Government policy

The goal of this research is to answer a single question. During an urban evacuation, is it advisable for regional planners to allow transit units signal priority in cases where police assisted traffic controls are not an option? Standard practice for emergency evacuation is to place police officers at intersection throughout the evacuation area. However, this is not always an option where environmental factors such as the presence of fire, chemical plume, radioactive fallout (nuclear contaminated wind and dust) do not permit police presence. Results from a case study conducted on Washington D.C. show that it would take four non-prioritized transit units to accomplish the same task as three prioritized vehicles. Furthermore, allowing transit signal priority during an urban evacuation has little to no effect on evacuation clearance time or evacuee travel time. Moreover, when transit signal priority is restricted to operate only on evacuation routes, evacuee travel and delay time decreases.

Breast and prostate cancers are the most commonly diagnosed forms of cancer in women and men in the United States. The federal government has played an active role in dedicating resources toward breast and prostate cancers since the early 1990s, when policy actors successfully lobbied Congress to adopt policies that increased awareness and spending. Using theories of social construction, I argue that the key to their success was the ability of these policy actors to socially construct the illnesses of breast and prostate cancers into politically attractive public issues that appealed to federal policymakers. Through the use of embedded collective case study and content analysis of newspaper coverage and congressional data, this dissertation demonstrates how the social constructions of these illnesses impacted the way that breast and prostate cancers were treated as they moved through the policy process. The way in which social construction influenced the types of policies that were adopted to deal with these illnesses is also examined. Because social construction is a multidimensional and dynamic process, several different elements of this process were examined in this dissertation: the ways that policy actors attracted attention to these illnesses, how gender influenced advocacy efforts, the symbolic aspects of these illnesses, and the way the illnesses were defined on systemic and institutional agendas. Since this dissertation examines two different policy issues, the similarities and differences in breast and prostate cancer policymaking were analyzed. I found that discussing breast and prostate cancers in relation to their social constructions provides support for the importance of symbolism and non-rational policy-making processes.

Immigration has become a hot button issue across the United States. Television newsmen dedicate hours of time to excoriate the "illegal invasion." I viewed the immigration debate as something not directly concerning me. I am a legal citizen of Hispanic descent. My mother is a naturalized citizen from Mexico. However, as the government conducted raids looking for illegal immigrants, my mother became more aware of her place as a Mexican woman living in the Midwest. She wondered whether people would assume she was illegal because of her accent and appearance. Our discussions prompted me to think about of my place in the story, and about my lack of connection with the Hispanic culture. I set out to interview migrants living in South Florida, and to document my and my mother's experience with immigration and assimilation.

This paper examines permit trading as an instrument for greenhouse gas emission abatement and suggests that a cap and trade scheme is the lowest-cost option for achieving this goal. The paper examines relevant examples of emission trading within the United States, including the Acid Rain Program contained within the 1990 Clean Air Act, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and the Chicago Climate Exchange. I address the circumstances, constraints, and degree of success of such programs in relation to the Kyoto Protocol as well as other possible permit schemes at the national level within the United States. I contrast tradable permits with other forms of environmental abatement policy including command and control regulation and taxation. Finally, I analyze the effect of several variables including population and GDP on emissions growth and draws conclusions on what extent those variables play on shaping a domestic greenhouse gas trading program.

Democracy promotion is an important tenet of United States foreign policy. However, U.S. democracy promotion efforts are conditioned by geopolitical concerns, economic goals, and security interests. This thesis analyzes the impact of U.S. foreign policy in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Evidence from these cases suggests that United States foreign policy has contributed to the growth of unhealthy or pseudo-democracies in Latin America because frequently the policy reinforces the political and economic power of entrenched elites or the military. These groups, whose interests more closely align with U.S interests, are often uncommitted to supporting policy that promotes human rights and equitable distribution of wealth and power or that demands universal political liberties. Democracy is promoted rhetorically rather than in practice, and consequently is unresponsive and illegitimate. Future democracy promotion efforts by the United States, if they are to be successful, must overcome this illegitimacy by compensating for the conflicts that conditioned democracy produces.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was approved by Congress on November 16, 1990 after years of American Indian lobbying due to the unfair treatment of American Indian remains. Since the enactment of NAGPRA there have been multiple complaints from the archaeological community that the way in which they conduct their jobs has been severely limited by the implementation of NAGPRA. In this study I compare data from the Secretary's Report to Congress questionnaire, conducted by the National Park Service's Federal Archaeology Program, to determine whether NAGPRA has caused an increase or decrease in the amount of archaeological administrative, laboratory, and fieldwork completed between 1985 and 2005. The comparison shows that there was a significant increase in specific archaeological practices in the years following the implementation of NAGPRA. Looking at the changes in work patterns of archaeologists allows us to assess the success of NAGPRA and it provides empirical evidence to evaluate the claims made by parties affected by the act.

Greenways are corridors of relatively intact natural vegetation through otherwise disturbed habitat that typically connect larger protected natural areas. The establishment of greenway systems throughout the United States is a testament to the increasing recognition of the necessity to incorporate wild areas within urban and other disturbed landscapes for the sake of biological sustainability and the emotional welfare of human residents. In my thesis, I examine a local greenway in Jupiter, Florida, the Abacoa Greenway, which is both product and component of the greenway movement, a recent and revolutionary phenomenon in urban planning. I evaluate the greenway's ecology, the specific functions it serves, and its significance within the broader realm of environmental ethics. The primary protected habitats are a mixture of scrubby pine flatwoods and shallow wetland basins. The flatwoods provide important habitats for numerous native species, including the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) and the many commensal species that live in the tortoises' burrows. The shallow wetland basins also serve a number of purposes, including a surface water management system. As a whole, the greenway is an important resource for human recreation and environmental education, including scholarly research by students and faculty at Florida Atlantic University. It serves as important link between people and nature in an urban setting where they might otherwise be completely estranged.

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Timothy Steigenga, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Using the United States and Spain as case studies, this thesis argues that increasingly restrictive immigration policies instituted by receiving countries have little to no effect on the net inflow of immigration, nor do they promote a higher rate of assimilation for those immigrants already present within the host country. An analysis of the net inflow of immigrants, their social and economic status, and their rate of assimilation in the U.S. and Spain suggests that restrictive policies only further the social and economic exclusion of immigrants from the host society. Restrictive immigration policies are more effective at keeping immigrants outside of the host country's society than its borders.