Bachelor of Arts, Marietta College, 2009, History, Philosophy, Political Science and Religion

This study examines the factors contributing to the success of democratization in terms of its consolidation and sustainability in post-communist countries including the influence of economic freedom, the external powers and the process of democratization. How those factors determine the democratization outcome, and how they interact with each other, is significant as it relates to political theories of democratization and potential democratization outside Eastern Europe. By studying two cases, Poland and Ukraine, the external powers and the process of democratization has demonstrated a great influence on the political development of these two countries.

Committee: Mark Schaefer PhD (Advisor); Mike Tager PhD (Advisor); Rees-Miller Janie PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

The study sought to ascertain whether introducing democracy has adversely impacted Indigenous cultural practices in Ghana or whether the path to democracy has enhanced, shaped, or strengthened aspects of the country's Indigenous culture. The study sheds some light on the realistic, symbolic, and pervasive threat(s) that transitional or Indigenous societies like Ghana undergoing the process of democratization face and must deal with. More specifically, the study provides some insights into how traditional societies, where Indigenous values and practices are held with some reverence and esteem, can be integrated into liberal democratic institutions to potentially ameliorate cultural tension and political discord that often accompanies the process of democratic and electoral transitions. The study also provides a rich context to explain and dispel some of the pernicious stereotypes and perceptions about countries that strive to build a suitable system of governance by combining aspects of their Indigenous culture and liberal democratic tenets. The primary scholarly contribution of the study is a greater understanding of how Indigenous cultural norms, as informal institutions, shape the trajectory and consolidation of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Committee: Daniel Ogbaharya PhD (Committee Chair); Chris Voparil PhD (Committee Member); Michael Simanga PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; African Studies; Alternative Dispute Resolution; Black History; Black Studies; Cultural Resources Management; Ethics; Ethnic Studies; Families and Family Life; Individual and Family Studies; Management; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Multicultural Education; Philosophy; Political Science; Public Policy; Regional Studies; Social Research; Soil Sciences

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Communication Studies

Digitalization becomes aggressively integrated into the policy agenda of modern nation-states arguably to accelerate their progress and impact democratization. Concurrently, digital surveillance is also growing worldwide. What happens to democracy when nation-states engage in such a paradoxical exercise of digitalization? This dissertation takes a fresh look at this problem in a transnational context and investigates the democratic implications of such digitalization practices. I examine the (un)changing development discourses within digital policy documents (N=41) and news articles (N=3,739) covering digitization in Bangladesh and Norway over 15 years (2003-2017). I specifically investigate the conceptual framing of three overarching elements of ICT4D — communication, technology, and development— using a new theoretical lens communication as critical freedom (CCF) that I propose uniting relevant works of Jurgen Habermas, Michell Foucault, and Amartya Sen. This inquiry explores how digital policy and news media discursively expand or limit democratization. An innovative mixed-method, computational-critical discourse analysis (C-CDA) is proposed and employed in doing the analysis, combining qualitative methods (i.e., critical discourse analysis) with computational techniques (i.e., LDA topic modeling). As the analyses suggest, Bangladesh and Norway advance a technocapital determinist logic of social change, which instrumentalizes “communication,” renders excessive agency to “technology,” and ultimately posits “development” as mere material progress. These nations' digital policy and news reports scrutinized in this study seem to have been shaped mainly by a transnational discourse of neoliberal globalization, making Bangladesh a digital proletariat and Norway a digital bourgeoisie in the spectrum of global development. Moreover, both nations are forging cybersecurity discourse as a new technique of power that legitimizes digital surveillance and control. Hence (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Srinivas Melkote Ph.D. (Advisor); Lara Lengel Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kei Nomaguchi Ph.D. (Other); Clayton Rosati Ph.D. (Committee Member); Syed Shahin Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, History

The Salvadoran Civil War of 1979-1992 transformed the nation's government from a military dictatorship into a liberal democracy. The United States was involved from the beginning to the end of the war, yet the superpower's role in the political outcome has been under-investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to examine how the presence of the United States in the conflict shaped its eventual outcome. It argues that the United States' main role was to serve as a bulwark for the formal institutions and processes of liberal democratic government against the furies unleashed by the civil war. Salvadoran politicians, activists, party members and voters worked within these institutions to reform the politics of the country. The U.S. policy that unfolded in El Salvador was itself a product of historical development. This dissertation therefore describes the historical antecedents of the policies of the three U.S. presidential administrations that engaged with the Salvadoran Civil War: those of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. These antecedents included the legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean Basin, the Cold War, and the rise of the human rights movement in U.S. politics. Furthermore, the Reagan and Bush administrations' El Salvador policy was the product of both administrations' interaction with a human rights constituency in the U.S. Congress.

