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"The White Men's Countries explores how a shared ideal of race united the American and Australian governments during World War II and the early Cold War periods. This interpretation places cultural and ideological factors alongside the traditional emphasis on pragmatic economic and security considerations in explaining why two nations whose objectives in the Pacific region were often at odds were able to craft one of the most enduring diplomatic relationships of the twentieth century. It examines not only official policies and attitudes but also emphasizes the shared views on race carried by both American and Australian citizens that helped to ameliorate, and at times complicate, the bond between Washington D.C. and Canberra. This work also places greater emphasis on the post-World War II relationship as being the most crucial time in the shaping of the alliance. The White Men's Countries serves to help broaden our understanding of how racial ideology played a powerful role in the transnational relationships formed by the United States and Australia in the mid-twentieth century and how influential ideological factors became an international diplomacy"--

Americans expect the president to lead Congress, but Congress's partisan divide typically widens on presidential priorities. More often, presidents are reduced to leading their copartisans rather than Congress as a whole, but why? In this paper, I argue that competition for White House control creates incentives for parties to disagree on presidents' policy agendas, regardless of the contents of those agendas. I use an original data set of members' roll-call vote decisions on presidents' agendas between 1971 and 2010 to show that partisan polarization is larger on presidents' priorities and largest on their top priorities, above and beyond what we would expect from members' ideologies and standard party effects. These findings persist over time and under a wide range of alternative model specifications, bringing us closer to understanding the partisan conflict so prevalent in today's politics.

Do presidents unite or divide Congress? In new research which analyses more than 6,000 roll call votes over nearly 40 years, Travis J. Baker finds that members of the opposition party are about 6 percent less likely to support a president's priorities than members of the president's party. This occurs even when legislators have the same voting record, and the differences get wider as presidents speak for longer on the issue. He argues that this effect is mainly driven by divided government, since at those times Congress is more likely to vote for bills which are opposed to the president's agenda.

Beginning in 1987, American Presidents have published a National Security Strategy (NSS), a public statement of their administration's grand strategy for the conduct of foreign policy. Despite breaking with a centuries-old tradition of secrecy, NSS documents have been routinely dismissed by scholars and experts as little more than an exercise in public relations or "mere rhetoric." In this dissertation, I argue that such a dismissive attitude is unproductive because it overlooks important linkages between the public expression of foreign policy, the influence that symbolism and rhetoric have on threat perception and policy choice, and the diverse (and continually shifting) array of audiences that such documents reach and influence. I engage in a close rhetorical analysis of the NSS documents of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in order to make this argument. Additionally, I demonstrate that NSS documents are an important resource for comparatively evaluating various administrations' foreign policies, thus facilitating better deliberation over grand strategy. While NSS documents may not function as "blueprints" for foreign policy, they are an important site for grounding public argument over the future of American foreign policy in an increasingly uncertain world.

As the United States Department of Defense continues to increase the number of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) operations overseas, improved Human Systems Integration becomes increasingly important. RPA systems rely heavily on distributed team communications determined by systems architecture. Two studies examine the effects of systems architecture on operator workload of US Air Force MQ-1/9 operators. The first study ascertains the effects of communication modality changes on mental workload using the Improved Research Integration Pro (IMPRINT) software tool to estimate pilot workload. Allocation of communication between modalities minimizes workload. The second study uses IMPRINT to model Mission Intelligence Controllers (MICs) and the effect of the system architecture upon them. Four system configurations were simulated for four mission activity levels. Mental workload, monitoring time and the number of delayed tasks were estimated to determine the effect of changing system architecture parameters. Literature and MIC interviews provided parameters for the model. The analysis demonstrates that the proposed changes have significant effects which, in some conditions, bring the overall workload function toward a proposed theoretical optimum.

Even as many experts predict that zero emission vehicles including electric vehicles will become a dominant North American transportation technology, many buildings are still being constructed across North America without EV-ready parking areas, raising the possibility of significant retrofitting costs down the road and likely delaying EV adoption for some residents. This paper considers policy actions being taken by North American "leader jurisdictions" that have recognized the potential of EVs to reduce transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions and improve local air quality. It examines (1) requirements targeting the development and renovation of the built environment (building code amendments and municipal by-laws), (2) requirements targeting rules governing condominiums and landlord-tenant relationships and (3) property tax financing schemes (known to many US readers as PACE financing).