Does gubernatorial leadership matter? Declining revenues associated with the great recession encourage state governments to use their limited resources more efficiently. However, elected officials will often disagree about priorities, which can make enacting necessary reforms difficult. The goal of this research is to investigate whether state variations in gubernatorial powers impact the ability of governors to respond to important challenges, such as the effects of the great recession. I study fifty states from 1960 to 2012, and ask whether unified government versus divided government, the strength of the governor’s veto power and the strength of the governor’s budget powers is related to a state’s economic performance. Controlling for other factors, I expect to find that states where governors have more veto and budget power, and where the government is unified under same party also tend to have lower unemployment rates. By improving our understanding of the relationship between governors and state economic performance, this study may also shed light on how national reforms strengthening the executive powers might impact presidential economic performance.

America has become a world leader in medical research because of the achievements in research and technology made by pioneering physicians in various specialist medical fields. In America, specialist physicians have come to dominate the physician population, more than in other developed nations. For government health insurance programs such as Medicare, specialist physicians already receive substantially higher reimbursements than primary care physicians, namely because of the higher costs of running their practice, in addition to complex and risky nature of their field of medicine. Medicare calculates reimbursements based on the costs, skills and liability of a physician's practice at the same rate throughout the country. However, Medicare provides for regional adjustments of these costs through the Geographic Practice Cost Index. I hypothesize that the geographic index amplifies the difference in how much specialist physicians make compared with their primary care counterparts. As the index increases in value, the compensation gap between the two groups widens, providing additional incentives for specialists to practice in areas where the geographic index is high. Using physician population statistics and the Geographic Practice Cost Index, I ask whether the income advantage of specialty physicians where the index is high leads to an undersupply of primary care physicians compared to other areas.

In Africa, emergency humanitarian relief operations, in response to ongoing conflict and natural disasters, continue to struggle with violent, targeted attacks on humanitarian workers, aid supplies and refugees. While food aid plays an important role in addressing food shortages, previous studies suggest that food aid can contribute to the spread of civil conflicts under certain conditions. The purpose of this study is to examine the possibility that certain levels of food aid could exacerbate political violence against refugees in Africa because armed groups are likely to be motivated to prevent food aid distribution to an opponent refugee population, and to achieve material gain. To evaluate this claim, I analyze the relationship between three different types of food aid and delivery methods reported in the World Food Programme between 1988 and 1998, and data on affected refugee population by political violence against refugees in African countries. Food aid, defined as emergency food aid, programme food aid and project food aid, is delivered through direct transfer, local purchase and triangular purchase. In this study, the basic conditions of food aid consist of all commodities and all donor countries. There are fifty-three African countries that reported the amount of food aid they received, and twenty-six African countries that reported the number of refugees affected by political violence during the years of study. Based on the available data, I create several regression models that show the effects of each food aid and delivery method on rate of violence. I expect that emergency food aid and direct transfer have a strong positive correlation with violence involving refugees because they are directly delivered to targeted refugees who are at risk for insurgent attack.

Since gaining the right to vote, women’s influence in the political sphere has been on the rise. While voters have started to embrace women as political leaders, research done by Huddy and Terkildsen on gender stereotypes and their effects on candidates finds that female leaders are not given the same respect as male leaders when it comes to military and police issues. Their research also finds that the inverse is true; male leaders are not perceived to have the same competence as female leaders on social welfare issues such as health care and family support programs. I will investigate this question of gender issue ownership by examining the impact of gender on gubernatorial power in 50 states over ten years. I will compare the changes in state spending across policy areas. I hypothesize that, other things equal, a change in the gender of the governor will predict changes in program spending across policy areas. I expect that governors who are perceived to be more competent in a specific policy area will have a greater effect on the spending in that area and therefore that a change in gender of the governor will predict a change in spending.

My research examines the increasing trend in the illicit use of prescription stimulants such as Adderall, Ritalin and Vyvanse among college students in the last 10 years and seeks to provide means to evaluate the phenomenon. One of the objectives of this study is to identify one of the four analytical perspectives in drug policy analysis (social deviance, rational choice, constructivism and realism) that best explains the pattern that is heavily featured in the literature view. Prior researches indicate 3 main positive indicators among the most common abusers: gender, ethnicity and membership in the Greek system. The constructivist approach, after careful consideration, appears to be most appropriate to further dissect the phenomenon. The approach suggests that individual behavior is fundamentally influenced by socially constructed norms. If individual behavior is indeed a product of social constructed norms, then one should hypothesize on the shift in value structures in the last decades that would have lend itself to the phenomenon. The findings from this paper would have multiple implications to policymakers as it was estimated that the number of people abusing amphetamine-type stimulants might soon exceed the number of people abusing opiates or cocaine combined. The methodology in consideration for this research is by utilizing longitudinal methods to compare panel data that is available through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, The System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE) database, Monitoring the Future study by the University of Michigan, The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), etc. With the data, I intend to construct an econometric model (difference in difference study or linear regression model) to outline the determinants among the samples and pinpoint the factors that are statistically significant in order to verify my hypothesis.

