Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Schattschnider argued that “Whoever decides what the game is about decides also who can get into the game.” We examine this hypothesis in the 2000 campaign. Using a combination of the National Annenberg Election Survey and campaign advertising content from the Wisconsin Advertising Project, we test how four subgroups responded to issue campaigns during the 2000 election. We find evidence that the choice of campaign themes do shape who becomes engaged, but that the results are not consistent enough to suggest that campaigners can neatly carve out and mobilize political subgroups.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: This paper examines the German political parties’ strategies towards immigrant constituencies in the Bundestag elections from 1998 to 2005. Ever since Germany became a country of immigration in the 1970s, two parties have silently profited from the immigrant vote while polarizing the electorate over immigration-related issues: while the Social Democrats (SPD) relied on the working-class Gastarbeiter vote, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) received a large share of the ethnic German Aussiedler vote. The liberalization of the German citizenship regime in 1999, however, led to an enlargement of the immigrant electorate and changed its long-time equilibrium. Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number of Gastarbeiter and their descendants acquiring German citizenship, while Aussiedler immigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union keeps falling. This paper hypothesises that the 1999 citizenship reform has produced a new mobilization scenario, with the parties now actively trying to get electoral support from immigrant constituencies. In order to achieve this, they avoid immigration-related issues and increasingly nominate immigrant candidates in their platforms. Empirical candidate evidence from the IMMCANDS database shows that the German political parties indeed started moving from a polarization to an incorporation strategy in the aftermath of the 1999 citizenship reform.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In several recent Supreme Court cases Justice Clarence Thomas has sought to link his interpretation of church-state relations to the Court’s states’ rights interpretation of federalism. Briefly, Justice Thomas argues that the 1st amendment Establishment Clause should be interpreted as a federalism provision that allows states and local communities to determine how religion and politics interact at the subnational level.

Justice Thomas’s argument is not new, however, and has been articulated by many constitutional scholars over the past 30 years. In this paper I detail the intellectual development of this argument and show how Justice Thomas’s view of religious liberty is an extension of the high court’s decade-long focus on federalism in general. Using current federalism scholarship that focuses on the structure and constituencies of American federalism, I assess “establishment clause federalism” in the context of the structure and constituencies of religious liberty in the United States. Using interest group litigation strategies, public opinion polls, and national and subnational responses to religious liberty issues, I argue that the main constituents of religious liberty doctrine tend to use and prefer federal courts, congress, and federal agencies to resolve disputes over religious liberty instead of local and state institutions. Thus, I argue that establishment clause federalism has no supporting constituency outside of the Supreme Court and a select group of legal scholars, and is unlikely to cause a significant shift in church-state relations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Jamaica and Israel, though politically and geographically two very different countries, are both economically and politically influenced by the United States. Jamaica and Israel also have historical ties outside of inter-state relations, due to a politically and economically influential Jewish community in Jamaica, as well as functional cooperation between the two states since the 1960s. In the 1970s, the relationship between Jamaica and Israel became quite complex, as Jamaica went through a period of third world nationalist activism that ostensibly sympathized with the Palestinian plight, but was mitigated by the domestic conservative Christian constituency in Jamaica, the extant Jewish community, as well as the intervening influence of the United States. This paper analyses the relationship between Jamaica and Israel, since Jamaica's independence in 1962, with a view to determining the primary factors influencing Jamaica's foreign policy toward Israel, and its position on the Palestinian question. The paper will compare Cold War and the post-Cold War periods in an effort to measure the extent to which geopolitical considerations, namely Jamaica's relationship with the US, is a factor in the relationship.