Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: “You’re either with us or against us,” George Bush blustered in November 2001, a precept that has led to the Axis of Evil, the ubiquitous claim that any critic of the administration is a traitor, and the systematic erosion of constitutional rights concerning privacy and due process. The binary would seem to suggest that the difference between those with us and those against us is easy to determine but the borders of allegiance are not nearly as stark as Bush’s bravura contends. What constitutes appropriate allegiance in this context? Jacques Chirac, who was literally “with” Bush when he made this assertion, was not with “us” in the fuller sense of the term, as the switch to Freedom Fries parodically demonstrated. How do we know, in other words, who is in and who is out?

In a world of stark oppositions, like the one our president wants for us to inhabit, the problem of allegiance repeatedly devolves to a question of performance. Besides dying for our nation, what acts constitute loyal behavior? During the Bush campaign, one solution to this problem were the loyalty pledge required of audience members at speeches and rallies. In my paper, I will consider the performative problems of the loyalty oath or pledge, a speech act that enacts loyalty but fails to provide epistemological certainty; introduced to guarantee what it creates, an oath necessarily leads to its own proliferation because it is undermined by the very anxieties that led to its use. Put differently, a performative speech act can only be assessed in retrospect so oaths express an anxiety about allegiance they tend to multiply rather than contain.

There is much to be learned from the nineteenth-century on this topic, especially in the debates concerning the assessment of loyalty during and after the Civil War, including the ways in which allegiance generates anxiety and the associated implications for the spatialization of nationalism. What the parallels make starkly clear, however, is that getting our allegiance anxieties under control is critical if we are to address what will most certainly be this president’s lasting legacy—a nation divided against itself.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This project will look to investigate the role of the Black Republican in United States’ politics today. Election patterns have shown that black Democrats are more successful in their pursuit of public office vis-à-vis black Republicans. This project will look to uncover the depth of this phenomenon at the statewide and local levels by analyzing the dynamics of specific campaigns that resulted in the election of a black Republican official.
The project will focus on approximately 35 elected black Republican officials in the states of Ohio and Florida. These states were chosen due to the preponderance of black Republican officials therein and the variety of offices in which they serve. The student will analyze each official’s respective campaigns, opponents, constituency characteristics, and various other aspects of circumstance. The student hopes that such compilation will reveal patterns illustrative of the source of these elected officials’ success.
Through a narrow lens of study, the student hopes to provide the basis for further research concerning questions such as: How are theories concerning race and vote choice skewed when the presence of a black Republican candidate is introduced? Is it foreseeable that a black Republican candidate could be elected to higher office (ie Congress) in the coming years? Why or why not? The final form will be a written paper with data table appendices and analysis. In order to complete this project the student must gather data from a variety of sources, relying most heavily on election results and information form various state/local reporting mechanisms.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that the constitutional controversy surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance poses a unique Establishment problem because of its context of daily recitation by public schoolchildren in public school classrooms. It presents this argument by, first, discussing the Supreme Court's emphasis on the spoken nature of the word "God" in its development of the notion of ceremonial deism; second, analyzing the language of "injury" in the Supreme Court's prayer in public schools jurisprudence; and third, examining Congressional transcripts explaining the security rationale for the 1954 insertion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. The paper argues that the Pledge question raises a complex triangle of specific issues: 1) the word "God" in its linguistic and specifically spoken form—not merely a question of religion in general; 2) the expectation that the state provide public school classrooms free from intellectual violence and safe for children's young minds—not merely a question of state presence in the public school; and 3) the political and in particular security rhetoric of patriotism—not merely ceremonial deism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I explore the extent to which the ideal of constitutional patriotism can serve as a standard of incorporation and, hence, as a source of guidance for judging how best to address the conflicting imperatives and tensions of multicultural politics in liberal societies. Up until now, the theoretical discussion of constitutional patriotism has focused almost solely on the topics of political identity and motivation and specifically whether constitutional patriotism as the affective component of a post-national political identity is robust enough to motivate citizens to consider one another as co-participants in a common project of democratic decision making. (Bernstein 2001; Calhoun 2002; Honohan 2001; Ingram 1996; Laborde 2002; Lacroix 2002; McCarthy 1999; Pensky 2001; Yack 1996; but also see Bartholomew 2001 and Benhabib 2002) These issues are centrally important to contemporary democratic theory, of course, but in framing them in this way participants have tacitly assumed that the question of incorporation has been answered and the borders defining the set of legitimate participants have been set. In a world characterized by mass immigration in which the question ‘Who belongs?’ has become a central issue of contemporary politics, this seems a very large question to beg.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Terrorism is a strategy designed to further a political agenda by a system of violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets, thereby instilling fear and intimidation among a wider audience. A decision to utilize this strategy reflects a group's goals and its ability to recruit. Drawing on principal-agent analysis of participation and incentive compatibility constraints and the analytical tradition of rent-seeking contests, a model is developed to demonstrate that the structure of the allocation of non-pecuniary rewards plays an important role in determining military success, deterring defection within the terrorist group, and shaping recruitment. By examining the organizational structure, we can better understand patterns of recruitment and allegiance of terrorist groups.