In the United States of America, the nonprofit sector has grown substantially over the last five decades. Despite this, social issues like houselessness appear to be as pervasive as ever. This research seeks to analyze the relationship between the growth of nonprofits focused on the housing crisis and the unhoused population. I hypothesize that the growth of housing-focused (HF) nonprofit organizations will not result in lower numbers of homeless individuals. My underlying theory is that nonprofits, constricted by the structure of the sector, are frequently unable to address structural causes of houselessness. The reliance nonprofits have on wealthy donors is a primary factor. This power dynamic is part of a greater system often referred to as the nonprofit industrial-complex. The growth of HF nonprofits is collected using Candid and measured using nonprofit revenue data from the Internal Revenue Service. Houselessness is measured using data from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. To test this hypothesis, I run a multivariate regression analysis between my two variables across two cities: Seattle, Washington and New York City, New York from 2012 to 2020 (a nine-year period). I control government funding, housing costs, poverty and unemployment. I expect to find increasing numbers of unhoused individuals despite HF nonprofit growth. This research does not advance a casual relationship, but contributes to the theoretical discussion as to whether nonprofits create transformative social change and provides rigorous empirical evidence supporting this theory.

My research questions for this paper are: What are the effects of the Extra Score Policy on Indigenous student enrollment in colleges and universities in Taiwan and is the Aboriginal Language Proficiency Certificate, in the context of the Extra Score Policy, an effective method of language revitalization? My hypotheses are that this policy has increased Indigenous student enrollment in colleges in Taiwan and the Aboriginal Language Proficiency Certificate is an effective method of language revitalization. Indigenous students have a higher chance at attending colleges with a boost to their university entrance exam score and with the addition of the Aboriginal Language Proficiency Certificate, students can receive an even greater boost in their score, so it should incentivize students to learn their Indigenous language to receive a higher score. Studying the enrollment and university population trends among Indigenous students, as well as the Aboriginal Language Proficiency Exam results, I examine the impacts of the Extra Score Policy. Through my study, I found that the Extra Score Policy increased Indigenous student enrollment in colleges and universities in Taiwan. However, I also found that there is no significant data which prove that the Aboriginal Language Proficiency Exam is an effective method of language revitalization. While this policy enables greater Indigenous student enrollment in college, Indigenous students are not attaining a college education at an equitable rate in comparison to non-Indigenous students. Furthermore, students do not have the proper support in these colleges to graduate from college and receive an equitable education. In turn, the implications of my research suggest that one policy cannot undo a system of inequity. Rather it is necessary to use this policy as a starting point to understand the impacts of it and highlight areas of improvements ranging from financial support for Indigenous students to culturally competent curricula.

 My research paper investigates whether the Supreme Court is influenced by public opinion. It is important to be aware of whether the Court is inclined to uphold laws that have been passed by legislative majorities or overturn them. Is the Supreme Court restrained or does it have a tendency for judicial activism? The question that guides my work is: During the period of approximately the last six decades, has the Supreme Court been influenced by public opinion when deciding politically important (i.e., salient) cases? My theory is that the Supreme Court is influenced by public opinion when deciding cases that are salient due, in part, to the Court’s inherent political nature. Justices ascend through a partisan appointment process that is predicated on the sharing of power between the President and the Senate. Consequently, justices and their institution cannot uncouple from the political ecosystem. Specifically, I posit that fear of non-implementation constrains a justice’s decision-making. Non-implementation would occur if the Court’s ruling was not enforced by either a lower court or a non-judicial authority. And the potential consequence of recurring non-implementation is to degrade the Court’s legitimacy. To test my hypothesis systematically, I will use multivariate regression analysis to examine the relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court case decisions and prevailing public opinion, while accounting for the influences of other factors. My analysis incorporates data from (approximately) 5,000 individual Supreme Court cases, extending from 1958 to 2018. I predict that public opinion does influence Supreme Court decision-making when rulings will ‘resolve’ the national debate around issues that have significant public policy implications.

