This article explores the discursive aspect of the church–state relationship in Ukraine after the Euromaidan protests and the outburst of the Russian–Ukrainian crisis in February 2014. In particular, it analyzes the evolution of the core elements in the discourse on religion by President Petro Poroshenko in the period 2014–2018. It also traces the sources of his ideological representation of the church as a key attribute of Ukrainian political order and national identity, along with the army and the state language. This study demonstrates that, in addition to their intensive practical efforts intended to facilitate the emergence of a united autocephalous Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian state authorities strove to establish and promote an ideological paradigm which features a close binding of religion and nationalism.

Political mobilizations for and against legal abortions are cyclical entities. Studies on people who joined pro-life movements in the peak of abortion protests (1980s) are relatively common but recent critical studies of right-to-life activists are almost non-existent. To address this lack of recent research, this work combines “political resource” theories and feminist scholarship to explain why certain people are involved in anti-abortion social movements. After analyzing data from the 2010–12 version of the American National Election Surveys (n = 3,860), this study concludes that pro-life activism was primarily driven by absolutist stances on abortion, the minimization of perceived sexism in society, being exposed to religious conversations about politics, and membership in explicitly political groups. The study also found that people's gender, social class, and educational levels failed to predict their pro-life political behaviors.

Breaking with a long tradition of political quietism, many Salafis in Tunisia and Egypt decided to found political parties and participate in competitive elections after the collapse of the regime. In doing so, they had to present a political program to voters, including policy proposals on economic issues. The article examines how Salafi parties dealt with economic policy-making and finds that they reluctantly engaged with it, offering contradictory and naïve policies meant to pander to the electorate. Policy-making preferences and positions on economic issues are employed to look at the degree of party institutionalization Salafi parties have.

Scholars have long recognized the impact of Hebrew prophecy on the rhetoric of the American Founding era, but they have assumed it is all of one type, the American Jeremiad, a clarion call for political action. In fact, biblical rhetoric during this era mirrors three types of Old Testament prophecy formulated at three distinct moments in ancient Biblical history: before, during, and after the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE. I refer to these as repentance, Jeremiad, and disappointment. I interpret sermons by three leading Protestant ministers in order to demonstrate that all three types of Hebraic prophecy were prevalent during this era, but only one of them, the Jeremiad, seeks to inspire political action; second, the Jeremiad was prominent only during the Revolutionary War. Before the war, and after the ratification of the Constitution, the two quietistic modes of prophecy, repentance, and disappointment, are more prevalent. I conclude by speculating about what the American founders might think of the contemporary rhetorical landscape, where the Jeremiad has become dominant, drowning out more moderate forms of biblical discourse.

It is an article of faith that organized interests represent members to elected officials making use of synchronized communication channels. Rarely, if at all, have researchers had access to multiple, internal, and external channels to test this notion. We mine a trove of nearly 2,500 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 to 2018. Text tools allow us to depict message flexibility of the FRC. We then consider how internal and external messages may be linked by examining the issue content of emails in relation to press releases. Finally, we note the bills lobbied by FRC and the frequency these are mentioned in the internal email messages. Our findings are twofold. First, they support the conditional independence of communication channels in ways that appear to conform to the requisites of the different audiences: elected officials are likely mobilized by different signals than members are. Second, our evidence shows that the flexibility organized interests have in composing their communications can mean that different audiences are presented with considerably different political agendas. While FRC has significant sophisticated message flexibility, our data set indicates that such flexibility can raise serious concerns about good faith representation.

While the study of religion in political science has reemerged as a growing field of inquiry in the last few decades, most research still focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What religion is and how it is measured has largely been conceptualized through the lens of these Abrahamic faiths. This article, by contrast, examines Hinduism, the world's oldest and third most populous religion. I randomly assigned closed-ended or open-ended surveys about Hindu religiosity across and within two demographically similar villages in the north Indian state of Bihar. A comparison of survey responses from a sample of 100 respondents suggests that many Hindus: (a) do not recognize basic analytical categories scholars use in the social scientific study of religion; (b) do not differentiate between ostensibly religious and secular categories; and (c) recognize features of everyday life, such as attire or obedience to rules about purity and auspiciousness, as religious in ways that may be different from most Western religious communities. This article productively challenges how political scientists think about what religion is and how to measure it, tasks that must precede explaining how it affects political behavior.

This article makes a case for the nexus between water resources and terrorism. Using Boko Haram activities in the Lake Chad region, I question the conventional arguments linking religion to the root cause of terrorism. I argue that there is an economic dimension of Boko Haram terrorism, which is based on two interrelated indicators: the attack on the Nigerian oil exploration team in the Lake Chad basin, and the continuous exploitation of oil and gas by Chad, Niger, and Cameroon in the region. Building on economic incentives and natural resources theoretical debates along with a historical enquiry into Boko Haram, the article concludes that economic interests, rather than religion, are partly the impetus to the activities of Boko Haram. The findings have significant implications for both the security of the Lake Chad region and counterterrorism at large.

Research consistently emphasizes the importance of religious institutions for influencing political action among Asian Americans. The social capital literature offers two theoretical explanations for why churches increase political activity: bridging capital between different groups and bonding capital among similar groups. The latter argues that individuals who attend racially homogeneous churches are more participatory. This paper expands on these accounts by examining another aspect of bonding. That is, how does similarity in political views among church members affect Asian Americans' political participation? Results from the 2016 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey show that Asian Americans who attend politically homogeneous churches are more likely to vote and participate in conventional activities. The effects of racial homogeneity are limited once taking political homogeneity into consideration. These findings provide evidence that political homophily within religious organizations may facilitate the bonding of social capital between racial/ethnic minorities, and this homophily is indeed salient to democratic participation.