Citizenship and Constructing Sense in Voting

This is a study of the ways in which citizens construct sense in the voting booth while voting. The experimental design is a pretest posttest control group. The driving theory is that citizens want to convince themselves that they have made sense of the information presented to them. This is their singular value. The reason why this is upheld as the singular value is because without the capacity to construct sense in the voting process, voters would otherwise feel disenfranchised (i.e. deprived of the right to vote) and subsequently feel alienated (i.e. deprived of the rewards that can come from voting). Citizens will be given an opportunity to present bills; they will evoke certain keywords and phrases. The citizen will later evoke varied terminology when confronted with voting patterns from "Senators". The test for the citizen in this experiment will be to remove those Senators who are voting at random and provide reasons for either reelection to or removal from office. There are two anticipated results: 1) Senators voting in random patterns will be removed from office in an equal or lesser proportion than remaining Senators, and 2) responses to non-random voting patterns will evoke lesser variation in terminology employed.M.S.Committee Chair: Kingsley, Gordon; Committee Member: Gaughan, Monica; Committee Member: Klein, Hans; Committee Member: Vallas, Steve