This paper uses national data collected through China’s population census to estimate the effect of housing prices on fertility rates between 2000-2020 across 31 provincial-level administrative regions in mainland China. I theorize that higher housing price would lead to a decrease in fertility rates. I take housing price as a proxy for the overall costs of living. As houses become more expensive, younger generations are forced to save money for years to afford buying a house. When individuals’ income remains unchanged, higher housing prices lower people’s purchasing ability. This lowered purchasing ability leaves people less financially capable of raising a child and results in individuals being less willing to have a child. This paper employs a multivariate regression model and controls for other relevant variables. I expect to find that with the continuous increase in housing price, there is a steady decrease in fertility rates in each administrative region. Furthermore, since a more rapid rise in commodity prices is associated with fast economic development especially in Beijing and Shanghai, the fertility rates in these two regions would be the lowest, corresponding with a weak per capita purchasing power of individual households. This analysis of the relationship between housing price and fertility rate is important because it explains why there is a fertility decline despite robust economic growth in a developing country. This paper calls for changes in maternity policy to accommodate possible decline in workforce and productivity in China and its aging society in the next 20 years.

The Supreme Court of the United States is required to interact with outside actors as it fulfills its duty of interpreting the law. These actors, including interest groups and the Solicitor General, often provide the Court with information regarding the political and social effects of their decisions. Throughout the past century, the relationship between interest groups and the Supreme Court has changed due to increased ideological and political polarization across the country. These increases have escalated the amount of partisan-oriented amicus curiae, or friend-of-the-court, briefs submitted to the Court. As the Court receives more information from partisan-oriented organizations, I hypothesize that the litigant that receives the most amici support will also receive the support of the Court. This hypothesis stems from the Court’s historical agreement with the desires of public opinion, due to its lack of enforcement power, causing the Court to rule in favor of the amicus groups that are believed to mirror public interests. Amicus briefs, historically meant to provide factual information, have begun to reflect the effects of partisan polarization by working to persuade the Court to decide in a particular direction. By assessing the influence of amicus briefs on the Court’s civil rights decisions following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, my research highlights the effects that both liberal and conservative-oriented interest groups have on civil rights jurisprudence. My research separates civil rights cases into 11 issue-areas, including discrimination, prison rights, and women’s rights. By conducting a multivariate analysis, I account for the effects of amicus briefs and several control variables, including the president’s and Congress’s ideologies, on the Court’s decisions. My preliminary results build on research conducted in the late 1990s by indicating the decreased efficacy of amicus briefs and increased effects of partisan ideology and public opinion on the Court.
 

Recent years have seen a great expansion in the public consciousness of human impacts on global environment, as well as wider acceptance of the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Although individual willingness to take pro-environmental action is a crucial component to real progress on the climate dilemma, it is a phenomenon whose antecedents are complex and diffuse. While much of the literature on this topic focuses on the identity characteristics which may account for individual pro-environmental behaviors, in this research project I build on research in environmental psychology and other disciplines to hypothesize that spending time in nature impacts the pro-environmental behaviors of individuals. I argue that, because it facilitates deeper connection and measurable psychological changes toward cooperative behaviors, time in nature is likely an influence on future actions on behalf of the natural world. I further theorize that although time in nature may impact Democrats and Republicans differently, there is an effect regardless of partisanship. To test this hypothesis, I employ a multivariate regression analysis which tests the relationship between time spent in nature and pro-environmental behaviors while controlling for possible confounding variables including income, education, gender, and partisanship. To investigate the effects of partisanship, I also run a model testing whether time in nature influences the behavior of Democrats and Republicans differently. I expect to find in each case that the relationship between time in nature and pro-environmental behaviors is statistically significant. Such findings could serve to emphasize the importance of access to natural spaces for the future of environmental attitude formation and activism.

Climate change is one of the most difficult legal challenges that the world faces today. Courts face new threats in combating climate change while interpreting legislation, previous case law and scientific evidence. Climate change includes issues regarding human rights, immigration rights, resource and land rights and native rights. New Zealand’s courts are limited by parliamentary sovereignty and cannot interpret the law in ways that invoke new legislation. Despite this, New Zealand’s legal system has played a critical role in climate change adaptation and policy innovation. In this project, I examine the use of the New Zealand Court system to better understand how the country is taking on the challenges climate changes poses. The project analyzes how the Environment Court tackles issues of climate change cases regarding land usage and resource management. However, it is important to discuss how the higher courts, the Court of Appeals, the High Court and the Supreme Court, settle climate change related disputes that exceed the jurisdiction of the Environment Court. All of New Zealand courts stay within the constraints of parliamentary sovereignty as they face a variety of issues resulting from climate change. To do this, I develop an original dataset. The data is from Environment Court cases, ranging from 1999 to 2021. The cases are coded to examine the court's response to these cases while taking into account the various impacts of climate change including land usage, pollution, and coastal erosion. Some cases from the higher courts are acknowledged in sections of the paper due to the importance of the case. First findings suggest that the court stays within the limits of parliamentary sovereignty and increases the legitimacy of future climate change litigation. The research at hand provides valuable insight on what future cases will cover and how courts around the world will respond.

