2018-2019 Senior Honors Theses
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/4111
This collection contains theses produced by Class of 2019 Honors students
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Browsing 2018-2019 Senior Honors Theses by Author "Belco, Michelle"
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Item ASIAN-AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOCIAL INVISIBILITY AND POLITICAL ALIENATION(2018-12) Chuor, BaonganContemporary political scientists have found that Asians do not follow the traditional socioeconomic model that is often used to predict an individual's likelihood to participate in the United States political process. As such, they have begun to explore the barriers to political participation but only focus on the internal roadblocks. Therefore, this paper contributes to the nascent literature on this subject by studying external barriers, such as social invisibility and political alienation, by implementing an original survey at the University of Houston.Item Identifying Breakdowns in the Integrated Transplantation Network(2019-05) Kambhampati, PraneethOrgan transplantation is a modern marvel of medicine. Yet even though the supply of organs has increased over time, the number of people that need organs has increased at a larger rate. The scope of the project is to create a supply and demand model of the transplantation network and to determine where the breakdowns are occurring. The transplantation supply process requires that the potential donor die either via brain death or cardiac death in a hospital. The organ or organs are then harvested by an organ procurement organization (OPO) who obtains approval from the family to collect the organ and then transfers it to the transplant hospital where the organ is transplanted into the recipient. This thesis seeks to explain the transplantation process and some of the breakdowns in the supply portion of the model, specifically with the OPOs and transplant hospitals.Item Under Pressure: Measuring Constituent Attitudes on Immigration and its Effects on Legislative Behavior(2019-05) Johnson, IsaiahImmigration is a highly contested topic that has divided political lines in much of recent history. Edwards and Gimpel (1999) show that immigration has not always been as polarized of an issue among voters, nor has it captivated as much partisanship in Congress as it has recently. This has led to the hypothesis that an increase in polarization among constituent attitudes surrounding immigrants has led to a decrease in bipartisanship in Congress on immigration legislation. To answer this question, the study will employ two tactics: First, this study will examine public opinion on immigrant sentiments using survey data extracted from the General Social Survey (GSS) over the time series 1994-2016, expanding upon the limited constituent anti-immigrant sentiment time series initiated by Butz and Kherberg (2016). After which, this study will combine the survey data with decennial Census data from years 1990, 2000, and 2010 in a multilevel regression and post-stratification model (MRP) (Butz and Kherberg, 2016), creating a state-level breakdown of constituent attitudes towards immigrants. Second, to correlate constituent attitudes to Congressional bipartisanship, I will measure immigration bill co-sponsorship over the same time series (1994-2016). To properly assume that an increase in polarization among constituent attitudes leads to a decrease in Congressional bipartisanship, I expect to see bipartisan bill co-sponsorship on immigration legislation decrease over the time-series, as the measure produced by the MRP show a progressive uptick in constituent polarization. These findings help contribute to the literature by providing new measures of state-level constituent attitudes on immigration, which can be correlated with legislative behavior to determine if Congressional policymaking accurately reflects public opinion.