Politics, 1927-2026

Alaska currently faces a growing brain drain problem, with consistent outmigration of its youngest and most educated residents. Left unaddressed, this poses a serious threat to Alaska’s economy, undermining sectors such as healthcare, law, education, and engineering. This paper argues that some reasons for brain drain are rooted in uncontrollable factors such as geography and climate, but are significantly compounded by legislative failures in addressing factors that are controllable through policy change. Alaska currently ranks last in graduate students per capita, wages for high-need individuals fail to compensate for the high cost of living, and Alaska maintains elevated standards for certain professional certifications despite a shortage of workers in these areas. Drawing on case studies from states and countries around the world, this paper proposes a fiscally responsible policy agenda, costing less than 0.1% of Alaska’s Permanent Fund, capable of meaningfully reducing brain drain.

This work examines how media systems shape agenda-setting after elite targeted political violence. Comparing coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, it asks how differences in media environments influence framing, responsibility attribution, policy salience, tone, and elite unity. Employing a comparative qualitative content analysis of 100 articles from the New York Times and Washington Post, the study finds that the historical case media structure produced unified narratives centered on national mourning, clear individual responsibility, elite consensus. The contemporary case was characterized by politicized framing, contested attribution, and reduced elite unity. Across both cases, policy discussion was limited, inferring that political violence functions as a weak trigger for policy agendas. The findings demonstrate that agenda-setting power is dependent on media structure, shifting from coordinated narrative formation to multiple and competing interpretations in the contemporary media environment.

In this ever expanding modern world, power and influence has been redefined by technology time and time again. Some powerful engines of political influence and culture seem to go unrecognized. The largest and most powerful of them all is gaming. In writing this thesis, I hope to unlock an understanding of how the fastest growing community in the world could be mobilized through federal policies and tangible government infrastructure for public good.

The primary research question driving this analysis is whether macro-level findings established in the global aggregate survive when applied to a region, like the Caribbean, with fundamentally different structural conditions. Specifically, this thesis hypothesizes that the ever-present gravity of US influence in the Caribbean moderates the impacts of Chinese economic statecraft, causing the global consensus on Chinese leverage to either fail or significantly alter. To test this, the analysis replicates four existing studies on the impact of Chinese influence, reanalyzing their regression results with a dataset localized to the Caribbean. The empirical findings of this replication exercise validate this regional divergence, revealing a landscape where the global assumptions either completely reverse direction or are heavily amplified by US proximity. Ultimately, this implies that researchers and policymakers cannot rely on global averages to understand how Chinese aid impacts regions so geographically and historically tied to the United States.

How do leaders present the case of aggressive foreign policies to the public? This thesis argues that political leaders change their tune in regards to war doctrines depending on the media outlet. For conservative outlets, they tend to focus on nationalism and protecting the security of its borders. For Liberal media outlets they tend to focus more heavily on humanitarian issues and diplomacy. As evidence, I present a series of examples, stemming from the 2003 invasion of Afghanistan. This research is relevant because partisan media outlets are increasingly shaping the way leaders interact with the public, which in turn is pivotal in democratic elections.

The rise of AI and the demand-heavy datacenters needed to power it have reshaped American electricity markets over the past five years. The case of PJM Interconnection and its capacity market crisis demonstrates how. The entry of datacenter demand into electricity markets exposed the mismatch between 21st-century demand shocks and a 20th-century governance architecture designed for slow, incremental, and predictable load growth. This thesis draws on scholarship on electricity restructuring, energy federalism, and regulatory capture, alongside analysis of market reports, regulatory actions, policy documents, and industry evidence. I argue that the crisis emerged through three linked dynamics. (1) The original design of PJM's market is poorly suited for datacenter load. (2) The fragmented authority structures within PJM's governance limit its ability to coordinate reforms. (3) The costs of attempted adaptations by market actors are distributed unevenly across market actors. More broadly, this thesis shows that when private capital moves faster than outdated governance structures, institutions rely on temporary political fixes and workarounds rather than on true structural reform.

