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Why do states give institutions the ability to legally punish them? While past research focuses on international pressure to delegate authority to third parties, I argue that domestic politics plays a key role. By viewing domestic politics through a principal–agent framework, I argue that the more accountable individual legislators remain to the public, the more likely it is that the legislature will delegate legal punishment authority. I focus on National Human Rights Institutions—domestic institutions tasked with protection and promotion of human rights—to build the argument. Electoral institutions that decrease monitoring of legislator agents, or institutional makeup that allows the executive to displace the public as the principal lead to National Human Rights Institutions without punishment power. Using Bayesian logistic analyses I test four hypotheses, all of which are in agreement with the argument.

This dissertation argues that compositional shifts that appear in Dutch cityscape paintingsdepicting Haarlem and Amsterdam between 1650 and 1672 indicate cultural fluctuations thatimpacted expressions of urban citizenship. In the decades following the Protestant Reformationand the eighty-year revolt against Spain, Dutch academics and political reformers proposed arelationship between city and inhabitant structured around rationality, voluntary collectivism,and a desire for environmental and existential certainty. Chapter 1 evaluates texts that addressthe destabilizing effects of the war with Spain and the necessity to strengthen Dutch culture in itsaftermath. While written at different times between the start of the war in 1568 and theconclusion of the Stadholderless period in 1672, each of these texts written by various culturalreformers and critics, from the philologist Justus Lipsius, to the historian Caspar Barlaeus, andthe economist Pieter de la Court, propose a subjective engagement with Dutch cities and theirsystems of local government. Chapter 2 maps this trend toward subjective engagements withcultural and political institutions onto visual depictions of the Dutch cities of Haarlem andAmsterdam. Prints and then paintings of cities replace distanced compositional views with moresubjective views, where the features of the city are apprehended from fixed and specificlocations, emphasizing each city's distinctive cultural character. Chapter 3 looks morespecifically at cityscape paintings produced between 1650 and 1672 to argue that paintersproduced images responsive to urban residents' own developing sense of subjective intimacywith Amsterdam and Haarlem. These images provided a visual vocabulary to the desire forneostoic order and social collectivism expressed by Lipsius, Barlaeus, and the engineer SimonStevin. Chapter 4 considers how these paintings functioned as symbolic objects, arguing thatthey were physical expressions of urban citizenship and bourgeois social inclusion for theresident-collectors who bought and displayed cityscapes in their homes. The concluding chapterproposes additional topics of consideration, such as a comparison between Dutch and Englishpictorial expressions of urban citizenship and the extent to which these expressions wereimpacted by the political instability experienced by both cultures during the seventeenth century.

The question of who should utilize the war power has been debated from the founding of the republic and the core issues while couched in different terms, and while war has become much more technologically advanced, remain the same. The fundamental question is one of what the President can do, and what Congress should do. I attempt to primarily address the question of what Congress should do with regard to the war powers rather than what the President can do because the scope of presidential war powers has been extensively researched and written about in the scholarly literature. Instead I address what from an institutional structure and policy perspective Congress ought to do with relation to the war powers and their execution.

Few towns in the United States can claim to be as in touch with its Civil War history as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. As the site of one of the war's most significant battles, Gettysburg today lives and breathes the Civil War every day through the historical tourism that Gettysburg National Military Park encourages, which itself has bred a Civil War merchandise economy in the town itself. As such, the town naturally becomes a new battleground for contemporary issues regarding the memory of the Civil War—including, most significantly, the interpretation and presentation of the Confederate battle flag. As the nation passed the 150th anniversary of the war itself, reigniting discussion on its purpose and legacy, controversies flared nationally and locally on display of the Confederate battle flag and its meaning as a symbol of racial hatred or southern heritage. During the summer of 2016, 11 members of the Gettysburg community with a stake in these discussions were interviewed on their thoughts and feelings towards the Confederate flag.