Sense of Belonging of LGBTQ+, Racial Minority, and Religiously Affiliated College Students at Binghamton University

Binghamton University and institutions alike have put forth certain rules and efforts to ensure that students of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and students who are religiously affiliated feel safe. The reality is that many of these students feel unwelcome and ostracized due to their social identities (Blakmon et al., 2020). The aim of this non-experimental study was to investigate if there was a significant difference in sense of belonging among minority groups of undergraduate students who attend Binghamton University, as well as those who are not part of minority groups. We hypothesized that the sense of belonging amongst minority groups will be lower when compared to the student population that does not self-identify within one of the following minority groups: LGBTQ+, racial minority, religiously affiliated. There was no significant data to conclude that students at Binghamton University who are LGBTQ+, a part of a racial minority, or are religiously affiliated have a lower or higher sense of belonging compared to students who are not part of those minority groups. This may mean that Binghamton University has found ways to support students that belong to these minority groups

Human Rights Shaming Through INGOs and Foreign Aid Delivery

Does the ``shaming" of human rights violations influence foreign aid delivery decisions across OECD donor countries? We examine the effect of shaming, defined as targeted negative attention by human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), on donor decisions about how to deliver bilateral aid. We argue that INGO shaming of recipient countries leads donor governments, on average, to ``bypass" the recipient government in favor of non-state aid delivery channels, including international and local NGOs and international organizations (IOs). However, we expect this relationship to be conditional on a donor country's position in the international system. Minor power countries have limited influence in global affairs and are therefore more able to centrally promote human rights in their foreign policy. Major power countries, on the other hand, shape world politics and often confront ``realpolitik" concerns that may require government-to-government aid relations in the presence of INGO shaming. We expect aid officials of minor donor countries to be more likely to condition aid delivery decisions on human rights shaming than their counterparts of major donor countries. Using compositional data analysis, we test our argument using originally collected data on human rights shaming events in a time-series cross-sectional framework from 2004 to 2010. We find support for our hypotheses: On average, OECD donor governments increase the proportion of bypass when INGOs shame the recipient government. When differentiating between donor types we find that this finding holds for minor but not for major powers. These results add to both our understanding of the influences of aid allocation decision-making and our understanding of the role of INGOs on foreign-policy

Sense of Belonging among Minority Groups at Binghamton University

Although Binghamton University and institutions alike put forth certain rules and efforts to ensure that students of the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) community, people of color, and students who are religiously affiliated feel safe, the reality is that many of these students feel unwelcome and different due to their social identities. The aim of this non-experimental study is to investigate if there is a significant difference in sense of belonging among minority groups of undergraduate students who attend Binghamton University, as well as between undergraduate students who self-identify within a minority group, with those who do not. We hypothesize that sense of belonging amongst different minority groups will be lower when compared to the Binghamton University student population that does not self-identify within a minority group. A survey was sent to undergraduate students across the university campus, and inferential statistical analysis was used to compare the means of the different subgroups. We contend that results from this study may highlight how offering various supports for minority students may not be enough to create a sense of belonging within academic institutions and that more research needs to be conducted to have effective safeguards in place.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2021/1064/thumbnail.jp

A New Approach to the Allocation of Aid among Developing Countries: Is the USA Different from the Rest?

This paper attempts to explain the factors that determine the geographical allocation of foreign aid. Its novelty is that it develops a rigorous theoretical model and conducts the corresponding empirical investigations based on a large panel dataset. We run regressions for different major donors (United States, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and multilateral organizations) with the explicit objective of establishing whether the United States, in light of its geopolitical hegemony, behaves differently from others. We find that all the donors respond to recipient need in their allocation of aid, but that the United States puts less emphasis on this than the other donors with the exception of Japan. We also find that the United States puts more emphasis on donor–recipient linkages than do the other donors suggesting that the United States attaches greater importance to issues of donor interest, for example, geopolitical, commercial, and other links with specific recipients

International Organizations and the Quality of Domestic Governance: the Multiple Principals Problem