Committee: Peter Hahn (Advisor); Stephanie Smith (Committee Member); Peter Mansoor (Committee Member); Joseph Parrott (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Political Science

Past literature in democratization, nationalism, and autocratic regime maintenance illustrate how education invites both risk and reward for autocratic states. Education is simultaneously linked with pro-democratic attitudes, political disengagement, and autocratic failure. At the same time, autocrats are predicted to be hesitant towards investing in disenfranchised populations. However, education has also been found to bolster national loyalty and identity, human capital, and long-term development. Nor is the real-world variation clear, autocratic states display significant variation in educational investment and attainment in addition to varied relationships between education and political outcomes. I argue that education can sustain or compromise autocratic stability depending on two factors: the ethnic composition of the state and the extent to which the state uses propaganda in schools. Education does not have a uniform effect. Education will not instill similarly pro-democratic attitudes or identity affiliations across a diverse population, even if the education “treatment” is constant. At the state level, similar educational policies and initiatives across autocratic states can have opposite outcomes, jeopardizing or strengthening autocratic stability. Similarly, at the individual level, increased education can lead to individuals becoming more or less attached to the national identity. My dissertation presents three papers to investigate the factors leading to differences in this real-world variation.

Committee: Jan Pierskalla PhD (Committee Chair); Amanda Robinson PhD (Committee Member); Sara Watson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Education; Education Policy; Political Science

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Arts and Sciences: Sociology

The role of the citizenry is often neglected in the literature about democratization but there is a growing scholarly attention – across the globe -- to the role of the citizenry in democratic development. This dissertation focuses on the democratic development in Argentinean and Turkish contexts with a specific emphasis on the role of citizenry in each case. Argentina and Turkey are two different social contexts – historically, regionally, culturally, etc. Yet, their political progress and civil-military relations show similarities. National militaries in each country have interrupted democratic order several times. This study examines the democratization efforts in each country after military rule. The research question -- `what defines the quality of a democracy during and after the period of transition of power from a military rule to a democratic one?' -- is designed to comprehend both militarization and democratization contexts from a comparative historical sociological perspective. The comparative historical sociological methodology of the study not only focuses on comparing two countries but also considers the comparison of past and present transformations of civil-military relations and democratic order in each country. The study concludes that the quality of a democracy depends on how successful three actors – namely citizenry, military, and political elites – are in establishing concordance on the quality of the democratic regime.

Committee: Steven Carlton-Ford Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Amy Lind Ph.D. (Committee Member); Annulla Linders Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Sociology

The goal of this dissertation is to analyze the links between democratic values, political trust, and protest participation, and the consequences of educational stratification of values, attitudes, and participation for democratization. I highlight in particular the concept of \textit{stratified modernity}, which refers to the differences in the adoption of modern values across social strata. Modernity is stratified because of the differential exposure to education systems, which are a medium of spreading modern values and orientations, as well as expectations regarding legitimate political rule, across the globe. By emphasizing the role of education in shaping within-country distributions of values, and pointing to the consequences of the social stratification of protest participation, this dissertation provides new insight into the mechanisms through which modernization improves chances for democratization. In the first empirical chapter (Chapter 4), I examine determinants of democratic values and political trust. Together these analyses test the stratified modernity thesis. I find that education is positively associated with democratic values regardless of the level of democracy of the country, and that political trust reflects the level of congruence between individual democratic values and the values represented by the political regime. In democratic countries, more educated individuals tend to have more political trust than less educated individuals, and the opposite is true for non-democracies. The second empirical chapter (Chapter 5) focuses on participation in demonstrations, and finds that participation rates tend to be highest in countries with high levels of political trust and high quality of democracy, and low political trust combined with low levels of democracy, pointing to the differential effects of political trust on demonstration rates across regimes types. Further, I find that individuals with low levels of political trust are more likely to (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kazimierz Slomczynski (Advisor); Craig Jenkins (Advisor); Vincent Roscigno (Committee Member); Edward Crenshaw (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