As presidents in the United States declare more emergencies to gain statutory powers—increasingly to address domestic policy issues under the guise of foreign affairs crises—what should the roles of the legislative and judicial branches be? This thesis examines whether the emergency powers architecture of the United States should be more like the Lockean prerogative or the Schmittian state of exceptionalism and how this debate has evolved. The methods used combine doctrinal analysis of Supreme Court precedent, historical analysis of the evolving political situation, and procedural analysis of the shadow docket. I demonstrate that through a series of institutional decisions in an increasingly global and complex environment, the governance architecture for emergency powers has evolved from a Lockean system to a Schmittian one of constant exceptionalism, allowing extraordinary powers to the executive by bypassing legislative deliberation and relying on judicial deference. The thesis recommends a return to a state closer to Lockean, with a set of legislative, judicial, and procedural reforms that should be evaluated in future work.

Over the past 25 years, immigration has become an important issue in American politics. But who drives increased salience of immigration: the public, the media, or politicians? And is increased salience of immigration caused by actual increases in undocumented immigration? This thesis uses the Granger causality test to analyze four time series: a public opinion poll on the salience of immigration, media stories about immigration, mentions of immigration in the Congressional Record, and monthly border apprehensions. The tests show that increased salience of immigration among the public is strongly caused by the media, not by politicians. In fact, it finds that the public then influences the level of salience of immigration among politicians. Finally, increases in monthly border apprehensions cause salience of immigration to increase among the public.

Carl Schmitt’s work on sovereignty and decisionism has been immensely influential in the world of political theory and jurisprudence. However, surprisingly little work has been done putting Schmitt in dialogue with jurists from the Oxford analytic tradition, the dominant tradition in Anglo-American legal philosophy. This thesis undertakes such an attempt. Three chapters examine regime transition, judicial discretion, and legal normativism under a decisionist lens. It is the ultimate opinion of this thesis that the aforementioned important questions in jurisprudence are more amply resolved through the dialectical synthesis of the analytic tradition and Schmitt’s decisionism.

When does insurgent violence move markets? Current scholarship explains why weaker actors target high-value assets and why political shocks move prices, but not which attacks cause insurers, carriers, and investors to reassess revenue continuity. This thesis fills that gap by introducing market-visible vulnerability (MVV): insurgent attacks produce measurable changes in investor behavior when they expose an economically sensitive asset as credibly contestable, forcing private actors to treat disruption as an ongoing condition. MVV requires three conditions—an economically sensitive target, a credible and sustained threat, and visible state involvement—and I test it across three cases representing distinct economic dependencies. The 2019 Houthi strikes on Abqaiq drove an 11.7% single-day jump in Brent crude and widened Saudi sovereign CDS spreads by 40%. The Houthi Red Sea campaign raised war-risk premiums to 2% of vessel value, cut corridor freight volumes by 78%, and showed that even the most powerful naval coalition in recent history could not restore commercial stability. After October 7, Ben Gurion’s international connectivity collapsed by nearly half, Israeli equities fell by 17%, and Israel nationalized its own airport’s war-risk insurance market when private underwriters exited. I find that the most consequential form of insurgent coercion operates through the pricing decisions of insurers, carriers, and investors, whose behavior determines whether state power remains commercially and fiscally viable.

As we get further away from the years of biological racism and overt structural prejudice, it becomes more crucial to understand the remaining impacts of these discriminatory practices. Across social sciences and the humanities, many scholars have attempted to answer the question of continued residential segregation and structural barriers to success for minority racial groups. This thesis aims to answer the research question, “How does race impact mortgage approval likelihoods?” by investigating the past fifteen years of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Using logistical regressions, I test the relevance of race in approval or denial outcomes to examine the “race-blind” nature of this financial assessment. Across all years of observation, I find that there is a statistically significant relationship between race and approval outcome, a significance that is comparable to income itself. My hypothesis about low approval likelihoods across all years of analysis were partially correct, although the disproven elements still lend themselves to my theory of differential assessment across racial groups.