Three different regimes have governed Bolivia within the past two years. Two of the regimes, the Morales and the Arce regimes, have been aligned with the Movement for Andean Socialism, a leftist party whose largest voting block is indigenous Bolivians. The other, the Áñez regime, was an interim government led by a right-wing alliance. This research examines the effect each regime has had on both indigenous rights litigation and the treatment of indigenous parties within the legal system. The analysis identifies how the three regimes interacted with the Bolivian legal system to affect indigenous rights. To explore this dynamic, the research develops an original case law dataset examining indigenous rights cases before the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal of Bolivia from 2009 to 2021. Utilizing case law analysis, the study explores the extent to which the Tribunal’s decision constrains or empowers the regime in power. Finally, it analyzes the three regimes’ uses of the legal system to determine the extent of indigenous persecution or empowerment in each of the three regimes. Preliminary findings suggest that rulings during the Evo Morales regime had the most consistently favorable outcomes for indigenous rights, even in rulings which constrained the Morales government. While there is a dearth of cases before the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal during the Áñez regime due to its short length, I provide additional data on lower-level court cases, use of prosecutors, and arbitrary detentions during this period to reveal the severity of indigenous persecution. I raise broader questions of judicial capture and regime change and both the promise and limitations of courts as an avenue for indigenous rights protections, and contextualizes comparisons between the legal systems of the three regimes within an understanding of the struggle for indigenous rights and related race and class based conflicts in Bolivia.

Emerging from past authoritarian regimes, it has not always been easy for developing democracies to maintain democratic rule in government institutions. However, for countries like South Korea, whose citizens are skeptical towards government actions due to a history of corruption, they hold a lot of faith in their judicial institutions as defenders of societal interests and democratic rule. To better understand the role of the judiciary in upholding democratic ideals in newer democracies, I study the Constitutional Court of Korea (CCK). Utilizing a sociolegal approach, I analyze how the CCK maintains legitimacy as the people’s court in upholding democracy. To answer this question, I create a unique dataset of the Court’s case law from 1995-2019 focusing on a case study of gender equality and political affairs. Through case law analysis, I analyze the Court’s efficacy in expanding non-traditional rights focused on gender equality and forming decisions that emphasize a separation of powers which limits political corruption. Preliminary findings reveal that the CCK has not hesitated to uphold democracy and holds widespread societal support as a proactive, accessible legal institution that is independent from other government influences. This research opens avenues to better comprehend the role of courts and their actions in rising democratic societies. Additionally, observing institutions like the CCK and their practices may serve as an example on a global scale of how courts play a role in preserving democratic norms.

The national sense of uncertainty and chaos surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic has been compounded by the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on social media. This has fostered an Infodemic as users struggle to separate fact from fiction in their news feeds and develop conflicting perceptions of reality. This project studies the relationship between the exposure to COVID-19 (re)tweets with misinformation or questionable levels of veracity and governmental trust during the Coronavirus pandemic. I create a continuous User Engagement Index to compare the differences in user engagement for COVID-19 twitter posts that were created/shared by influencers on the right, who tend to be problematic as they have a history of sharing or dog whistling COVID-19 misinformation, to influencers on the left who tend to post neutral content in terms of veracity. Furthermore, I created an ordinal Public Confidence index in which I compare changes in the User Engagement index for posts from the right and left to changes in public opinion survey data to gauge the levels of trust in government institutions. I conduct two separate multivariate regression analyses to evaluate the relationship between the User Engagement Index and a Public Confidence Index. I then assess whether the spread of COVID-19 (re)tweets that are likely epistemically problematic negatively impacts an exposed user’s trust in government. I theorize that exposure to misinformation fosters political cynicism and epistemic confusion, which both fuel a decline in public trust. The findings of this study will help us better understand the cultivation of polarized perception gaps that may inhibit collective action and a unified response during times of crisis and uncertainty. This erodes trust and undermines democratic governance and institutions.