BA, Oberlin College, 2017, Politics

This thesis examines U.S. democratization efforts in Haiti and Iraq: two instances where the United States used military intervention in its failed attempts to export democracy around the world. If the United States is to continue pursuing democratization, it is necessary for policy makers to modify their practices, as recent attempts have only resulted in failure. Thus, the study of how and why democratization attempts fail is critical in order to minimize the damage created by disastrous attempts at exporting democracy. So, in the Clinton and Bush administration's attempts to implement democracy in Haiti and Iraq, where did the democracy planners go wrong, and how did these mistakes further each country's failure to democratize successfully? Through a careful examination and analysis of the United States' democratization efforts in Haiti and Iraq, this thesis demonstrates that due to an inadequate understanding of universal characteristics of democracy, poor assessments of each country's historical, political, and social contexts as they relate to internal characteristics associated with democracy, and various obstacles to democracy, the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to successfully democratize Haiti and Iraq. Furthermore, these two cases suggest that the very practice of externally motivated and militarily enforced democratization cannot lead to a sustainable democracy.

Committee: Eve Nan Sandberg (Advisor) Subjects: International Relations

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Political Science

Once a frontrunner of democratization in post-communist Europe, Hungary is backsliding. The 2010 election left the country with an unstable and polarized party system, and the population is quiescent as the Fidesz government dismantles the institutions of liberal democracy. Indeed, support for the very idea of democracy is weaker today in Hungary than it was at the transition. Democracy, it turns out, is not seen to be the only game in town for many Hungarians. Why would experience with democracy fail to yield support for the ideals and norms of democracy? Why do party systems in the young democracies of East Central Europe (ECE) remain highly volatile? Answering these questions requires attending to voters' experiences with and feelings towards their democratic systems. This dissertation examines the emotional dynamics of political behavior in Hungary, revealing high levels of popular disgust towards politics driving an active rejection of competitive multiparty politics and engendering democratic backsliding. I show that policy constraint from the European Union limits the ability of mainstream political parties in post-communist Europe to differentiate themselves from one another concerning many of the key policy issues most important to voters. This leaves elites with little maneuvering room to make programmatic appeals, increasing the likelihood that they will leverage the power of populist outrage –-- a discourse of alleging real or imagined moral transgressions by political competitors –-- to differentiate themselves from competitors and inspire political action. Where this vitriolic discourse elicits anger it causes participation in the form of protest voting, thus explaining persistent party system volatility. However, this constant stream of vitriol often elicits disgust. This powerful emotion causes a visceral avoidance of politics that undermines the accountability mechanism at the heart of democracy and explains rising disaffection from democrac (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Goldie Shabad PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Irfan Nooruddin PhD (Committee Chair); Anthony Mughan PhD (Committee Member); Kathleen McGraw PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Slavic and East European Studies

Originating in response to Polish partitions of the 18th century, the concept of Polish exceptionalism asserts the cultural uniqueness and superiority of the Polish nation. As the 19th century progressed, this belief in a cultural exceptionalism quickly became gendered with figure of the Matka Polka (Polish Mother). As men went off to battle for national freedom, the Matka Polka became the symbolic protector of the hearth and the reproducer of national culture. Deeply associated with the domestic sphere and essentialized understandings of gender, the Matka Polka proved to be a strong cultural emblem of patriotic motherhood and duty. The deeply entrenched belief in Polish exceptionalism did not end with the partition era, but persevered, from state socialism to membership in the EU. Closely tied to reproduction, the Catholic Church, and cultural conceptions of femininity, exceptionalist appeals to the Matka Polka remain a central component of Polish identity formation. The cultural currency of Polish exceptionalism carried into the abortion debate of the early postsocialist era. Resulting in the revocation of women's reproductive rights just as the nation gained its independence. The push for restrictive abortion legislation continued in the accession toward EU membership, pulling from nostalgic depictions of the national past in the formulation of a uniquely Polish identity within the shifting political environment. In this thesis, I will argue that appeals to exceptionalism and the political mobilization of the Matka Polka in the postsocialist abortion debate drew on invented traditions of the past and ultimately resulted in a limited, restrictive definition of what it means to be a woman citizen in Poland.