Body-worn cameras have been widely adopted to curb police use of force, yet mixed and null findings have led some scholars to conclude that officers are simply unresponsive to monitoring, fueling a broader debate in the principal-agent and street-level bureaucracy literatures over whether police can be meaningfully managed through formal oversight or are rendered impervious to it by occupational culture and individual disposition. However, existing studies share a critical weakness: they fail to measure compliance with camera activation, leaving open whether null results reflect genuine insensitivity to surveillance or merely the discretionary non-use of the technology. This thesis fills that gap by operationalizing activation compliance through the adoption of the Signal Sidearm, an automatic-activation system that triggers recording upon weapon draw, effectively removing officer discretion and creating a natural experiment in enforced compliance. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design across police departments, I find that automatic activation reduces use-of-force rates by 36 to 44 percent while conventional cameras produce no significant effect. Departments operating automatic activation upload 52 to 95 percent more videos per encounter, confirming that the technology substantively increases compliance. Arrest rates remain unchanged, indicating restraint rather than enforcement withdrawal. These results suggest that officers do respond to credible monitoring and that policymakers should prioritize how cameras are implemented.

California has passed a substantial number of housing reforms intended to increase residential development, many of which focus on expanding allowable density. Yet housing production has remained persistently below what is needed. This thesis examines whether changes in maximum allowable density are actually associated with meaningful changes in housing production and prices across California jurisdictions over time. Using the National Longitudinal Land Use Survey, this paper employs a first-difference design to analyze California jurisdictions observed in 1994, 2003, and 2019. The findings suggest that increases in maximum allowable density are associated with greater housing production, especially multifamily housing, but that these effects are modest and do not consistently translate into lower housing prices. Interviews with housing providers suggest that these modest estimates reflect the broader regulatory environment where discretionary approvals, environmental review, fees, and layered policy requirements continue to constrain housing development even when formal density limits are loosened. This thesis argues that density reform is an important part of expanding housing supply, but that California’s housing shortage cannot be meaningfully addressed unless the state is willing to confront policy tradeoffs and reduce the broader set of regulatory burdens that continue to suppress housing production.

Due to Western journalists conveying not only information but also emotional valence when reporting on Middle East peace efforts, this thesis investigates whether the affective tone of that coverage operates as an independent influence on public support for a two-state solution. Synthesizing media effects theory, the political psychology of hope (particularly the affect heuristic and appraisal tendency frameworks), and verified public opinion data, the core argument demonstrates that hopeful media tone functions as a form of affective framing that primes citizens to evaluate the two-state solution more favorably, even after accounting for substantive content. Published content analyses of Western outlets reveal systematic framing asymmetries in emotional vocabulary, source selection, and victim humanization that structurally constrain the tonal range of coverage. I utilize survey data document partisan, generational, and ideological cleavages that align with predictions derived from the theoretical framework, underscoring the salience of affective tone as an underspecified variable in existing models of policy opinion formation.

Mawdudi viewed Islamization as the process in which the people become reformed on the basis of Islam and Islam becomes entrenched in society. This process is viewed by him as a necessary prerequisite to establishing an Islamic state. However, a look at Mawdudi’s own writings and political decisions along with the various Islamic organizations that claim to adhere to his way show that different methods have been taken for Islamization based on the local context. This may seem to be a problem for his Islamization framework. I argue, however, that there is an inherent flexibility in Mawdudian Islamization where the main goal is the establishment of the Islamic state but different methods of Islamization can be taken to achieve it. By looking at the various methods that Mawdudi used for Islamization, I am able to ascertain the three main features of Mawdudian Islamization: focus on removing jahili (un-Islamic) elements in society; an Islamic vanguard must be formed to carry out the Islamization processes; and the approaches should be rooted in Mawdudi’s historical reading of the Prophet Muhammad’s biography (sirah) and the government led by the Rashidun Caliphs. After establishing this, I then look at how the various Jamaats, originally one group founded by Mawdudi, in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Jammu & Kashmir have pursued Mawdudian Islamization in their local contexts.