Following recent insight into how citizens respond to attempts to correct political and salient misperceptions (Nyhan and Riefler, 2010, Political Behavior 32 (2): 303–330), we also expect that certain characteristics will predispose citizens to react strongly to messaging on highly contentious issues. Specifically, we expect that respondents will express an opinion that is even stronger in line with their predispositions when exposed to frames that challenge their position. Using an experiment on abortion opinion embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find little indication that Pro-Abortion Access and Anti-Abortion Access frames move opinion on abortion in the aggregate, but there is evidence that specific characteristics correlate with a “backfire” effect identified by Nyhan and Riefler (2010, Political Behavior 32 (2): 303–330). In particular, gender, religiosity, and “Born-Again” Christian affiliation are all predictive of responding to either the Anti-Abortion Access or Pro-Abortion Access frame by moving the opposite direction as intended on the feeling thermometer.

This study considers the sources of evangelical support for Israel, utilizing an original survey of 1,000 evangelical and born-again respondents. The results show that the three strongest predictors of evangelical and born-again Christian support for Israel are (1) age (older respondents are more supportive); (2) opinion of Jews; and (3) socialization (frequency of hearing other evangelicals talking about Israel). Our results also show that evangelical support for Israel is driven by respondents' beliefs rooted in evangelical Christian theology on eschatology and Biblical literalism. Thus, the most significant ideological statements that were found in the research were that the “State of Israel is proof of the fulfillment of prophesy regarding the nearing of Jesus' Second Coming” and that “Jews are God's chosen people.” Another important finding is that there is less support toward Israel among young evangelicals (ages 18–29).

Comparative research on authoritarianism has largely neglected religion. Yet, in order to understand the logic of authoritarian control over the civil society, it is necessary to study how the authoritarian regimes deal with religious groups. In this paper, lessons from the two rapidly expanding fields on regulation of religion and comparative authoritarianism are combined. In particular, a conceptualization of regulation of religion in the authoritarian context is proposed, according to which positive endorsement of religion can be understood as co-optation, whereas negative restrictions can be seen as repression. By employing data on positive endorsement and negative restrictions on religion from 2014 for ca. 70 countries, three different clusters of authoritarian countries regarding the regulation of religion are identified. Finally, it is argued that capacity and ambition of both the religious groups and the authoritarian regimes are the main determinants of regulation.

In the early days after the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Islamist movements and parties appeared to be the winners of the political transformation. This opened new opportunities for activism and political participation for Islamist men and women. The political organizing of the Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood and Ennahda women in Tunisia before, during, and after the Arab Spring provides a significant case for addressing the gap in the literature on Islamist women's political organizing and agency. Moreover, it addresses the lack of scholarly attention to the Muslim Sisterhood and Ennahda women and the agency they manifest in their sociopolitical activism. Relying on primary and secondary interviews with these activists, this article traces the framing strategies, activism, and roles of Islamist women in Egypt and Tunisia. In both cases, we argue that government repression and backlash against Islamist movements is a shared experience and a central topic of identification for Islamist women. Islamist women in Tunisia and Egypt became more visible in the aftermath of the uprisings and reached into decision-making bodies such as a parliament when their countries were on the path toward democracy. Women from the two groups highlight democracy, freedom, human rights, and women's rights to frame their activism.

We examine the changing nature of an authoritarian regime, which is emerging from the social and political conditions shaped by the unconsolidated democracy in Bangladesh. Drawing on desk-based research combined with interviews from the field, we argue that the current form of the authoritarian regime in Bangladesh represents the characteristics of competitive authoritarianism. We find that authoritarianism in Bangladesh combines “election manipulation” with three additional social and political mechanisms: “marginalization of political oppositions” leading to the oppositional void, “institutionalization of authoritarian policies,” and “co-option of religious leaders.” By adding these new mechanisms of authoritarian politics and tracing the links between politics and religion, we aim to expand the theory of competitive authoritarianism and unpack the puzzle of democratic consolidation in Bangladesh.

This paper highlights the impact of religious oppositions in Muslim-majority states towards security cooperation with the U.S. Such cooperation provides security but is risky as the U.S. can coerce its weaker allies and push for regime change. To protect against this possibility, this paper suggests that incumbents in recipient states strategically extend or limit cooperation based on the strength of Islamist opposition parties. Weaker Islamist oppositions pose a threat to incumbents in recipient states as the U.S. can coerce and replace them without fear of bringing anti-U.S. elements to power, which results in lower cooperation. In case of a stronger Islamist opposition, the regime's replacement cannot offer better policy concessions to the U.S.; hence, a strong Islamist opposition leads to more extensive cooperation. This mechanism is demonstrated through U.S. military aid acceptance in 40 Muslim-majority states during 2002–2015, and a comparison of U.S. security relations with Algeria and Tunisia.

What is the relationship between religion and human development? Using data from the pooled 1981–2014 World and European Values Surveys, we examine the effect of human development on a country's level of religious attendance and belief. Consistent with the idea that the primary causal mechanism underlying secularization theory has to do with the substitutability of secular and religious goods, we find that human development has a negative effect on religious attendance but no effect on religious belief. Our results indicate that as societies develop, we should not be surprised if religious belief remains high even as religious attendance declines. The negative effect of human development on religious attendance is driven primarily by a country's level of education and health. Our analysis suggests that it is important to think carefully about what one's theoretical model of the secularization process implies for different aspects of religion.

Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their churches. Yet, direct observations of political topics in a wide set of religious settings are rare. We examine the nature of political speech by clergy with a novel dataset of over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of validation, we find political content in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven of 10 pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic data to link the sermons to demographic and political information around the church and to information about the church and pastor to evaluate the variation of political content in sermons. We find that most pastors—across location and denomination—engage around political topics, confirming the intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.

The fight against terrorism prompts governments to differentiate between “good” religious practices and the “bad” ones. The simplistic dichotomy of “good” and “bad” Muslims has led to a cascade of criticism, but a fallacy underlying this dualism remains underexplored. This paper examines the “no true Scotsman” fallacy that is prevalent in the political discourse surrounding terrorism and religion. It argues that China's attempt to counteract the essentialist assumption about Uyghurs leads to a reinforced “good-versus-bad” dichotomous categorization of Muslims, reflected in the binary of “normal” and “illegal” in China's religious policy. This is a major contribution to the existing literature on politics and religion because, theoretically, this paper applies the “no true Scotsman” fallacy and “good” and “bad” Muslims dichotomy to explain the relationship between politics and religion; empirically, it provides a rich overview of the political nature of religious policy in China.

How, and in what contexts, do U.S. senators publicly invoke religious rhetoric when engaging with their constituents? Do periods of heightened public anxiety make senators more likely to use religious rhetoric? We use the Internet Archive's 90-terabyte collection of material from the U.S. government's Internet domain (.gov) to evaluate the relationships between insecurity, anxiety, and religious rhetoric on senators' official websites. We estimate the association between a senator's use of anxiety-related terms on her official website in a given year (as a proportion of overall yearly words) and that senator's use of religious rhetoric (public-facing religiosity). We find a strong, positive association between senators' public display of anxious sentiments and public-facing religiosity in a given year. This research advances scholarly understanding of how U.S. legislators invoke religion in public spaces. It also models the use of “big data” sources and scalable, time-variant text-data approaches for measuring and analyzing religion and elite political behavior.

Under what conditions can faith leaders influence peace in civil wars? The ongoing conflict in Congo, Syria, and Yemen indicate that faith leaders can fuel sectarian divide, but also intervene on the side of peace. Drawing on experiences in Sierra Leone's civil war, this paper highlights the role of faith leaders as moral guarantors of peace processes, with respondent former rebels indicating that without interfaith delegations personally bringing the peace accord to their remote jungle camps, they would not have trusted the UN-led process. Ethnographic analysis and over 60 field interviews with former combatants and religious leaders, presents a model for answering why faith leaders were central in terminating this conflict. Combatant's personal experience with a diverse mixture of Christian, Traditional, and Islamic leaders contributed to high confidence in peace accords, due to interfaith practices deeply embedded within the culture and shows the dispositions, rituals, and interfaith practices that provided the cultural foundations for successful interfaith intervention. The paper ends with generalizations for other interfaith groups seeking to intervene in conflict.

Studies have documented more negative attitudes and a higher level of social hostilities toward religious minorities in Muslim than in non-Muslim countries. I seek to explain what contributes to these poor interfaith relations. Diverging from the mainstream approaches that focus on cultural, institutional, or psychological explanations, I argue that the poorer interfaith relations in Muslim countries are driven by high levels of religious bonding or religiously homogeneous friendships among Muslims in these countries. Analyzing a global survey of more than 17,000 Muslims and a report documenting how religious groups in a country restrict or discriminate against each other, I show that religious bonding is related to more negative attitudes toward religious minorities, that a country's level of religious bonding is positively related to its level of social hostilities, and that religious bonding is indeed higher among Muslims in Muslim countries than among Catholics in Catholic-majority Latin American countries.

The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, although widely noted for their clarity, are also rich and capacious enough to merit differing interpretations among scholars of good will and good faith. However, despite the noble intentions and praiseworthy work of the late Michael Novak and other Catholic neoconservatives, their marketing of St. Thomas Aquinas as the “first Whig” appears to sever elements of the Angelic Doctor's philosophy from its essential principles. Although jealously guarding the nobility of conscience and the interior life, St. Thomas envisioned a political community that was decidedly hierarchical and in which the faith was to be shepherded by the state, which itself was charged with suppressing heresy and dissident thinking. These political ideas, moreover, are rooted in the very heart of St. Thomas Aquinas's deepest philosophical and theological principles.

Can a concept such as dignity, with roots in hierarchy and exclusion, serve as the constitutional basis for advancing egalitarian justice within a democratic political community? This article highlights some concerns, via engagement with the work of Indian constitutional architect and anti-caste champion B.R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar strongly associates dignity with upper-caste status in Hinduism, and with dispositions to haughtiness or arrogance toward lower-status persons. His analysis has implications for recent treatments which frame dignity as a property which is possessed equally by all persons and is suitable for grounding egalitarian justice within political communities. In such accounts, dignity is shown to entail a defensive disposition and indignation against others as potential rights violators. This introduces tensions between the dignitarian foundation and in some cases very expansive social justice aims. Ambedkar offers an alternative conception of innate worth or worthiness, entailing dispositions to openness and inclusiveness, rendered as fraternity, Deweyan social endosmosis, and ultimately the Buddhist maitri. Such an approach avoids some tensions between dignity/indignation and egalitarian aims, while also offering a way to conceptualize human and non-human animal relations that avoids simply reinscribing status hierarchies.

“Sectarianization”—the political instrumentalization of sectarian identities—is a profitable strategy for many state and non-state actors. This paper presents a theory of sectarianization, as well as an accompanying typology. The paper does not seek to explain the causes of sectarian conflict; rather, the paper examines how third parties respond to exogenous instances of such conflict. The paper argues that third parties face incentives to cultivate strategic ambiguity about their own stances, especially amid significant religious and political competition. In such competitive environments, third parties appear to take stances based on the interaction among three factors: first, a short-term cost-benefit analysis of whether to take sides and if so, how far to align with either of the main two sectarian actors; second, pre-existing relationships between the third party and the two main sectarian actors; and third, a desire to maintain long-term credibility with the broadest audience possible.

Does the ethnic dimension of violence—religious versus tribal—shape whether individuals perceive national versus local issues as central? Based on survey data collected in Jos, Nigeria—a site of recurring ethnic violence since 2001—this paper argues that attribution to local versus national causes varies depending on whether individuals perceive the violence as religious or tribal. We also show that this has implications for peacebuilding, as views of the ethnic dimensions of violence also distinctly shape attitudes regarding national- versus local-level solutions. Broadly, this paper demonstrates the importance of a more nuanced approach to the study of ethnic conflict—specifically, the need to interrogate how perceptions of identity, conflict, and the locus of conflict interrelate.

The literature on voting for Christian-democratic parties has emphasized that voters of these parties are still motivated by the old religious cleavages that led to the formation of these parties and that structured the vote for these parties for years. Their strong attachment to religious parties even immunized Christian voters from the temptation of the radical right. Yet what the role the new cultural dimension about immigration, civic integration, and identity plays in structuring the vote for religious parties is unclear. Are voters of religious parties immune to the effect of the party polarization of immigration? This paper shows that the policy positions of religious parties matter for what kind of voter votes for them. This paper shows the importance of immigration attitudes in voting for three different religious parties in the Netherlands by combining eight national election surveys between 1994 and 2017.

This article analyzes the use of religious language on Twitter by members of the U.S. Congress (MOCs). Politicians use various media platforms to communicate about their political agendas and their personal lives. In the United States, religious language is often part of the messaging from politicians to their constituents. This is done carefully and often strategically and across media platforms. With members of Congress increasingly using Twitter to connect with constituents on a regular basis, we want to explain who uses religious language on Twitter, when, and how. Using 1.5 million tweets scraped from members of Congress in April of 2018, we find that MOCs from both major political parties make use of a “religious code” on Twitter in order to send messages about their own identities as well as to activate the religious identities of their constituents. However, Republicans use the code more extensively and with Judeo-Christian-specific terms. Additionally, we discuss gender effects for the ways MOCs use “religious code” on Twitter.

Muslims in the United States are often constructed as anti-American and are perceived to have little engagement with politics. Moreover, Arab and Muslim identity is often conflated in the public mind. In this note, we introduce results from a randomized survey experiment conducted in three states with varying Muslim populations—Ohio, California, and Michigan—to assess how trustworthy respondents rate a local community leader calling for unity when that individual signals themselves to be an Arab, Muslim, or Arab Muslim, as opposed to when they do not signal their background. Across the board, and in each state, respondents rate the community leader as less trustworthy when he is identified as Muslim American or as Arab Muslim, but not when he is identified as Arab. These results suggest that the public does not conflate these two identities and that Muslims are evaluated more negatively than Arabs, even when hearing about their prosocial democratic behavior.

When the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) again took control after the 2012 general election, Japan's ruling party politicians increasingly associated themselves with Shinto Seiji Renmei, a political organization that is affiliated with Shinto, the country's native religion. What are the motivations for joining such a group, considering Japan has institutional regulations regarding the separation of politics and religion, in addition to there being no sign of rising religiosity among the Japanese population? I explain this puzzle by focusing on politicians' electoral incentives in a changing environment of Japan's party politics. As the opposition became fragmented after 2012, the ruling party's candidates found it electorally advantageous to appeal to the core supporters rather than the centrist floating voters. An empirical analysis of an original dataset supports my argument. The findings suggest the changes in Japan's political landscape might affect the future strategies of LDP politicians, particularly regarding the coalition with Komeito. Overall, this study proposes that there is a need to pay closer attention to politicians' strategic use of religion in politics.