Previous research generally ignores the costs of international cooperation. Using the principal-agent framework, we draw attention to the agency loss that occurs domestically when multiple international actors simultaneously influence national policy makers. We contribute to the literature by emphasizing the potentially negative consequences of competition between international organizations and citizens for influence over domestic politicians. Drawing upon previous theoretical and empirical work on the multiple principals-common-agent problem, we hypothesize that the joint influence of a country’s memberships in multiple international governmental organizations (IGOs) generates consistent, unintended, disruptive effects on governance. The empirical part of the paper applies our theoretical expectations to indicators of the quality of domestic governance. The results support our argument and show that the disruptive effect is strongest in less democratic countries

Multivariate Analysis of the Temporal and Spatial Correlations of the Global Human Rights Dataset

We propose an extension of a previously proposed method for lead-lag analysis of multivariate time series to include the analysis of spatial correlations. We applied the extended spatial and temporal method to CIRIGHTS, a large global human rights dataset, in order to determine the most influential and most influenced indicators of human rights, freedoms, and atrocities over time. We consider four target countries, each from a different continent. The previously proposed method used a weighted directed network with several lags of each variable as nodes and with edges weighted by transfer entropy. In this study, that method is extended to the spatial multivariate time series by investigating geographical correlations between each target country and its surrounding region to determine which variables best represent activity between the target country and the surrounding region. The nodes in this undirected network are variables in the target country and variables in the surrounding region, with edges weighted by mutual information. Eigenvector centrality is used to determine which variables best represent activity between the target country and the surrounding region. Key findings indicate that occupational and worker rights are the most influential and most influenced in the target countries over time and by region, and laws tend to influence future activity

The Dynamics of Democracy, Development and Cultural Values

Over the past decades many countries have experienced rapid changes in their economies, their democratic institutions and the values of their citizens. Comprehensive data measuring these changes across very different countries has recently become openly available. Between country similarities suggest common underlying dynamics in how countries develop in terms of economy, democracy and cultural values. We apply a novel Bayesian dynamical systems approach to identify the model which best captures the complex, mainly non-linear dynamics that underlie these changes. We show that the level of Human Development Index (HDI) in a country drives first democracy and then higher emancipation of citizens. This change occurs once the countries pass a certain threshold in HDI. The data also suggests that there is a limit to the growth of wealth, set by higher emancipation. Having reached a high level of democracy and emancipation, societies tend towards equilibrium that does not support further economic growth. Our findings give strong empirical evidence against a popular political science theory, known as the Human Development Sequence. Contrary to this theory, we find that implementation of human-rights and democratisation precede increases in emancipative values

Rewards for Ratification: Payoffs for Participating in the International Human Rights Regime?

Among the explanations for state ratification of human rights treaties, few are more common and widely accepted than the conjecture that states are rewarded for ratification by other states. These rewards are expected to come in the form of tangible benefits - foreign aid, trade, and investment - and intangible benefits such as praise, acceptance, and legitimacy. Surprisingly, these explanations for ratification have never been tested empirically. We summarize and clarify the theoretical underpinnings of "reward-for-ratification" theories and test these propositions empirically by looking for increased international aid, economic agreements and public praise and recognition following ratification of four prominent human rights treaties. We find almost no evidence that states can expect increased tangible or intangible rewards after ratification. Given the lack of empirical support, alternative explanations seem more appealing for understanding human rights treaty ratification.Governmen

Inequality and Human Rights: Who Controls What, When, and How

This article tests the empirical relationship between inequality and the protection of personal integrity rights using a cross-national time-series data set for 162 countries for the years 1980?2004. The data comprise measures of land inequality, income inequality, and a combined factor score for personal integrity rights protection, while the analysis controls for additional sets of explanatory variables related to development, political regimes, ethnic composition, and domestic conflict. The analysis shows robust support for the empirical relationship between income inequality and personal integrity rights abuse across the whole sample of countries as well as for distinct subsets, including non-communist countries and non-OECD countries. The hypothesized effect of land inequality is also born out by the data, although its effects are less substantial and less robust across different methods of estimation. Additional variables with explanatory weight include the level of income, democracy, ethnic fragmentation, domestic conflict, and population size. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the results are not due to reverse causation, misspecification or omitted variable bias. The analysis is discussed in the context of inequality and rights abuse in specific country cases and the policy implications of the results are considered in the conclusion