Perspectives from the Edge: Chaplains in Greater Boston, 1945–2015

We follow Bender et al.’s (Religion on the Edge: De‐Centering and Recentering the Sociology of Religion) call to study religion “on the edge” by looking at the work of chaplains, religious professionals who work outside of congregations. Rather than studying chaplains within a single type of institution—the military, healthcare, or other sectors—we shift the unit of analysis to geography, asking where chaplains in Greater Boston worked between 1945 and the present. Based on coverage in the Boston Globe, we find that chaplains, mostly men, worked across Greater Boston between 1945 and 2015. The majority were Catholic with frequent minorities of Protestants and Jews, and—after 1995—a few Buddhists, Muslims, and Humanists. Most worked in higher education, healthcare, and prisons. While much of the chaplains’ work seems improvisational and varied, we identify services related to ceremonies, bearing witness, and working around death as common occurrences across the venues where chaplains worked. To the extent that these patterns are evident in other cities, they suggest that chaplains have regularly been a quiet part of the religious landscape, that they are a consistent part of the institutional field, and that their work has more commonalities across sectors than previous studies suggest.     

Mosques,Churches, and Civic Skill Opportunities in Indonesia

This article examines the role of houses of worship as institutions where individuals acquire civic skills that can be deployed for political participation in the world's largest Muslim‐majority democracy: Indonesia. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic religious communities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this article investigates three questions: (1) What opportunities exist for individuals worshipping in Indonesian churches and mosques to develop and practice civic skills as part of their religious engagement? (2) Does civic skill opportunity vary across religious denominations? and (3) What factors might explain variation across different religious settings? The study shows that mosques offer fewer prospects for their worshippers to develop civic skills than do churches. These denominational differences can be explained by a house of worship's management practices, which are shaped by its degree of autonomy, style of worship, and the relative size of the religious denomination.     

The mirror and the hammer: the politics of resacralization

The paper consists of the opening chapter of Andrew Samuels’ book The Political Psyche, published in 1993, together with a retrospective introduction. In the chapter, the author discussed the possibilities and limitations of applying depth psychological thinking to social and political problematics. He situates the attempt to make such applications within a wider movement to refresh and reform Western political endeavours. He terms this wider project ‘resacralization’. The author cautions against psychological reductionism and a simplistic approach to market‐based capitalism, calling for a transformation of the latter to the degree possible. He links sociopolitical criticism and psychological writings on numinous experience, thereby connecting the worlds of politics and depth psychology without losing their separate and unique qualities.     

Does the Awareness of Mortality Shape People's Openness to Violence and Conflict? An Examination of Terror Management Theory

Terror management theory (TMT) proposes that evoking death‐related thoughts (mortality salience; MS) in individuals or groups can lead to stronger worldview defence and greater support for extremist violence. In three experiments, we tested whether an MS manipulation, and associated moderators, increased support for extremist violence. In Australian university students, Study 1 found no statistically significant main or moderated effects for MS on measures of extremist violence. However, participants exposed to the MS manipulation reported increases in conservative religiosity (belief in divine power). In Study 2, the MS manipulation had no significant effect on support for extremist violence for Australian university students primed with an antiviolent extremism norm. And in young Australian Jewish people (Study 3), the MS manipulation did not increase support for violence against migrants. However, there was an increase in support for policies that act to fight against violent extremism in Iraq and Syria in those exposed to the MS manipulation. Across three studies, we find little support for the hypothesis that MS results in increased support for violent extremism. Larger more methodological sound studies are needed to address inconsistencies in the evidence surrounding TMT and the MS hypothesis, at least in regards to violence and extremism.     

Playing the Woman Card: Ambivalent Sexism in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Race

Late in the 2016 U.S. Presidential primary, Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for playing the “woman’s card.” Theories of system justification suggest that attitudes about gender, particularly endorsement of hostile and benevolent sexism, likely shaped reactions to this campaign attack. Using a set of two studies, we find that hostile sexists exposed to the attack showed increased support for Trump and decreased support for Clinton. Benevolent sexists, however, reacted to Trump’s statements with increased support for Clinton, consistent with benevolent sexism’s focus on protecting women (Study 1). We further found that the woman card attack produced distinct emotional reactions among those with low and high levels of hostile and benevolent sexism. The attack also increased political participation among hostile sexists (Study 2). Our results offer new insights into the role of sexism in the 2016 presidential contest and further the discipline’s understanding of the gendered dimension of negative campaigning.     

Political Attitudes and the Processing of Misinformation Corrections

Misinformation often continues to influence people’s memory and inferential reasoning after it has been retracted; this is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Previous research investigating the role of attitude‐based motivated reasoning in this context has found conflicting results: Some studies have found that worldview can have a strong impact on the magnitude of the CIE, such that retractions are less effective if the misinformation is congruent with a person’s relevant attitudes, in which case the retractions can even backfire. Other studies have failed to find evidence for an effect of attitudes on the processing of misinformation corrections. The present study used political misinformation—specifically fictional scenarios involving misconduct by politicians from left‐wing and right‐wing parties—and tested participants identifying with those political parties. Results showed that in this type of scenario, partisan attitudes have an impact on the processing of retractions, in particular (1) if the misinformation relates to a general assertion rather than just a specific singular event and (2) if the misinformation is congruent with a conservative partisanship.     

The role of right-wing authoritarianism and political sophistication in shaping attitudes toward redistribution

Using data from the Austrian National Election Study (Study 1) and the American National Election Study (Study 2), this research investigated the role of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in shaping attitudes toward governmental action related to the redistribution of wealth. We show that RWA is a relevant variable in explaining attitudes toward redistribution policies, and that the association between RWA and redistribution attitudes is moderated by political sophistication. RWA was associated with opposition to redistribution policies among individuals high in political sophistication, while among individuals low in political sophistication, RWA was either associated with support for redistribution policies (Study 1) or unrelated to redistribution attitudes (Study 2). Results suggest that exposure to the political discourse in a society affects how psychological needs and motives are related to preferences regarding the redistribution of wealth through the government.     

Position,Preference and Personality: A Microlevel Explanation of Negativity in Day‐To‐Day Politics

While many scholars investigate the determinants of negativity in the political sphere, it remains largely unclear why some politicians are more negative than others. Studies thus far lack explanations at the individual level, and they almost exclusively focus on negativity during electoral races. Surveying national and regional representatives in Belgium (N = 228), this study seeks to explain individual politicians’ willingness to go negative during everyday politics. The results show that negativity is not so much related to institutionally driven differences between representatives but more to politicians’ personal characteristics and preference roles. Negative politics, hence, is not an inevitable result of institutional structures, rules, and norms, but rather depends on the characteristics and motivations of the individual representatives citizens elect.     

Motivating Political Participation Among Youth: An Analysis of Factors Related to Adolescents’ Political Engagement

Prior research has identified political efficacy and political interest as strong predictors of political participation, but few studies have examined these two attitudes in tandem or compared their relative importance vis‐à‐vis political participation. Drawing on the expectancy‐value model of motivation, we begin to address this research gap while also considering several related issues. Our sample includes a diverse group of high school students in grades 10, 11, and 12 (N = 422) from the midwestern United States. Through quantitative analyses of participants’ survey data, we found that political interest (a central aspect of value) and political efficacy (closely related to expectancy) predicted participants’ expected future political participation, controlling for background characteristics—and that political interest was a particularly strong predictor. In addition, we identified political‐engagement differences on various demographic measures, such as grade level. We also found a significant interaction between political interest and internal political efficacy, suggesting that high levels of both attitudes can have an especially positive effect on adolescents’ political participation. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and educators interested in fostering political engagement among youth.