Committee: Jennifer Suchland (Advisor); Jessie Labov (Committee Member); Jill Bystydzienski (Committee Member) Subjects: East European Studies; Gender; History; Slavic Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2011, International and Comparative Politics

Some theorists have found a positive correlation between increased drug prohibition enforcement and a rise in violence. These studies focus on the United States and Colombia, arguing that prohibition amplifies violence, rather than decreasing it. Much like the United States and Colombia earlier in their histories, Mexico has recently experienced an escalation in violence. Since beginning a democratic transition in 2000, the Mexican government has intensified a war on drugs by strengthening the rule of law, battling corruption, and cooperating with the United States' drug war. This study, using a congruence method with process-tracing, will analyze the Mexican case in depth, with the goal of determining whether increased drug prohibition enforcement has escalated drug-related violence in Mexico, and what effect the violence has on the legitimacy of democracy itself in Mexico.

Committee: December Green PhD (Committee Chair); Nancy Broughton PhD (Committee Member); Laura Luehrmann PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations; Latin American Studies; Political Science

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2000, Arts and Sciences : Political Science

Using Jordan and Egypt as case studies, this dissertation develops a model for understanding democratization in the Middle East and its impact on foreign policy. In contrast to studies emphasizing bottom-up transitions, democratization in the Middle East should be understood as a strategy designed to secure the position and power of the ruling regime-a strategy I term democratization-as-control. Although there were variations, the basic features of this strategy included the controlled re-legalization of political parties, competitive elections to dependent parliaments, limited liberalization of the press, and attempts at explicit agreements (in the form of national pacts or dialogues) in which greater political freedoms were exchanged for acceptance of the regime's right to rule. These tactics funneled political contestation into regime-dominated forums and created strong incentives for the wide range of political contenders to play by the regime-defined rules of the game. In turn, Democratization-as-control had significant consequences for foreign policy. The predominant models of realism and leadership personality do not capture the intensely political nature of foreign policy in the Middle East. Weak political institutionalization, the permeability of Arab states to transnational ideologies, and tenuous domestic legitimacy meant that leaders faced multifaceted threats to their continued rule. The domestic vulnerability of Arab regimes constrained their decision-making latitude and compelled them to seek support through nationalistic foreign policies. By enhancing regime security, democratization-as-control allowed leaders to insulate foreign policy decision making from domestic constraints. A particular focus of this study is on the domestic politics of war and peace in the region. This research offers an important corrective to the current literature, which posits that democratization increases the likelihood of war. The impact of democratization on war and pea (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Harknett (Advisor) Subjects:

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Political Science

This dissertation examines the relationship between foreign military intervention and democratization. It focuses on the conditions that contribute to the democratization of the occupied countries and looks at the cases of Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea. These countries are similar in that they all experienced military foreign intervention, have been non-democratic regimes prior to military intervention and became democracies after the intervention. The analysis aims to shed light on what conditions were conducive or not to the democratization of Germany, Japan, and Italy and South Korea. Using the inductive research method and secondary data analysis this work finds that while military intervention in Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea was an important factor in deposing non-democratic regimes, it was not the only important and conducive condition to democratization. While the goals, policies and commitment of the occupying power were important to democratization, the changes in political culture of the occupied elites and population and the character of security environment were also two other important conditions. The comparative analysis shows that when the goals, policies and commitment of the occupying force were oriented toward democratization, when the occupied elites and population moved toward a political culture displaying democratic patterns and behavior, and when the security environment was not characterized by wars or where the security threat was high but addressed by the external power, these conditions were both conducive for and contributed to democratization. The analysis finds these conditions in the cases of Germany, Japan and Italy but not in South Korea. The absence of such conditions in the case of South Korea may explain why South Korea did not democratize under the US military occupation and when it occurred, it took more than four decades.

Committee: Dinshaw Mistry PhD (Committee Chair); Richard Harknett PhD (Committee Member); Laura Jenkins PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2012, Political Science

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolutions in early 2011, academics and political pundits alike have attempted to discern the causes and factors that led to the success (or failures) of these movements. While each country has faced its own specific set of political, social, and economic problems, a common thread that academic observers have detected is the increasingly common use of social media for purposes of revolution. While social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter undoubtedly played a role in the numerous revolts in the Middle East, there are widely varying opinions on the importance of that role to the success of the revolutions. Many Middle Eastern experts protested that, while social media had facilitated the uprisings, the impetus for these events were varied and complicated. In their eyes, the underlying factors unique to each nation were the true causes of successful revolution, even if Facebook and Twitter assisted the social movements. To others, however, the novelty of social media was an alluring news story and a potential cause of the MidEast revolutions. Pundits and news anchors drew on Facebook and Twitter accounts of citizens on the ground to illustrate the dire situation of the protestors. Even politicians and other decision makers relied heavily on social media, as state controlled conventional media ignored the actual conditions on the ground.

