Title of Document: THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE DYNAMIC INTERACTION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR POLITICAL MICRO-ENVIRONMENT Stephen Wendel, Ph.D., 2012 Directed By: Professor Joe Oppenheimer, Department of Government and Politics While political choices are rarely isolated or simultaneous, the vast majority of empirical models in political science assume they ar...

In this paper we theorize the impact of democratic states on state-oriented challengers. We argue that aspects of states influence the overall mobilization of state-oriented challengers and the forms of their mobilization and collective action. We develop I2 hypotheses about the impact of state political institutions, democratic processes, bureaucracies, and policies on mobilization and provide...

State and non-state actors engaged in disputes to expand and limit abortion rights have engaged in legal mobilization-in other words, strategies using rights and law as a central tool for advancing contested political goals. Peru, like other Latin American countries, has experienced an increase in abortion rights legal mobilization in recent years, including litigation before national and inter...

The contextual theory of political participation in non-electoral politics developed in this paper supposes that more open political opportunity structure of a respective state increases both, the individual non-electoral participation and mobilization into this participation, since the decentralized political institutions send a message that more access points to influence politics are availab...

The period since September 11 attacks in 2001 has witnessed intense debates over to what extent a ―clash of civilizations‖ is inevitable. This paper argues that the ―clash of civilizations‖ thesis is a mistaken paradigm of understanding the Post-Cold War international order. While cultural and religious identities have increasingly become a source of political mobilization in the Post-Cold War ...

Theories of interest group mobilization are central to political science but current research on interest organizations has not proven useful for scholars in related fields. I argue that, by adapting organizational theory to account for the particular function of interest organizations, scholars can build a widely applied theoretical framework. The key step is an analysis of the role that organ...