Among the limited powers that the U.S. Constitution grants to Congress, the power to regulate commerce among the states is one of the most important. Over the past one hundred years, Congress has sought to use this power to pass a wider and wider range of legislation, from labor laws to drug laws. The members of the Supreme Court have had to use the power of judicial review to determine the limits of the commerce power, but have disagreed about where to place them. The two major approaches to judicial review in commerce clause cases came to a head in United States v. Lopez (1995), in which the Court overturned a law on Commerce Clause grounds for the first time since the New Deal era. Through an examination of all six opinions written for this case, I argue that those of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Kennedy respond to the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional approaches to judicial review. In doing so, Rehnquist and Kennedy’s opinions are the only ones to take on the task of judicial review as it was originally envisioned in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Earmark spending has proven to be a popular political tool for members of Congress because it allows them to claim credit for a concrete economic benefit for their districts. I ask whether expectations of political benefits similarly influence large-scale stimulus spending allocations and, more importantly, whether these allocations have political benefits for the incumbent president. This research project examines the link between federal spending and shifts in election outcomes. It asks whether spending in the stimulus package of 2009 substantively influenced President Obama’s share of the popular vote in 2012. Other things equal, did competitive regions of the nation receive disproportionately more spending, and was that spending associated with increased vote shares for the incumbent president between 2008 and 2012? To answer these questions I examine government spending and popular vote shares in over 3,000 counties from 2008 to 2012. I also control for underlying social and economic issues by county, such as foreclosure and unemployment rates. Finally, I control for other political influences on stimulus spending, including whether certain counties had representatives in powerful congressional roles. Overall, this study will promote understanding of the political implications of large-scale federal spending. It will also shed light on the political dynamics of “swing counties” and whether stimulus spending is a useful political tool for winning these counties.

Since the development of the Drug Recognition Expert program in the 1970s, police officers are trained to recognize impairments and have the expertise to identify these influential drugs opposed to, or along with alcohol. This research is a part of an ongoing partnership between the Washington State University Division of Governmental Studies and Services and Washington State’s DRE program. The goal of the work entails determining whether the current evaluation standards set forth by the Washington State Patrol are sufficiently strict and assessing the accuracy of the DRE officers’ assessments of impaired drivers. The analysis will be based on the coding and digitization of all 5000+ DRE assessments done over the period 2006 to 2010 (5 years) and will include the identification of Type I errors (failure to detect) and Type II errors (false attention) as determined by toxicology reports on blood samples. An examination will be made to determine whether the Type I and Type II errors detected are related to driver racial and ethnic background, gender, and age. With this research an understanding of how law enforcement training on “drugged driving” can be improved in Washington State. Resolving DRE training issues will ensure that individuals’ constitutional rights are fully protected while law enforcement safeguards their ability to enforce the states driver safety laws in Washington.

Health care in third-world countries is often bleak when compared to most industrialized countries. In an effort to close this gap, students and health professionals have taken an interest in ameliorating global health issues by contributing donations, by volunteering, and by conducting research. Among these global health initiatives are short-term medical missions (STMM), which generally take place over 1-2 weeks and provide health-related services to individuals in developing countries. These services include eye examinations, wellness checks, over-the-counter medicine, and surgical operations. While on the surface these programs seem beneficial to both volunteers and to program recipients, we know little about the short- and long-term effects on the recipient community. What, then, are the impacts of overseas educational medical programs on the receiving community? And, more specifically, what program model best ensures positive results on-the-ground? My project evaluates four prominent STMM organizations based on each program's pre-departure training practices, the empowerment of local healthcare workers, the presence of organization-community partnerships, the comprehensiveness of care, and the program’s duration and impact. I conclude that most short-term medical missions are set to do more harm than good in the communities they serve. The primary issue is that these missions aim to temporarily fix the problem instead of preventing problems or establishing long-term, sustainable practices. Funding and volunteers should be utilized by the existing local health care sector to aid in the training and support of local health care workers.