In 2015, Seattle voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of Honest Elections Seattle. A citizen-led initiative that significantly changed the way Seattle City elections were financed. By providing every resident of Seattle with Democracy Vouchers, four $25 credits that can be given to participating candidates, these reforms have provided a new opportunity for citizens to become political donors and participate in a process that has been dominated by wealthier and more educated elites. My research analyzes every political contribution made in the 2017 and 2015 electoral cycles for two city council races that are city wide. I break down the city of Seattle into ZIP codes and compare political contributions from each ZIP code in 2015 and 2017. I then use the American Community Survey data to compare each ZIP code by mean income, percent of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher, and percentage of white residents. I predict that Seattle’s Democracy voucher program has significantly changed the profile of the average political donor in Seattle and made them more representative of the city as a whole. I hope to find that through publicly financing elections, we can create an electoral system where everyone can participate, not just the wealthy elite. This work is critical for evaluating the success of a multi-million dollar public program and whether it ought to be adopted in other cities throughout the United States.

Policies and practices rooted in the politics of “War and Drugs” and “Tough on Crime” have elevated the ever increasing power of federal prosecutors to an unprecedented height. Through punitive sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums, federal prosecutors have the ability to strong-arm plea deals and exert control over sentencing outcomes. Despite being a key element of the American criminal justice system, prosecutorial discretion remains an understudied topic in social science and law. Seeking to be hard on crime, the current Attorney General Jeff Sessions has rescinded the previous memos that discouraged federal prosecutors from seeking long mandatory minimums and enhancements, and encourage them to apply mandatory minimums whenever possible. The literature, however, has shown that prosecutors not only apply mandatory minimums selectively, but also at different rates across different legal contexts. Through interviews with federal defense attorneys in Seattle, this study attempts to investigate 1) the factors that federal prosecutors consider in making charging and sentencing relevant decisions, and 2) how these factors have been impacted by the 2017 Sessions Charging and Sentencing Memo in the legal context of the Western District of Washington. Findings will shed light on how national initiatives interact with local legal culture to influence punishment.

In early 2017, King County Executive Dow Constantine and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray approved a proposal to create the nation’s first supervised consumption sites, areas where drug users can safely consume illicit drugs while medically supervised and without fear of legal repercussions. The proposal planned for two supervised consumption sites, one located within the city of Seattle and the other in another region of King County. In response to these recommendations, opposition began to arise from members of the community, eventually growing into organized movements to ban supervised consumption sites, most notably King County Initiative 27. This study examines the various arguments that groups on either side of the debate are making in order to sway the public on the morally charged issue of supervised consumption sites. Primary data for this study was collected via interviews with key individuals on both sides of the issue. Additionally, this study analyzes community engagement efforts by both campaigns, various sources of media, and international research on supervised consumption sites. Currently, twelve interviews have been completed, along with reviews of media and campaign publications. Arguments from these sources have then been compiled into various “frames,” in an attempt to categorize the key assumptions and principles at the heart of this debate. The research draws parallels between claims in attempt to compare and contrast arguments along moral, political, and legal lines. This study outlines the current discussion on this topic in King County and has the potential to serve as a guide for future groups that aim to advocate or develop proposals on this issue.

This study explores the use of media to construct social valuation and devaluation in racial discourse on the internet. The use of social media and on-line platforms contribute to complex power relations that mediate social and racial difference. I am investigating how both news sources and social media are used in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement and All Lives Matter campaign to expose the relational construction of value, race, and the “other.” Through an inductive content and discourse analysis of primary movement resources, news media, and Twitter, I reveal the controversial ways in which the value of Black lives is affirmed and challenged on public platforms. This project is significant for understanding how social media and online news sources have created new opportunities for protest as well as new revelations of how the process of “othering” racialized groups persists in the twenty-first century.

 Our research is focused on the travel ban from President Trump’s Executive Order 13780: “Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States”. We are looking specifically at the impacts of the travel ban, commonly referred to as the “Muslim Ban,” on the Muslim community in Washington state, focusing even more narrowly on the UW student population. The purpose of our research is to find out the direct effects of the ban on people’s lives, opposed to statistics we receive in the news and through social media outlets. We are conducting interviews with affected Muslim communities in Washington State. We are reaching out to friends and community organizations that provide aid to Muslim communities affected by the travel ban. We conducted two separate types of interviews: one for people affected by the ban and one for relief providers. Our results show that the ban has largely impacted people’s abilities to see their family and has imposed a lot of doubt and uncertainty about their future. Additionally, interviewees expressed a lack of awareness of their rights.

Despite the intense coverage of the Syrian Civil War in US media, consensus about what started the Syrian Civil War is highly debated. The variety of explanations cited as leading to the Syrian Civil War range from: corruption, protests, sectarianism, climate change, and drought. My mixed methods research begins by exploring whether certain conflict explanations like the Arab Spring Protests are overrepresented in discourse whereas conflict explanations using climate change are underrepresented. A manifest content analysis of 134 American newspaper articles of causes for the conflict from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal yielded that they did indeed favor Arab Spring protests but that the results varied by newspaper. The right-leaning Wall Street Journal failed to mention climate change in a statistically significant manner whereas the Washington Post repeatedly mentioned climate change as a major factor for the Syrian Civil War. Interpretations and analysis of the same conflict produced different ideas about what started the conflict. The second part of my research involved an inductive latent content analysis of these news sources to truly understand the perceptions that drove news organizations to report the way they did. Here I report two key findings: a better understanding of how causal factors for conflict are explained in American media and how media organizations justify and convey narratives of importance to them. Such research is important because climate change and conflict is an issue that is important to the stability of the globe. Understanding how and why it’s importance is overrepresented and underrepresented in news sources can help determine how popular geopolitics shapes perceptions and how to make discussions of climate change in the lens of conflict more acceptable.

Wealth inequality in the U.S. is at an extremely high level and continues to grow. In 2010, the wealthiest 10% owned 70% of total wealth, a percentage close to the level in 1930. The gross wealth disparity that characterizes the contemporary U.S. is one of the most pressing economic and political issues of our times. In this work, I present agapism as an alternate philosophical system of ethics to address the debilitating wealth inequality in the U.S. today. Agapism is an ethical system based on the commandment in the Pentateuch to love one's neighbor as oneself. Traditionally, academic philosophy has overlooked agapism as an ethical system because its foundational sources are of religious origin rather than grounded in philosophical texts. However, agapism is a robust ethical system that provides compelling moral reasons for government wealth redistribution. In my work, I detail the moral and philosophical reasons for wealth redistribution that arise from the agapist tradition and explore the kinds of moral obligations agapism imposes on individuals and communities. Though agapism’s foundational sources include those of Christian origin, I consider and respond to Christian arguments against government wealth redistribution and Christian arguments that make a weaker case for wealth redistribution than agapism calls for. I also consider and respond to arguments regarding the proper and just distribution of wealth from influential secular figures in contemporary moral philosophy, including John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Among other issues, I consider their perspectives on how wealth should be justly distributed, as well as the government’s role in wealth redistribution.