Honors Projects
Showing 411 - 420 of 662 Items
From Left to Right? White Evangelical Politicization, GOP Incorporation, and the Effect of Party Affiliation on Group Opinion Change
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Devon B Shapiro
Access: Open access
- While most white evangelicals in America have advocated moral, cultural, and social conservatism since the Founding, the group’s fiscal and social welfare preferences have been more volatile. Early 20th century evangelicals tended to be socially conservative, fiscally liberal, and, to the extent that they were politicized, mostly Democratic partisans. Since that time, not only have white evangelicals abandoned the Democratic Party, but also they have largely become fiscal and social welfare conservatives. I attempt to explain that transformation. I first examine the dynamics of white evangelical politicization and GOP incorporation, providing social and historical context to the political and partisan calculations of white evangelicals since the 1970s. Further, I propose a party affiliation effect that helps to explain white evangelical fiscal and social welfare conservatism. This effect asserts that partisanship penetrates individual conceptions of political issues. In the case of white evangelicals, I argue that the group affiliated with the GOP largely on the basis of socio-moral issues and concerns. Partly as a result of that affiliation, group opinion on fiscal policy began to drift to the right, toward the Republican Party status quo. Consistent with this claim, I provide longitudinal analyses of ANES and GSS data that shed light on the timing of opinion changes. As we would expect, white evangelical opinion on economic issues was closer to Democratic partisans during the 1960s and moved moved toward Republicans during the 1980s-1990s.
Systemic Risk in the Airline Industry: Investigating the Effects of Network Interconnectedness on MES Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Angela Goldshteyn
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Human Today, Posthuman Tomorrow in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Benjamin Bousquet
Access: Open access
- Human Today, Posthuman Tomorrow explores the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy through the lens of posthuman theory. Atwood’s trilogy depicts a dystopian, anthropocentric world that hinges upon an apocalyptic, man-made epidemic known as the Waterless Flood. Through posthuman theory, this thesis looks at ways to reconcile the oppositional and hierarchical relationship between the human and the nonhuman. The thesis is split into three main chapters, each of which engages a different posthuman theory. The first chapter addresses the concept of hybridity as it is elaborated by Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. Next, the thesis turns to Donna Haraway’s “The Companion Species Manifesto” to address the ways human-animal relations in the trilogy are imagined as mutual and non-hierarchical. The last chapter turns to the pigoon/human relationship through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming to understand the ways in which humans and pigoons build a new, non-oppositional relationship. In all, this thesis works to understand the stakes of the trilogy through posthumanism to argue that only through a posthuman understanding of the world are we able to erode oppositional differences between humans and nonhumans and create a future inhabitable for all.
Narrative, Identity, and Holocaust Memorialization in the United States
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Alexander Noah Kogan
Access: Open access
- Narratives at Holocaust memorials and museums in the United States connect the Holocaust to present-day identities and weave the Holocaust into American history. Holocaust narratives––whether at the universal, national, or local level––draw moral lessons from the past. These narratives and their moral lessons redefine what constitutes the Holocaust and are determined by the needs and sentiments of the present. The sites of remembrance in this thesis at once show the significance of the Holocaust in American identities at both national and local levels, as well as encourage an active remembrance of the past that restructures these identities. The type of active remembrance and its purpose differs at each site, but each encourages a reconsideration of the past to find potentially applicable lessons for the present.
Governing the Internet: The Extraterritorial Effects of the General Data Protection Regulation
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Sasa Jovanovic
Access: Open access
- The advent of the commercial Internet has introduced novel challenges to global governance because of the transnational nature of shared data flows, creating interdependence that may result in inter-state cooperation or competition. Data protection laws that are designed to ensure citizens’ right to privacy are one of the primary tool used by states to extend control over data flows. The European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (2016) is widely regarded as the strongest data protection law in the world, and therefore may serve as a barrier to the openness of the Internet. The GDPR is both an instance of regulatory competition between the EU and US, but also heightens the need for cooperation to ensure the smooth functioning of online commerce. This paper shows that the EU is exporting the GDPR to jurisdictions such as the US via extraterritorial effects, even though the US has adopted an alternative legal approach to data protection. This paper seeks to explain the influence and limitations of the GDPR by considering factors such as the relative regulatory capabilities of the EU and the US as the result of their institutional and legal histories. It demonstrates that the EU has relied on complex interdependence to design a regulation like the GDPR, and it uses this regulatory competitive advantage alongside its soft power to promote its model of data protection, allowing the EU to obtain favorable outcomes in cooperation with the US.
Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art Since 1973
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Mackenzie Philbrick
Access: Open access
- Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art Since 1973, explores contemporary renderings of the sex worker as a response to the heavily constructed formalist ideology of the “pure gaze” which privileged the heterosexual male voyeur. The analysis covers a broad range of media, sectioned off into three chapters—painting and photography, body art, and systemic critiques—to explore the affordances of each in critiquing the position of the voyeur as well as the larger capitalistic system. The first chapter investigates the ways in which realistic pictorial renderings depicted the sex worker to impose the voyeuristic viewing position of pornography onto the art-viewer. The second focuses on the relationship between the viewer and the commodified female body, as performers replaced the art commodity with their sexualized bodies. The third chapter discusses larger institutional critiques which illuminate the processes of class structuring in capitalism by recreating the capitalist exploitation or institutional shortcomings of our current sociopolitical system. Taken together, these works respond to the modernist commodification of the art object and female sexuality, which formalist viewing dynamics both reflected and promoted. The artists emphasize the real ramifications of class construction and relational or performative identity to understand how larger social processes play out on certain marginalized bodies, thus highlighting the inherent problems embedded in these social, cultural, and economic systems.
Campaigning for the Court: The Effect of Presidential Campaign Rhetoric on the Supreme Court
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Mackey O'Keefe
Access: Open access
- This paper investigates how presidential candidates speak about the Supreme Court on the campaign trail, and how the ideological tenor of their rhetoric influences outcomes on the Court. Rhetoric is a powerful and well-researched tool of the presidency and has often been called “the power to persuade.” Much of judicial politics scholarship works to describe judicial decision making, investigating what constrains the actions and decisions of the Supreme Court. Though some scholarship has examined how presidential rhetoric affects the Supreme Court, little has been conducted in the area of presidential campaigns. This paper argues that presidential campaign rhetoric influences the Supreme Court by demonstrating that in the area of civil liberties the ideology of the winning presidential candidates' campaign rhetoric concerning the Supreme Court has a statistically significant effect on the percent of liberal rulings the Court issues one year after an election.
The United States’ and United Kingdom’s Responses to 2016 Russian Election Interference: Through the Lens of Bureaucratic Politics
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Katherine Davidson
Access: Open access
- Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign during the U.S. elections represented the first large-scale campaign against the United States and was intended to cause American citizens to question the fundamental security and resilience of U.S. democracy. A similar campaign during the 2016 U.K. Brexit referendum supported the campaign to leave the European Union. This paper assesses the policy formation process in the United States and United Kingdom in response to 2016 Russian disinformation using a bureaucratic politics framework. Focusing on the role of sub-state organizations in policy formation, the paper identifies challenges to establishing an effective policy response to foreign disinformation, particularly in the emergence of leadership and bargaining, and the impact of centralization of power in the U.K. Discussion of the shift in foreign policy context since the end of the Cold War, which provided a greater level of foreign policy consensus, as well as specific challenges presented by the cyber deterrence context, supplements insights from bureaucratic politics. Despite different governmental structures, both countries struggled to achieve collaborative and systematic policy processes; analysis reveals the lack of leadership and coordination in the United States and both the lack of compromise and effective fulfillment of responsibilities in the United Kingdom. Particular challenges of democracies responding to exercises of sharp power by authoritarian governments point to the need for a wholistic response from public and private entities and better definition of intelligence agencies’ responsibility to election security in the U.K.
The Modulatory Role of the Hyperpolarization-Activated Inward Current and Adenosine A1 - Dopamine D1 Receptor Heteromers on Spinal Locomotor Activity Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Andrew Moore
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Ultrasonic vocalization playback as an affective assay at both neural and behavioral levels: Implications for understanding adversity-induced emotional dysfunction Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Sydney M Bonauto
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community