Participation and Representation: Does Risk Acceptance Influence the Decision Making of Political Actors?

ABSTRACT Are political actors influenced by their acceptance of risk? By political actors I mean individuals in society or government that have an influence on political outcomes. By risk acceptance I mean the degree to which an individual is comfortable with uncertainty and willing to challenge the status quo. The purpose of the present dissertation is to further enhance scholarly understanding of the causal psychological mechanisms that influence political behavior by considering individual risk acceptance. Kam’s (2012) theoretical framework suggests that risk-accepting individuals are more likely to participate in politics because they seek out exciting and novel activities. She does not, however, find any evidence that the risk accepting are any more likely to vote. I argue that enforced compulsory sanctions provide exciting opportunities for the highly risk accepting to abstain from compulsory elections, but also create higher levels of uncertainty for those with low levels of risk acceptance, which leads to a greater likelihood of voting for the latter but not the former. If you are a risk acceptor, you may be willing to violate the compulsory voting requirement. I also expand Kam’s (2012) theoretical framework in Chapter 5 by considering how risk acceptance influences the decision to protest. I argue that because nondemocracies are more repressive than democracies, the risk accepting may be more likely to protest in non-democratic countries than their less risk-accepting counterparts. On the other hand, low risk-accepting individuals may be more hesitant in their willingness to risk life and limb by challenging the status quo of non-democratic regimes because non-democratic countries are more likely to repress political detractors. Finally, political scholars theorize that legislators are hesitant to make risky decisions in office, yet they provide surprisingly little empirical evidence that risk acceptance influences legislative decision making. In Chapter 6 I use a novel theoretical framework and measure of risk acceptance to predict legislative decision making in the United States House of Representatives

Three Essays on Contagion Risk in Supply Chain

Firms often benefit when an unfavourable event befalls a rival, usually through a shift in demand. But sometimes negative events can adversely affect other firms in the industry, a phenomena referred to as contagion. While contagion can harm the supply chain by disrupting supply or demand, or increasing operating costs, it has not yet been studied in the area of supply chain risk management. Aiming to fill this gap, in the first essay I use real cases to conceptualize the process of contagion and apply related theories and literature to theorize the key factors contributing to contagion risk. The second essay examines the contagion effect of small to moderate events as opposed to extreme events, such as an explosion in a nuclear power plant, where contagion is clearly evident and documented. Finally, the third essay explores the conditions under which low-risk firms may benefit from investing in safety improvements for their higher-risk rivals. My dissertation contributes to the literature by recognizing the role of rivals’ safety in supply chain risk management

Leader Incentives and the Termination of Civil War

This dissertation examines the influence of leaders' incentives on civil conflict termination and outcome. Building upon principal-agent framework and insights from credible commitment theories of civil war, I argue that culpable leaders - those viewed as responsible for the war by their constituencies and opponents - are more likely to be punished following poor war performance than non-culpable leaders, who can more easily avoid responsibility for the war. As a result, culpable leaders will have incentives to `gamble for resurrection', extending a losing war in the hope of turning the tide, achieving victory, and avoiding punishment. The culpable leader's incentive to gamble for resurrection thus influences the dynamics of war termination, making wars less likely to end when culpable leaders are in power. Culpability is also hypothesized to increase the likelihood of extreme war outcomes - total defeat or major victory - and to decrease the likelihood that the leader makes concessions to end the war. These propositions are tested using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. First, using an original dataset of rebel and state leaders of a global random sample of civil wars between 1980 and 2010, I test the influence of leader culpability on civil war termination and outcome. The results provide strong support for my theoretical expectations; culpability decreases the likelihood of conflict termination and concessions, while increasing the likelihood of extreme war outcomes. Additionally, I test the mechanism underlying the theoretical argument using quantitative and qualitative evidence. Original data on each leader's culpability, war performance, and post-tenure fate demonstrate that culpable leaders are, in fact, more likely to be punished following poor war performance than their non-culpable counterparts. Within-case comparative analysis of settlement attempts during the civil war in Angola provides additional support for the theoretical argument, demonstrating that leader vulnerability to punishment played a critical role in undermining settlement attempts in Angola during the 1980s and 1990s

Blurring Safety Between Online and Offline Worlds: Archival, Correlational, and Experimental Evidence of Generalized Threat in the Digital Age

abstract: Decades of research in cyberpsychology and human-computer interaction has pointed to a strong distinction between the online and offline worlds, suggesting that attitudes and behaviors in one domain do not necessarily generalize to the other. However, as humans spend increasing amounts of time in the digital world, psychological understandings of safety may begin to influence human perceptions of threat while online. This dissertation therefore examines whether perceived threat generalizes between domains across archival, correlational, and experimental research methods. Four studies offer insight into the relationship between objective indicators of physical and online safety on the levels of nation and state; the relationship between perceptions of these forms of safety on the individual level; and whether experimental manipulations of one form of threat influence perceptions of threat in the opposite domain. In addition, this work explores the impact of threat perception-related personal and situational factors, as well as the impact of threat type (i.e., self-protection, resource), on this hypothesized relationship. Collectively, these studies evince a positive relationship between physical and online safety in macro-level actuality and individual-level perception. Among individuals, objective indicators of community safety—as measured by zip code crime data—were a positive reflection of perceptions of physical safety; these perceptions, in turn, mapped onto perceived online safety. The generalization between perceived physical threat and online threat was stronger after being exposed to self-protection threat manipulations, possibly underscoring the more dire nature of threats to bodily safety than those to valuable resources. Most notably, experimental findings suggest that it is not the physical that informs the digital, but rather the opposite: Online threats blur more readily into physical domains, possibly speaking to the concern that dangers specific to the digital world will bleed into the physical one. This generalization of threat may function as a strategy to prepare oneself for future dangers wherever they might appear; and indeed, perceived threat in either world positively influenced desires to act on recommended safety practices. Taken together, this research suggests that in the realm of threat perception, the boundaries between physical and digital are less rigid than may have been previously believed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Psychology 201

