The interactions between religious and secular elites differ across societies, and those interactions may evolve differently even in the face of similarly controversial issues. What explains variation in relations between religious and secular elites in comparative settings? We highlight the links between religious change, political incentives, and the level of conflict or cooperation between religious and secular actors in public life. We illustrate distinct patterns of religious-secular relations with a paired comparison of two democracies with an intertwined history: the United States and the Philippines. In the United States, religious-secular relations have becoming increasingly conflictual as political incentives have changed in response to religious change. In the Philippines, in contrast, religious and secular actors maintain cooperative ties in part because relative religious stability has diminished political incentives to stoke religious-secular tensions.

Although there has been considerable descriptive writing about religious coalitions, more work is needed in specifying when these coalitions form and when they are successful. This article offers some sketches toward a more general theory of religious coalitions.

Although there has been substantial academic interest in the New Christian Right, to date there has been little effort to place it in a larger historical context. There have been three waves of fundamentalist Christian Right activity in this century, and there are a number of similarities between the contemporary organizations and earlier ones. The contemporary fundamentalist Right, however, is a more sophisticated political movement than its predecessors, with an expanded issue agenda and more widespread public awareness. More recently, a pentecostal Right has begun to become active in politics. For a number of historic reasons, this pentecostal Right may have greater potential to unite conservative Christians than does its fundamentalist counterpart.

To judge by the absence of religion from the pages of the American Political Science Review in its first century, most political scientists have embraced a secular understanding of the political world. We explore the evolving status of religion in the discipline by examining patterns of scholarly inquiry in the discipline's flagship journal. After finding religion an (at best) marginal topic and rejecting some plausible hypotheses for this outcome, we examine the major reasons religion has received so little attention—the intellectual origins of the discipline, the social background of practitioners, the complexity of religious measurements, and the event-driven agenda of political science. Despite the resurgence of scholarly interest in religion during the 1980s, the status of the subfield remains tenuous because of the intellectual isolation of research on the topic.

In this study, we seek to describe and explain changes in mass abortion attitudes in Poland and the United States. Both countries exhibit modest, but significant, declines in support for legal abortion during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century. When compositional, structural, and period effects are estimated separately, both countries exhibit strong pro-life period effects beginning in the late 1990s. In Poland, compositional effects exert pro-choice pressure but are counteracted by strong pro-life structural effects. By contrast, compositional effects in the United States are rather weak, but strong pro-choice structural effects are offset by pro-life period effects. The latter result is attributed to strategic framing of the abortion issue by pro-life elites.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2004. Thanks are due David Damore, Kenneth Fernandez, Sheila Lambert, Jonathan Strand, Matthew Wetstein, and Melanie Young for valuable comments and assistance.

The Prophetic Pulpit: Clergy, Churches, and Communities in American Politics.

Sidney Verba sta lavorando ad un nuovo libro, in collaborazione con Henry Brady e Kay Schlozman. Verba ha 71 anni, e molti si sarebbero aspettati che prendesse congedo dalla ricerca creativa per scrivere saggi sintetici sulla storia della disciplina. Dopo tutto Verba era presente alla nascita del movimento comportamentista in politica comparata — uno degli autori di The Civic Culture. E inoltre negli ultimi decenni ha pubblicato due importanti libri sul volontariato civico e sulla partecipazione politica, per un totale di quasi 1.100 pagine (Verba, Schlozman e Brady 1995; Burns, Schlozman e Verba 2001). È anche riuscito a pubblicare quattro articoli sulla American Political Science Review, tre sul Journal of Politics, due sull'American Journal of Political Science e due rispettivamente sul British Journal of Political Science e sul Journal of Theoretical Politics. Un livello di produttività notevole per studiosi di qualsiasi età. Di certo nessuno avrebbe obiezioni se si prendesse una pausa.