In the South China Sea, has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Form been effective in crisis management since its inception in 1993? If so, to what extent? It is the only current multilateral framework for potential conflict management in the South China Sea disputes particularly with regard to island settlements between China and other claimant nations including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan. This research will shed light on how effective this multilateral framework has progressed since its creation in achieving its mission of resolving regional conflicts and the implications this has for US foreign policy. The research relies on current scholarship and on expert interviews. The ASEAN Regional Forum is a work-in-progress in resolving regional conflict, especially island disputes in the South China Sea. Its operating emphasis on consensus-building and the ‘ASEAN Way’ assures that both weak and powerful nations alike are involved. Yet, differences between rival nations threaten to dismantle the positive influence it has potential to wield in the region. This has strong implications for the US ‘Asia Pivot’ and the continued influence of the US in the East Asia region as the forum is valuable in articulating US interests including adherence to international law under The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

In 1996, a scandal involving members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus triggered the United States Senate to launch an investigation. In the scandal, Asian American campaign contributors were accused of funneling foreign Chinese funds in an attempt to hijack U.S. politics. The Senate investigation concluded that several Asian Americans were committing espionage by colluding with the Chinese government as political spies. This research asks how the U.S. Senate concluded that these Asian American contributors were spies. My findings suggest that the Senate’s conclusion rested not on sound inculpatory evidence but a historic racial logic of Asian Americans as politically suspect. I argue that the “model minority” stereotype centrally informed the Senate’s racial logic of Asian Americans in their investigation. In particular, the model minority stereotype celebrates the industrious work ethic of Asians while condemning political participation as a dangerous behavior. My research thus explores the informative role of the model minority stereotype in the U.S. Senate’s investigation of the 1996 CAPAC’s scandal. My findings imply that the model minority stereotype ideologically disenfranchises Asian Americans within the American polity. In effect, Asian Americans are disproportionally scrutinized in the political arena through a racial logic that casts them as foreign, suspicious, and disloyal to the polity.

Traditional political participation is at an unprecedented low among American youth. But while youth voter turnout is suffering, alternative forms of political participation are on the rise—namely, political consumerism, the intentional buying or abstention from buying specific products for political, social, or ethical purposes. This research seeks to understand the motivating factors behind the youth shift toward political consumerism as a means of representation. Three possible explanations were tested: First, youth choose political consumerism because they receive immediate material benefits from the products and services they buy, a feature absent from traditional participation. Second, youth choose political consumerism because of convenience; they have too many other pressing priorities to engage in more time-consuming forms of participation like voting or writing to officials. Third, youth choose political consumerism because they prefer corporate actors over political actors to enact change because the latter has failed them. In order to test these explanations, I conducted a public opinion survey, interviews with leaders in consumer advocacy, and research on the evolution of youth political participation and consumerism. The analysis finds that the second hypothesis has the most explanatory power. Youth recognize that corporate actors have significant influence on political outcomes, but usually opt for convenience when it comes to making politically-informed consumer decisions. If sufficient information about the political context of products and services is given to youth, it affects their decision-making process. A surge in political consumerism among youth can be consequently be explained by a surge in available information due to the Internet and social media platforms. The results of this research demonstrate the importance of information framing in the digital age, efforts by companies to appeal to young consumers on a political level, and the relationship between political knowledge and participation.

This research project explores disenfranchisement in America. Today, citizens living in unincorporated US territories (Guam, Northern Marianas Islands, US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa) are considered “second-class Americans,” having all other fundamental rights as mainland Americans do except federal voting rights. To help understand this phenomenon, this project examines the circumstances under which the political elite had extended suffrage or had established additional protection for minority voters since the early 1900s. Since then, women, African-Americans, 18-year olds, and citizens living in US territories have used different movement techniques and strategies to achieve suffrage, such as establishing conventions, organizing violent and nonviolent protests, and committing to quid pro quo services like serving the country in times of war. This closes in on a theory where political will—defined as the mobilization of mass movements to gain the right to vote—helps explain why Congress votes to extend suffrage to previous disenfranchised groups. This variable is operationalized by counting the number of organized events and the number of people in the group lobbying for suffrage during the year prior to a congressional vote on the floor. I hypothesized that the greater amount of political will present in a year, the more bills will be introduced in Congress. The time frame of data used in this project is from 1910-2015. This presentation can serve as a guide to explain when suffrage extension happens, and what disenfranchised groups did to get what they wanted from big government.

Since 1904, when the first voter-sponsored bill appeared on the ballot in Oregon, the frequency of initiatives and referenda has greatly increased, most especially over the last 40 years. While there were only 98 bills voted on nation-wide between 1960 and 1969, over 370 initiatives made it onto state ballots between 2000 and 2009. My research examines several underlying causes of this rising frequency in order to help understand trends in the increasing use of direct democracy. Previous work has focused on the increased participation by moneyed interest groups who use paid petitioners to circulate legislation; however, I am proposing a new, original theory which connects political alienation and dissatisfaction of representative democracy to increased participation in direct democracy. I have built an original dataset which will combine measures of polarization within government, public trust in Congress, and the number of initiatives and referenda throughout the multiple states in which they appear. With this dataset, I ran multivariate regressions to analyze statistical significance in the relationships between these variables. I expect to find that as political polarization in Congress increases, people will lose faith in traditional modes of representative democracy. I further hypothesize that as trust in government decreases, people are more likely to turn to modes of direct democracy to instill change in government, therefore increasing participation in the initiative and referendum process. If my hypothesis is correct, my research would serve as a tool for political scientists to use to predict the rise or fall in the political activity of voters, the implications of which could influence timing of legislation, outreach efforts, and a number of other participation-related issues.