This research project seeks to understand resource management policy and its effectiveness in practice, especially as climate change exacerbates pre-existing scarcities. As a case study, this project examines two policies that attempt to manage water use in California– the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (2014) and the Central Valley Water Project Improvement Act (1992). The former was chosen because it focuses on the regulation of groundwater, a resource that had yet to be overseen in California, and the latter was selected as it is one of the most recent pieces of notable legislation that sought to improve the sustainable management of surface water. By considering how effective the policies have been in regulating two important sources, it can provide insight into the current and prospective water situation in California. This project measures the effectiveness of these acts through the agricultural sector, given that the industry uses approximately 80% of the state’s water supply in a given year. Therefore, by measuring the growth of water intensive crops in the years following the passage of said legislation, we can better understand whether these acts were successful in curbing exorbitant water use. To measure growth, I record the acres harvested of almonds, walnuts, avocados, and wheat (as a control); I then translate this data into growth rate for each year and record the unit price for further understanding. After conducting the aforementioned methodology, this project finds that the Central Valley Water Project Improvement Act is significantly more effective in limiting the growth of thirsty crops, whereas the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was found to have little impact.

This presentation discusses the climate change responses from two of the dominant international oil companies, BP and Shell. This project will start by comparing explicit corporate responses to climate change, including the respective companies' mitigation and adaptation strategies. Both firms have included dedications to net-zero emissions in the future and adherence to international climate policy stipulations. My presentation will further discuss BP and Shell's involvement in anthropogenic climate catastrophes, and compare these findings to the corporate-issued responses to climate change. Research will include corporate-issued memos, historical analysis of environmental responses, and governmental regulations of the oil and gas industry. This research aims to inform about the true reactions and responses towards climate change taken by two of the dominant oil and gas firms. Additionally, the research will prove the financial and social stability and dominance in which Shell and BP find immunity from climate issues. "Big Oil" has been one of the most violent drivers of anthropogenic climate change, and I expect my research to demonstrate the incredible impact of such, while demonstrating the rapid growth and profits that the oil and gas industry is experiencing during this climate crisis.

The purpose of this study is to test the relationship between xenophobic rhetoric and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) political mobilization. The COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, has led to undeserved blame and hatred towards Asian Americans during COVID’s early stages. As a result, discrimination against Asian Americans had increased by over 150 percent during the pandemic’s first year. I theorize that the increase of xenophobia will fuel mobilization based on feelings of victimization. Expectations from the study stem from a theory of mobilization that AAPI members will strive for political action instead of a withdrawal from politics when racial targeting is solely Asian-oriented and relies on negative, inaccurate stereotypes. In order to test the effects of discrimination, I will employ regression models to examine whether xenophobic tweets from former President Donald Trump lead to increased mobilization and solidarity among Asian-Americans in online settings from late 2019 until the suspension of his Twitter account in January 2021. I expect to find that xenophobic tweets with high exposure levels to these tweets–measured by the number of likes and retweets–lead to increased popularity in Google-searching terms related to AAPI mobilization (e.g., Asian American Resources, Stop Asian Hate, etc.).

Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the football field in August of 2016 was not the first instance of athlete activism in history but was incredibly meaningful to our current politics. Two years later, in September of 2018, Nike released their Dream Crazy advertisement featuring Colin Kaepernick. Evidence shows that this campaign had significant economic consequences for Kaepernick and Nike, leading one to believe that there could have been political consequences as well. Therefore, I ask: to what extent did Colin Kaepernick’s campaign with Nike mobilize public support for and against racial justice in the United States? I hypothesize that there is a positive relationship between exposure and donations; as exposure to the campaign increases so do donations to both racial justice efforts and counter-racial justice efforts. I reason that people’s actions are grounded in emotions and morals; with the polarization of the United States growing, a political act like Kaepernick’s taps into people’s allegiances and identities and they will act accordingly. To test this hypothesis and answer my research question I have gathered Google search term data from August 2018-October 2018 to gauge how much attention the Nike advertisement got. Then I gathered donation data from seven political campaigns representing the left and right sides of the political spectrum from August 2018-October 2018 as a measurement of political activism. The campaigns were chosen based on their salience on each side of the Black Lives Matter conversation and include Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Preliminary results suggest that there may be a positive relationship between exposure and donations. This matters because it exemplifies the power that big brand names and celebrity athletes have on the political playing field. The consequences of this participation and influence are vast, it can create polarized divides and mobilize action.