Departmental Honors Program
Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
Registrar's Thesis Guidelines Requirements for Format and Deposit of Theses for Honors
Example of Honors Thesis:
"Empowered Diaspora or Clientelist Politics?: An Intergenerational Study of Dominican Transnational Political Attitudes and Involvement"
Submitted as an Interdisciplinary Major in Latin America
Carlos Adolfo Gonzalez ‘14
Abstract: In the last several decades, the Dominican state has adopted a series of constitutional reforms that politically reincorporated its two million citizens currently residing abroad. My research focuses on the political attitudes and participation of Dominicans living in the United States, the epicenter of the Dominican diaspora. My honors thesis studied the prevalence of electoral clientelism, the exchange of goods and services for political support, within Dominican politics in the United States and analyzed the attitudes towards clientelism of Dominicans across three generations. Drawing from secondary literature, public opinion polls, newspaper articles and seventeen personal interviews, I concluded that, while political parties operating within the United States also utilize gifts and favors as a way to gain political support and win elections, clientelist exchanges within the diaspora are not as common or as explicit as they are in the Dominican Republic. This fact, combined with a greater expectation within the diaspora for direct government action to mitigate social inequality in the Dominican Republic, leads me to believe that Dominican transnational politics cannot be characterized as an extension of Dominican domestic politics. Though the influence of the diaspora is growing, institutionally and in terms of electoral power, the diaspora is not yet at a place to significantly change the clientelist system or influence Dominican domestic politics.
Complete Thesis available through Archives & Special Collections.