'Descended from immigrants and revolutionists': how family immigration history shapes representation in Congress

Does recent immigrant lineage influence the legislative behavior of members of Congress on immigration policy? We examine the relationship between the immigrant background of legislators (i.e., their generational distance from immigration) and legislative behavior, focusing on roll-call votes for landmark immigration legislation and congressional speech on the floor. Legislators more proximate to the immigrant experience tend to support more permissive immigration legislation. Legislators with recent immigration backgrounds also speak more often about immigration in Congress, though the size of immigrant constituencies in their districts accounts for a larger share of this effect. A regression discontinuity design on close elections, which addresses selection bias concerns and holds district composition constant, confirms that legislators with recent immigrant backgrounds tend to support pro-immigration legislation. Finally, we demonstrate how a common immigrant identity can break down along narrower ethnic lines in cases where restrictive legislation targets specific places of origin. Our findings illustrate the important role of immigrant identity in legislative behavior and help illuminate the legislative dynamics of present-day immigration policy.Accepted manuscrip

Navigating the complexities of community monitoring reporting and verification (CMRV)

Under REDD+, the UNFCCC’s financial tool for the preservation of the world’s tropical forests, the necessity to monitor performance as well as involve local people is made clear in the policy documentation. Community Monitoring Reporting and Verification (CMRV) combines these two policy needs to create a concept that delegates the responsibility of ground-level monitoring to local communities. This is a deeply complicated model to implement, balancing local, national, and international needs, incorporating divergent stakeholder opinions, as well as livelihood issues, political dynamics, natural resource management and systemic change. Within this field, I identified three research areas, namely how CMRV fits into the REDD+ MRV policy context, how local people might engage with social, or ‘wellbeing’ monitoring, and the sustainability of CMRV as a local and national institution. There are only a handful of CMRV projects occurring throughout the world, building on the foundations created by locally-based monitoring, and I have been involved in facilitating CMRV in the North Rupununi region of Guyana with traditional Makushi Amerindian communities. This provides the study site for a number of the research chapters. The thesis starts by reviewing how CMRV might synergise with REDD+, particularly looking at the pros and cons of using local people instead of professional scientists for monitoring tasks. The majority opinions lean towards local people being well positioned and capable to fulfil this role, while the additional financial, cultural and empowerment benefits make this approach attractive rather than simply viable. It then moves on to looking more deeply at the previously unexplored area of locally-based social monitoring, or ‘wellbeing’ monitoring. In Guyana, I explored the similarities between external and local formulations of the wellbeing concept and its measurement, finding them to be not too dissimilar. However, when investigating how to implement wellbeing monitoring, practitioners face some complex trade-offs, such as subjective vs. objective measures, or internal vs. external validity, and need to be wary of simple quantification. The final analyses look more generally at CMRV, starting from the observation that after two years of operation, the project in Guyana can neither be said to be particularly empowering or sustainable. The barriers to local participation and associated power dynamics were explored, identifying why the devolution of responsibilities has been lower than expected. Lastly a Systems Thinking approach was taken to reveal counter-intuitive patterns and architectural flaws in the CMRV institutional framework that are leading to inherent unsustainability. The thesis concludes by looking at three cross-cutting themes: paternalism; hastiness in project work; and balancing different opinions. Drawing from my own journey, bringing personal values (such as of humility, patience and empathy) to bear in these institutional difficulties is a strong approach to navigating CMRV towards betterment. I finish by highlighting the most significant practical output from this work: a decision-making framework that proportions a project’s impact on stakeholder wellbeing with their decision-making power.Open Acces

The evaluation and modification of a YMCA testing and counseling program on the basis of the counselees' reactions to it

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1946. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Ising Field Theory on a Pseudosphere

We show how the symmetries of the Ising field theory on a pseudosphere can be exploited to derive the form factors of the spin fields as well as the non-linear differential equations satisfied by the corresponding two-point correlation functions. The latter are studied in detail and, in particular, we present a solution to the so-called connection problem relating two of the singular points of the associated Painleve VI equation. A brief discussion of the thermodynamic properties is also presented.Comment: 39 pages, 6 eps figures, uses harvma

What information do citizens want? Evidence from one million information requests in Mexico

While scholars have emphasized the importance of information for accountability, little research has addressed the demand for government information by real citizens. We study the totality of information requests filed with Mexican federal government agencies from 2003 to 2015, over 1 million requests in all. We use unsupervised methods to categorize requests, revealing the diversity of topics including environment, security, budgets, and government procurement and employees. While many topics have clear public accountability-seeking purposes, others are focused on more private, micro-political goals. Analysis over time and across states reveals linkage between information demand and issues of public interest such as environmental impacts and criminal violence. Our results demonstrate that, given functioning access-to-information institutions, citizens in a transitional democracy really do demand information relevant to public accountability