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Legitimacy is a ubiquitous social phenomenon that is studied in a variety of social scientific research domains. Yet, the term is inherently complex, multifaceted, and often situated within complex social arrangements. This dissertation examines the empirical complexities of legitimacy within Nigeria, an emergent and rapidly developing sub-Saharan African nation fraught with political violence and instability. The first chapter outlines the historic and contemporary theoretical fields, revealing legitimacy as a multidimensional symbolic commodity that operates within many levels of a given social structure. The dissertation synthesizes these theories and assumes a relational approach that takes into account the structural characteristics within Nigeria’s populace and evaluates the dynamics between primary actors of the country’s politically contested field: the institutionalized government, armed non-state challengers, and the citizenry as the legitimizing audience. Chapter 2 begins by operationalizing legitimacy’s multidimensionality using survey data from two nationally representative samples. Confirmatory factor analysis reveals seven distinct components consisting of both normative and performance-based evaluative sources (where performance pertains to how a political system, institutions, and leaders function in practice). These dimensions are applied to Nigeria and reveal a diverse legitimacy landscape within a state balancing a complex and contentious ethno-political population. Chapter 3 investigates legitimacy relationships within a populace focusing on how neighborhood-level sentiments and community trust associate with individual legitimacy perceptions and attitudes towards authority system preservation. The analysis reveals that community consensus is a necessary condition for the positive influence of neighborhood-level legitimacy orientation on individual-level perceptions. Moreover, community trust is found to enhance the moderating properties of cons

What drives and shapes the insufficient and unequal access to constitutionally guaranteed economic and social goods and services in South Africa? I pose three puzzling patterns of rights realization that are inconsistent with the literature: Why do a larger percent of households live in shacks now than at the end of apartheid despite the government and activists prioritizing housing? Why has utility progress been slow despite a mix of for-profit and public providers? Why does the government play a large role in indirectly feeding people despite a lack of awareness of and pressure for realizing the right to food? I analyze a combination of interviews, ethnographic observations, national survey data, and primary documents to understand the patterns of rights realization of education, electricity, food, housing, sanitation, social security, and water. By examining the patterns of rights realization for these seven rights in tandem, I find that the materiality of rights results in both synergistic and gatekeeper relationships between economic and social rights. These complex relationships both exacerbate and are compounded by the limited ability of litigation and the courts to enforce rights realization. Using a field-level approach, this research shows that there are relationships between economic and social rights based on their material characteristics, and that these gatekeeper and synergistic relationships between economic and social rights must be taken into account to understand complex patterns of rights realization.

The Problem of educational attainment and student retention have received increasing attention by social researchers for many years. The focus of analysis has shifted from describing status mobility to the causal sequence of status transmission and attainment. The present study examines the process of formal educational attainment through student retention in American four-year colleges by applying objective and subjective variables in a sequence of causal relationships. The results of the study show student retention in higher education may depend on institutional resources such as, parent and sibling's educational attainments in addition to strong individual commitment to educational goals and positive feelings about the institution that the student attends. Though the sample in the study are relatively disadvantaged in academic ability, the findings suggest that high schools and colleges as primary socializing agents provide powerful influences in developing educational aspirations and commitments that help in the process of educational attainment among young adults. Taking relevant factors of retention, the knowledge-base is created for the design of expert system. User interface is developed with the help of object-oriented language to access the knowledge-base. The expert system will provide useful services to the users in terms of prescribing, monitoring and evaluating individualized intervention program(s) for the high risk students. This service will facilitate the process of educational attainment among the high risk students and perhaps, will help retain them in the given institution.