assessment of the “culture wars”—religiosity and ideology are closely linked, but their connection is grounded in genetic predispositions.
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    Introducing the Turkey Protest, Repression, and Pro-Government Rally Dataset (TPRPGRD)
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-08-28) Kahvecioğlu, Anıl; Demirel-Pegg, Tijen; Aytürk, İ̇lker; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    The repression-protest nexus in authoritarian regimes has attracted scholarly attention of contention scholars for a long time. However, studies have generally overlooked pro-government actors’ role in contentious dynamics. This article introduces an original event dataset on protests, repression, and pro-government rallies in Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party during a period in which authoritarianism has increased in intensity. Using protest event analysis, this dataset includes actions of governments, pro-government actors, and dissidents hand-coded from two newspapers between 1 January 2013, and 31 December 2016. The dataset enables researchers to study pro-government rallies (PGRs), anti-government protests, and state actions during a heightened period of contention in Turkey.