The relationship between corporate social performance and financial asset characteristics

This thesis explores the theoretical and empirical evidence for a relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and financial characteristics. An empirical analysis is performed to examine the Australian evidence for such a relationship, from a financial asset perspective. CSP data provided by Corporate Monitor Pty. Ltd. are used in the analysis. Specifically, available measures of environmental, social and governance performance of 237 Australian companies are compared with selected financial asset characteristics, including firm size, book-to-market value, financial performance and risk, covering the period between July 1997 and August 2003. Evidence of relationships is sought using bivariate correlations, group comparisons and multivariate regression models. The analysis allows for heterogeneity in CSP-financial characteristics relationships, related to firm size, trading history and industry. Findings indicate that governance performance is most strongly related to characteristics, followed by social performance, whereas environmental is in general not strongly or consistently related to financial characteristics. Very strong and consistent evidence is found of a negative relationship between risk and all categories of CSP, although such relationships are again strongest for corporate governance. Strong evidence is found of a positive relationship between financial performance and governance performance (and to a certain extent social-performance), which is concentrated among recently listed companies, large companies and constituents of an industry group containing banks, diversified financials, insurance companies and telecommunication companies. Environmental and social performance is found to be contingent on size and industry, whereas governance performance is found to be contingent predominantly on size. However, the causes of the relationships between environmental and social performance and size are suggested to be different from the causes of the relationships between governance performance and size

Environmental Risk and the Traditional Sector Approach: Market Efficiency at the Core of Environmental Law

Professor Gillroy provides an in-depth discussion on the evolution of environmental law and the proposition that market efficiency has been, and still is, at its core

An Index of Financial Stress for Canada

The authors develop an index of financial stress for the Canadian financial system. Stress is defined as the force exerted on economic agents by uncertainty and changing expectations of loss in financial markets and institutions. It is a continuous variable with a spectrum of values, where extreme values are called financial crises. Information about financial stress is extracted from a wide array of financial variables using several techniques, including factor analysis, econometric benchmarking, and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) modelling. An internal Bank of Canada survey is used to condition the choice of variables and to evaluate their ability to reflect the responses to the survey regarding highly stressful financial events. The authors show that alternative measures of financial crises suggested by the literature do not accurately reflect the results of the survey, while several measures developed in this paper do reflect them.Financial institutions; Financial markets

An Empirical Investigation Of The Influence Of Fear Appeals On Attitudes And Behavioral Intentions Associated With Recommended Individual Computer Security Actions

Through persuasive communication, IT executives strive to align the actions of end users with the desired security posture of management and of the firm. In many cases, the element of fear is incorporated within these communications. However, within the context of computer security and information assurance, it is not yet clear how these fear-inducing arguments, known as fear appeals, will ultimately impact the actions of end users. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of fear appeals on the compliance of end users with recommendations to enact specific individual computer security actions toward the amelioration of threats. A two-phase examination was adopted that involved two distinct data collection and analysis procedures, and culminated in the development and testing of a conceptual model representing an infusion of theories based on prior research in Social Psychology and Information Systems (IS), namely the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). Results of the study suggest that fear appeals do impact end users attitudes and behavioral intentions to comply with recommended individual acts of security, and that the impact is not uniform across all end users, but is determined in part by perceptions of self-efficacy, response efficacy, threat severity, threat susceptibility, and social influence. The findings suggest that self-efficacy and, to a lesser extent, response efficacy predict attitudes and behavioral intentions to engage individual computer security actions, and that these relationships are governed by perceptions of threat severity and threat susceptibility. The findings of this research will contribute to IS expectancy research, human-computer interaction, and organizational communication by revealing a new paradigm in which IT users form perceptions of the technology, not on the basis of performance gains, but on the basis of utility for threat amelioration

Responses to terrorism scenarios: Event features, individual characteristics, and subjective evaluations

The extensive research into responses to terrorism has focused on the effects of individual characteristics on reactions to past terrorism events. This literature has largely omitted two issues: the impact of terrorism event features, and reactions to possible future terrorism events. The first purpose of this dissertation was to account for the effects of event features as well as subjective evaluations on responses to terrorism events. The second purpose of this dissertation was to compare reactions to past and future terrorism scenarios. A series of actual and hypothetical written scenarios were presented to undergraduate psychology students, and various responses measured. A number of individual characteristics were also measured. Studies 1 and 2 served to identify type of weapon, number of victims, type of target, and level of disruption as specific features of terrorism events or threats that are salient to observers. Study 3 through 5 manipulated these features to examine their impact on responses. Study 3 found that weapon independently affected some responses to terrorism, and affected others in conjunction with the type of target. Study 3 also found that some individual characteristics were important after controlling for event features. Study 4 found that type of weapon interacted with the presence of an actual attack to impact responses to terrorism. Study 5 incorporated a series of subjective evaluations of each scenario, and found that these evaluations were not related to responses after accounting for event features and individual characteristics. Differences between Studies 3 and 5 also suggest differing responses to threats and attacks. This dissertation reviews the relevant literature for responses to terrorism and perceptions of risk. Also, the results are discussed in relation to previous research, and several implications are outlined for emergency preparedness and response agencies. Implications for future studies and empirical extensions of this work are also discussed