Committee: Maria Fanis (Advisor); James Moshter (Other) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Political Science

Islamist political parties – once marked by their uniformity across countries in their oppositional and non-democratic platforms, and the goal of Islamizing state and society – face challenges leading to the emergence of a qualitatively-different and more moderate kind of political party: the Muslim democratic party (MDP). My dissertation answers two interrelated questions on the rise of MDPs: What explains the emergence of Muslim Democratic Parties recently, and why have these parties been successful in some cases, but not others? I theorize that the way in which a country liberalizes its economy shapes the social foundations of Islamic party politics. MDPs emerge and find societal support when Islamic peripheral businesses find a chance to compete economically – a feature of competitive liberalization –, and peripheral masses experience an improved income. In contrast, when economic liberalization's reach remains limited because of its uncompetitive character and the perpetuation of pre-liberalization economic structure, societal support for MDPs fails to materialize, leaving Islamist parties' societal support intact. I call this process crony liberalization. I test my theory in a three-country, structured comparison of Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. These countries were selected in order to maximize the variance I observe on my key causal variables while holding other factors constant following the most similar systems design. In Egypt, I analyze the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) and the Wasat Party as cases of Islamist and Muslim democratic parties, respectively. In Morocco, the Party for Justice and Development represents the Muslim democratic platform whereas Al-Adl wal-Ihsan functions as the Islamist opposition party. Finally, in Turkey the Justice and Development Party is the Muslim democratic case compared with the National Outlook Movement's current political representative, the Felicity Party.

Committee: Sarah Brooks PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Amaney Jamal PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Marcus Kurtz PhD (Committee Member); Irfan Nooruddin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Sociology

The study of political change, and in particular the causes of democratization, has a long history within the social sciences among cross-national comparative scholars interested in international development. Most often political change has been explained in terms of its connection to a nation's level of economic development. Although the exact nature of the development/democracy relationship has been a point of disagreement among social scientists, the premise that there is a relationship is widely accepted, debated and tested. Early explanations for the development/democracy relationship focused on a broad set of explanatory variables (Lipset 1959). Since then most cross-national development scholars have reduced the concept of “development” to mean economic development—at least in terms of their empirical measures. In simplifying this concept, the role of other contributing factors which were once understood to be central components of the overall development process has been largely ignored and side-lined in empirical analyses. This has been especially true of urban population. In light of the above, this dissertation is aimed at challenging the notion that the relationship between development and democracy should be understood only as a relationship between level of economic development and democratization. Even more broadly, this dissertation challenges the notion that economic factors are the most important for understanding macro political change. Indeed, while economic factors are certainly a central contributing factor for political change, urban populations and their social contexts are equally important since it is urban dwellers who are predominately engaged in modern exchanges rather than abstract “markets.” Thus, this dissertation explores the role urban populations and their contexts within nation-states play in eliciting political change. In particular, it focuses on the dimensions of urban population within nation-states including; the absolute siz (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Edward M. Crenshaw (Committee Chair); J. Craig Jenkins (Committee Member); Kazimierz Slomczynski (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Political Science

While the empirical correlation between fuel exports and authoritarianism has become conventional wisdom, influencing academics and policy-makers, the answer for why fuel exporters tend to be more authoritarian has remained elusive. This study proposes a model based on the increased importance of government decision-making in determining the distribution of economic goods in societies that are dependent on fuel exports. These increases in government distribution, as a result of fuel development revenues primarily accruing to the state, take on three forms: direct payments and subsidization, government ownership of industry, and a more arbitrary enforcement of property rights. Countries are affected differently, dependent upon both their level of dependence and the size of revenues garnered from fuel exports. In countries with high per-capita fuel export income, fuel revenues are stabilizing for authoritarian regimes, as they provide the resources for maintaining support. In countries which are heavily dependent on fuel exports in the economy, but with a relatively low per-capita income from those exports, the increased importance of distribution in the economy results in greater instability in democratic regimes, as it increases the temptation for both government and opposition parties to lock in their share of relatively scarce resources through exclusionary politics.Utilizing a dataset covering 166 countries from 1965 to 2001, I demonstrate that there is a general correlation between fuel export dependence and the importance of government distribution. I also find that income from fuel exports is generally stabilizing, especially for authoritarian regimes, while fuel dependence is destabilizing, especially for democracies. In addition, the same patterns of accumulation that fuel government distribution and resource competition, also promote incentives towards under-provision of public goods. This study demonstrates that fuel exporting states tend to have worse soc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marcus Kurtz PhD (Committee Chair); Timothy Frye PhD (Committee Member); Janet Box-Steffensmeier PhD (Committee Member); Richard Gunther PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Sociology

