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Deliberative democracy can be defined as a political system based on citizens' voluntary and free discussions on public issues. Most scholars have discussed deliberative democracy within normative boundaries. However, based primarily on Katz's interpretation of Tarde, this study finds the concept of public sphere a useful framework for operationalizing the normative concept of deliberative democracy, since the four components of the public sphere-news media use, interpersonal communication, opinion formation, and political participation-provide us with empirically testable categories. This stu...

Cranial and postcranial research on East and Southeast Asians has shown population variability between and within these two regions. Moreover, as populations vary by sex, sex differences vary by population. The purpose of this study is to provide the first descriptive and comparative analysis of two recently curated samples of complete, documented, contemporary skeletons from Thailand (N=104) and Hong Kong (N=94) that have not been previously studied. Sex differences reveal Hong Kong males and females as larger but less dimorphic than Thais. Stepwise discriminant function analysis of the...

Based on data on publicly traded insurance firms, the first essay examines questions about the effect of large catastrophic events on insurance firms. Rather than looking at a single event, thirty catastrophic events were aggregated into quintiles and the cumulative abnormal returns around these events were found to be significantly positive over a 25 day trading window. There is no significant evidence that post-catastrophic stock returns are correlated to the magnitude of the catastrophe. The second essay analyzes the effect of a large land grant university, the University of Illinois,...

This thesis proposes a reconceptualization of the "attitude" as a multidimensional latent process, which may be unstable across situations, individuals, and time. A review of the literature in light of this reconceptualization reveals aspects of the survey situation that may systematically influence measures of attitudes, behaviors, and social norms. This suggests that contradictory findings regarding attitude-behavior consistency may be partly due to specific inadequacies of conventional measures. A reflexive research strategy is proposed, which supplements survey methods with both quantitat...

Dostoevsky's novels have contributed to a conception of man that reverberates in the conclusions of prominent twentieth-century philosophical anthropologists. Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus, among others, have admitted that the works of Dostoevsky had an influence on the manner in which they learned to conceive of human nature and the world in which humans live. Our aim in this dissertation is to ask: what is there in the novels of Dostoevsky concerning the nature of man, of which certain philosophers could claim that in their phi...

The electrostatic interaction between two charged spheres in the presence of a screening electrolyte is calculated at the level of the linearized Debye-Hückel theory. The calculation is performed analytically as a multipole expansion by applying two-center spherical harmonic expansions and symbolic manipulation methods. I focus on charge-charge and charge-induced dipole interactions, calculated for two spheres of possibly unequal size. The former interaction is given to good approximation by the familiar Debye-Hückel form ~ q1q2exp[-k(R-2a)]/[(epsilon*r(1+ka)^2]. The new results are ...

Traditional theories of property rights change have posited an evolutionary progression of property rights towards private property in response to changes in the relative price ratio of land compared to the other factors of production. Using case studies from two areas of Ethiopia and one area of Eritrea the dissertation demonstrates the role of political factors such as interest group preference and state intervention in directing property rights development away from a linear path. The case studies trace the development of three separate systems of property rights throughout the twentieth ce...

In this dissertation I investigate how community context affects Spanish language use and English proficiency among Latina and Latino children in the United States, focusing on the children of immigrants. I view children's language attributes through a sociological perspective that recognizes that children learn and use languages within specific social and cultural contexts, and that these contexts have an important effect on language acquisition and use. This theoretical perspective leads to the hypothesis that children's language skills and language use will be affected by the communities t...

The enhanced access of developing countries to the international financial market since the seventies has been characterized by boom-bust cycles of unfettered external borrowing followed by abrupt financial crises. The first chapter analyzes the macroeconomic effects of volatile capital flows to a developing country. The analysis shows that investment, consumption, and the current account deficit depend positively on the expected availability of external finance. If international investors may unexpectedly decide to reduce their exposure to financial assets issued by the country, the optimal c...

This study examines the question of whether or not the technology of bullock traction has spread in northern Ghana between 1982/83 and 1993/94 and, furthermore, what factors determine changes in the pattern of the adoption of bullock traction in this area. The introduction to the problem and the objectives of the study in chapter one are followed by a theoretical section in chapter two that focuses on the question why one would have expected a further spread of bullock traction. This chapter explains the direct benefits of bullock traction and reviews the current state of knowledge of this i...