The implications in the connection between the Fifth Amendment and Miranda warnings have been well explored in Miranda v Arizona, highlighting that understanding such rights are relevant during police interrogations. The standardization of administering Miranda warnings before police interrogation becomes a mechanism in which to legitimize the State as well as the system of justice, since doing so becomes a form of checking and balancing the power dynamic between State and individual. The question then becomes, is there an effective way to clearly communicate an individual’s protection under the Fifth Amendment through the Miranda warnings in cases where the individual in question may be inherently more vulnerable, such as a child or a person with intellectual disabilities. In 2016, King County implemented a different set of Miranda warnings catered to juvenile competency. It is also crucial to examine how police are trained to understand the difference in the language in which they are mandated to employ. In this research, I aim to find out what and how the different sets of language of Miranda warnings influence the police’s state of mind. I anticipate on obtaining qualitative data by interviewing the police and other legal actors. First, I will ask police to recall what they are thinking after I have given a word cue in a randomized order to see if they are able to give the same meaning in both the adult and youth version. This should yield a baseline towards how the police are thinking about language. Secondly, my questions will also pertain to the ways in which the police are trained to interact with juveniles. I expect to find from interviews that the component of training is what will change how police perceive juveniles differently, rather than administering the warning.

Over recent decades, scholars have noted declining trends in perceptions of legitimacy in high-income, democratic countries. Many theories offer competing explanations for this decline, including immigration, polarization, and neoliberalism, but scholars have yet to connect declining perceptions of legitimacy to stagnant wages. I argue that within the Group of 7 (G7) countries, wage stagnation triggers a crisis of legitimacy because ordinary citizens’ living standards worsen as wages remain low and the cost of living rises, resulting in the belief that their governments are unresponsive and illegitimate. I hypothesize that wage stagnation plays into a legitimacy crisis in domestic democratic institutions, because stagnant wages increase economic inequality and generate perceptions of an illegitimate government. To test this claim, I create a legitimacy index to compare trends in perceptions of legitimacy cross-nationally. I also run a multivariate regression test to assess the strength of the relationship between stagnant wages and government legitimacy, controlling for other relevant factors. This project may reveal that if a productive economy fails to benefit its people, there is the possibility of democratic decline.

The introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States is fundamental to women’s status as equal to men. Scholars have shown that while women’s descriptive representation in legislative bodies can predict women’s equality, the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment is a better gauge of public opinion on the status of women in each given state. However, researchers have yet to link the relationship between the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s descriptive representation to measure the level of sexual subordination women experience at the state level. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment interacts with the descriptive representation of women, affecting the level of sexual subordination of women. I hypothesize that the interaction of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and a high level of women’s descriptive representation reduces the sexual subordination of women. To test this, I employ an original index called the Sexual Subordination Index to quantify the theoretical definition of modern patriarchy or the political, social, economic, and sexual subordination of women in each state. Preliminary findings suggest that there is a negative relationship between the combination of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s descriptive representation, and the sexual subordination of women. These findings bring into question the symbolic significance of the Equal Rights Amendment and the role of women in American politics.

Civil religion, or the religion of the nation as a whole, is comprised of historically and religiously derived symbols and rituals, all of which contribute to an underlying and overarching ideal for American society rooted in sacrifice and commitment. This paper argues that during the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) Coalition violated norms of civil religion, contributing to a decline and fragmentation of American civil religion and providential thought. Using Jon Ebel’s G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion as a foundational text for the analysis of the intersections between the VVAW and American civil religiosity, the symbolic soldier, and providential thought, this paper concludes that the VVAW’s aims to “bring the war home” brought American civilians face to face with the atrocities of war, reminded Americans that involvement in war is hardly honorable (let alone innocent), and contributed to both a decline in providential thought and engagement in civil religion.

After Saudi Arabia announced its VISION2030 plan to reduce its oil dependence through economic diversification, a wide-scale crackdown on corruption was carried out. Following that was the imposition of the first tax policy in the Kingdom, a 5% value-added tax. These reforms strike a delicate balance; to develop infrastructure and new industries, particularly for an oil-dependent economy (ODE), the country must sustain high levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) among other sources of funding. Nonetheless, attracting FDI requires transparent and resilient fiscal institutions, and the presence of corruption negatively impacts FDI by conveying uncertainty and increasing costs of conducting business. ODEs may also seek to enhance non-resource taxation, providing another stable revenue stream. FDI enlarges the non-resource tax base by including new firms and increasing employment opportunities. By relying on FDI as an indicator of institutional quality, this paper tests the interaction of corruption and FDI and its impact on levels of non-oil tax revenue. I employ regression models to conduct a cross-national study of 17 ODEs, controlling for population, GDP per capita, government expenditure, oil sector ownership and oil price. I expect to find that higher levels of corruption lead to lower levels of FDI, which in turn decreases non-oil tax revenue collection. Additionally, I will use a Fiscal Reliance Measure (Haber and Menaldo, 2011) to test the same interaction’s effect on the ratio of hydrocarbon and oil revenue to total government revenue as a second proxy for economic diversification. This research contributes to the growing field of oil-dependence and economic diversification in two ways: it rejects the presence of a “resource curse” and examines the relationship between corruption and non-resource tax revenue by studying institutional state structures, and it explores the causal mechanism running from FDI to tax revenue, whereas previous literature has tested the inverse relationship.