Consistently, young adults (ages 18-24), hereafter referred to as "youth" are slow to get involved in the governance process. Rates of engagement in the political and governance process are consistently lower among those with intersections of marginality (e.g. race, gender, level of education, etc.). Two components which impact a young person's activism and connection to civic and political engagement are political education and socialization. How a person is introduced to the political process and how their interactions with their community had helped to instill, or failed to instill, notions of democratic citizenry. The way a person is taught to engage with the political process has significant implications for an engaged citizenry, and there are educational and social systems which work to promote or discourage such democratic involvement, among marginalized groups. This research provides statistical comparisons which allow for quantitative analysis of participation rates among diverse youth, and addtionally provides a qualitative examination of constructions of citizenship, socialization and education, which might discourage participation in traditional democracy for youth and other marginalized groups. Variations in how educational institutions teach about youth political engagement impact how involved they become in their own governance. Pedagogy and constructions of citizenship play a major role in not only whether youth engage, but how they engage in the political process. While shifts in socialization may not be achievable through public policy solutions, implications of this research could offer alternatives and solutions to the problem of youth political participation, to both existing educational institutions and policymakers, when considering youth engagement in the governance process.

Seattle has a well-established reputation as a progressive haven, and yet significant problems surround certain issues such as racial justice. One of the most striking examples is the current segregation of Seattle public schools; the north end schools are predominately White and the South End schools are predominately Black and Asian. My overall research question is: why is Seattle still unable to integrate its schools in 2016? To explore this question I am researching the mandatory bussing program that the city of Seattle instituted in 1977 that desegregated the schools within two years. This program was fiercely opposed by some community members, predominately White, at the time, and the main anti-bussing organizing group was the Citizens for Voluntary Integration Committee (CiVIC). I am using CiVIC as a case study and asking how it fits into a larger pattern of "Seattle racial backlash," a phenomenon that arises whenever Seattle tries to advance racial justice issues and involves predominately White community members pushing back against changes to the status quo. My qualitative methodology is primarily based on interviews with people that were involved with both sides of the bussing issue. My research thus far suggests that the ultimate downfall of bussing in Seattle was that the plan failed to attack the root of the school segregation problem, which was, and remains, housing segregation.

On a global scale, Australia attracts a minimal amount of asylum seekers but has adopted one of the strictest policies in dealing with these individuals. This paper will attempt to explain the two policies Australia has adopted for dealing with different asylum seekers based on arrival methods. It will draw upon historical and current asylum seeker policy documents and statistics published by the Australian government. It will also seek to analyze why Australia has adopted two separate policies for treating these two categories of asylum seekers. It will utilize scholarly articles and journals, as well as news articles to evaluate these two policies and why Australia has chosen to embrace this treatment.

This project examines local government effort to combat persistent racial residential segregation. Although U.S. cities today are more diverse than ever, many continue to be characterized by black-white segregation. Because many local governments today do not implement a sufficient variety of policy solutions to address segregation, an important question arises: What might deter local government implementation of these policies? I hypothesize that fragmentation, a result of the fracturing of metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) into many smaller local governments, can explain this inaction. Because metropolitan areas vary regarding their level of fragmentation and therefore the political and economic competitiveness local governments face, local governments in more fragmented MSA’s will prioritize policy issues that will allow them to compete. In order to test my hypothesis, I use statistical methods to analyze local government effort to combat segregation for three U.S. cities, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Atlanta between 2011-2014. I draw on original research identifying key legislation and newspaper articles addressing residential segregation and examine the role of institutional fragmentation in each context, controlling for other factors. This project will offer a new understanding of local governments’ role in addressing a crucial aspect of racial inequality by revealing one reason many local governments do not treat racial residential segregation as an immediate issue to be addressed through public policy.

Over the last 10 years, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has gradually begun to decline for the first time in decades. While previous research has looked at this change in the rate of undocumented immigrants across the country as a whole, there is very little information on how or why these trends have changed within and across states. Yet, some states are losing more undocumented immigrants than the nation as a whole, and some states still have a growing undocumented immigrant population. Why has the rate of undocumented immigration dropped so much more in particular states since the mid 2000s, when compared to the national rates since the same year? To answer this question, I employ statistical methods and examine the relationship between the number of undocumented immigrants within a state, as well as state immigration legislation. I expect that the number and severity of state laws regulating or deterring undocumented immigrants corresponds with a more significant drop in the number of undocumented immigrants.

In October 2015, a Yale administrator named Erika Christakis sent a school-wide email in defense of culturally appropriative Halloween outfits. This email broke the tension that had been accumulating around race issues at Yale, a historically all-white all-male institution, where the specter of racism still exists in instances of social and institutional discrimination. Meanwhile, at University of Missouri and across the country, student protesters received nation-wide media attention for demanding institutional support for students of color, and speaking out against race-related campus violence. My paper analyses media and popular reaction to these protests by examining articles, blog posts, and YouTube commentary that appeared in their wake. I show how criticisms of the protesters’ respectability are often couched in racist, sexist, and ageist rhetoric. Additionally, I add to Michelle Smith’s discourse on respectability politics by arguing that conservative media weaponizes the notion of “free speech” by propagating the false notion that freedom of speech shields an individual from criticism and personal consequences. I contend that the trend of dismissing safe spaces further marginalizes oppressed groups, as safe spaces often provide a forum for free speech that runs counter to popular opinion and, in particular, state rule. Ultimately, I conclude that there is no way to separate free speech from its uncivil form, as free speech is inherently subversive.