Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This article examines the leisure exploration of abandoned buildings, popularly referred to as urban exploring. Using participant observation and interviews in four American cities, I argue that explorers create personalized historical interpretations of buildings in situ. Recently abandoned buildings offer little formal historical record, and as historical sites, both their physical structures and meanings have yet to be reconfigured by place entrepreneurs and knowledge professionals. Instead, the loose regulation of abandoned sites affords the opportunity for people to define their own parameters for meaningful behavior. Explorers use their experiences within a place to generate knowledge claims that extend beyond crumbling buildings to understandings of past social words, such as industrial work and psychiatric healthcare. While previous theoretical work has created a foundation for understanding this behavior, this is the first ethnographic study to analyze these processes in the field.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We now have this generation’s statement of the constitutional law of affirmative action in public university admissions. While the Supreme Court held that Michigan has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body and may use race preferences to achieve it, it upheld only the law school’s practices, striking down the undergraduate admissions process as too mechanical to satisfy the means element of Equal Protection analysis. Though it has been observed that universities would likely have continued using race preferences no matter what the Court did, these rulings are clearly a political victory for race preference proponents. That victory may be short lived, of course, if Michigan and other states decide to follow California and Washington State’s lead in banning race preferences. Yet just as important as the state law and politics of this issue may be the implications for federal constitutional law and judicial politics. Contrary to elite opinion, I submit, Justice O’Connor systematically departed the letter and spirit of the landmark ruling on which she claimed to rest her decision, Justice Lewis Powell’s controlling opinion in UC Regents v. Bakke. In the current climate of American judicial politics, it may be that only a centrist like Powell could be confirmed to replace a retiring member of the Grutter majority. If so, he will have ample reason and inclination to vote to overturn Grutter as a fundamental departure from Bakke.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Liberal regimes claim legitimacy through popular sovereignty expressed by an active citizenry limited to those with the consciousness and capacity to be independent and ratiocinating individuals. While liberals used this logic to exclude categories of humans from active participation (ie women), they were forced to do so in terms of a group's incapacity to meet the liberal litmus test. This test makes liberalism a potentially open-ended system because passive citizens-even those categorically excluded-might prove to public opinion that they meet the criteria. If passive citizens make the case, liberals are forced to extend suffrage or abandon liberal principles. If an elected majority removes a hurdle (such as literacy) as invalid, liberals are forced to accept the decision or find justification elsewhere. Thus, liberalism contains a democratic impulse that liberals may or may not accept. This paper analyzes the debate over near universal manhood suffrage in Italy in 1912 to explore how democratic impulses tested the limits of liberalism and how some liberals' unwillingness to accept the democratic consequences of liberalism led them toward an alternative Fascist solution.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Numerous scholars argue that democracies make especially reliable commitment partners. Why and how, then, do democracies abandon their international pledges, especially to close strategic friends and allies? In this paper, I argue that liberal humanitarian norms activated within democratic legislatures often stand at the center of this process. More specifically, I contend that the combined force of two variables ? norm violating behavior by commitment partners and the pressure of social activist groups -- explains why these norms inspire legislative de-commitment steps when they do. I demonstrate the validity of the argument in U.S. termination of military aid to Chile and Argentina during the 1970s. In addition to approaching this unexplored question in an age when democratic commitments underwrite most of international stability, the argument and its findings also suggest ways to interject liberal norms into the growing discussion on democratic commitment politics.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I ask which conditions help states cooperate with each other during wars. The key finding in this study is that democratic states are better able to maintain commitments to their partner during war. I explain that this superior commitment of democratic states in intra-war cooperation is because they have effective institutional constraints on individual preference changes and the practice of and respect for institutionalized decision-making procedures. This statistical and theoretical finding is followed by supporting historical evidence. The finding in this study challenges pessimistic views of democracies in world politics put forward by traditional realists, and support the general literature that democratic states are more likely to cooperate one another in international relations.