The second half of the twentieth century saw cyclical increases in the number of democracies worldwide as well as a rise in the number and intensity of ethnic rebellions. Some researchers link these two trends, suggesting that democratization unleashes ethnic tensions and gives rise to ethnic-based rebellion. Another proposition in the literature is that ethnic rebellion impedes democratization and may lead to democratic reversal. This dissertation examines the conditions under which democracy and democratization affect ethnic rebellion and the conditions under which ethnic rebellion affects democratization. In examining ethnic rebellion, I employ a variety of theories: elite persuasion, political opportunity, competition, modernization, and internal colonialism theories are all tested for their utility in explaining cross-national variation in ethnic rebellion. I find that democratization is associated with future reductions in ethnic rebellion, which supports political opportunity theory. I also find an interaction between the level of development and the level of democracy in affecting ethnic rebellion. In more developed countries, the level of democracy is positively associated with rebellion. In less developed countries, the level of democracy is negatively associated with ethnic rebellion. In examining the effect of ethnic rebellion on democracy, I find that ethnic rebellion has a negative effect on democracy and that the effect varies by the level of development a country has achieved. Among the most developed countries, the relationship is strongest, then as the level of development declines, the effect of rebellion on democracy also declines. Ethnic rebellion has the greatest negative impact on democracy in the most complex, interdependent societies. This work also contributes to the long-standing debate over the effect of economic inequality on democracy. I find that inequality negatively affects political rights but has no effects on civil liberties.

Committee: Edward Crenshaw (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Political Science

My dissertation focuses on the activities of the human rights organization LBH (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum, the Legal Aid Institute) in Indonesia as a case study to assess its role in the rise of civil society, and possibly democratization. I argue that the academic foci on democratization so far have been upon, in general, the importance of large macro-structures and political elites. Although the macro-level variables and political elites are important, there are critical links between the macro-level variables and micro-level variables, which have been left unexamined. In this dissertation, I propose a new approach to understanding the property and the dynamic workings of civil society by examining the state-society relations in authoritarian Indonesia between 1990 and 1998. I first examine both conservative and reformist elites in the Indonesian government, and how they find themselves in conflict, which creates a split within the state. Second, I argue that the split which took place in the Indonesian government has been occupied by the activities of LBH, both institutionally through the court system and functionally through personal networking. Once the penetration of human rights organizations into the state is successful, the state is no longer the same as the pre-penetration state and this new condition of the state sets an arena for another round of conflict between reformists and conservatives within the state. Through this series of conflict-driven cycles of change, the state and the society interact with each other, thereby creating and enlarging a relatively autonomous civil society. I endorse the view that human rights organizations and their activities are an important part of the development and maintenance of civil society, thus it is a vital element for democratic capacity and the possibility for democratization. I advocate the view that nonviolent actions, which are generated through social movements, provide a political arena in which democratic prin (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: R. Liddle (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2005, Political Science (Arts and Sciences)

The goal of this thesis is to determine the likelihood of Iraq developing into a democracy in the near future. Given the heightened level of U.S. involvement in Iraq since March 2003, the question of whether or not democracy in the country is possible has risen in significance. This study differs from more traditional democratization studies because it focuses on the international level of analysis rather than the state level. Due to U.S. involvement in the democratization process, the argument is presented that U.S. actions are more important in the initial stages than state level issues such as constitutional engineering. The results of this study find that democracy in Iraq will initially depend on actions taken by the United States, and that these actions will have a greater effect on Iraq's development than actions taken at the state level.

Committee: Barry Tadlock (Advisor) Subjects: