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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

The Trans-Universal Zombie Church of the Blissful Ringing is a religion that emerged in the context of a period of political uprising in Slovenia in 2012–13 and later consolidated into a church that now claims 12,000 members. We use the lens of invented religion and interviews conducted with observers and participants in 2017 to demonstrate ways in which the Zombie Church has been an unusually effective actor in contemporary Slovenian political discourse and, indeed, has broken ground by spotlighting challenges in the young republic's negotiation of the legal and cultural relationships between church, state, and civil society. Part 1 explores the context that led to the mobilization of Zombie as a multivalent symbol for political critique. Part 2 looks at the church's tenets, its success in compelling changes in Slovenia's registration process, and the challenge is its advocates raise to Slovenian church-state structures and practices.

The sweep of the coronavirus pandemic across the world and the United States offers an almost unparalleled opportunity to study how social systems cope with the threat and opportunities for collective action. In this paper, we draw on survey data collected as the United States flailed in response and before a general consensus among executive officeholders developed in the following weeks. In particular, we assess how holding prosperity gospel views strongly shaped perceptions of the virus and reactions to state responses to the virus. Research on the prosperity gospel is slowly expanding and this paper helps to highlight some missing dimensions. At a time when concerted action for the social good could be uniting the country, prosperity gospel beliefs systematically undermine that possibility by augmenting threat, raising outgroup barriers, and decreasing social trust.