Kenneth D. Wald

University of Florida | UF · Department of Political Science

This volume provides the most systematic study on the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States, from the Second World War until the second decade of the new century. The volume’s main argument is that, despite the expectations of se...

This volume provides the most systematic study on the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States, from the Second World War until the second decade of the new century. The volume’s main argument is that, despite the expectations of se...

This volume provides the most systematic study on the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States, from the Second World War until the second decade of the new century. The volume’s main argument is that, despite the expectations of se...

Studies of American Jewish preferences in the 2020 US presidential election reveal striking variability in partisan choices from one survey to the next. We believe this variability is due in part to different approaches to the measurement of Jewishness across surveys and survey research firms. Drawing principally on social identity theory, we argue...

To what extent is it possible for American Jews to maintain a deep emotional connection to Israel while criticizing the actions of the Israeli government? This long-debated question echoes earlier investigations of different forms of patriotism toward one's home country. Drawing on two 2019 surveys of American Jews, we find that, like Americans in...

Building on research about the long-term consequences of political violence, this case study examines the degree to which American Jews with direct and/or familial exposure to the Holocaust differ from other American Jews in their emotional attachment to Israel. Recent studies from other countries suggest that survivors of politically-induced traum...

Building on research about the long-term consequences of political violence, this case study examines the degree to which American Jews with direct and/or familial exposure to the Holocaust differ from other American Jews in their emotional attachment to Israel. Recent studies from other countries suggest that survivors of politically-induced traum...

Politics of American Jews. By Herbert F. Weisberg. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 296 pp. $80.00 Hardcover (forthcoming as E-book) - Volume 12 Issue 4 - Kenneth D. Wald

Cambridge Core - American Studies - The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism - by Kenneth D. Wald

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism - by Kenneth D. Wald January 2019

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism - by Kenneth D. Wald January 2019

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism - by Kenneth D. Wald January 2019

Students of the US Supreme Court have suggested that the personal traits of justices influence their decisions but scholars have seldom examined whether specifically religious views shape the justices’ approach to interpreting the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The chapter examines the opinions of the current court's Catholic and Jewish j...

Although American Jews are often perceived as extremely active if not hyperpolitical, scholars have seldom studied the degree to which Jews in the US actually participate in public life. In a statistical sense, Jews are overrepresented in some domains that tend to favor groups with substantial socioeconomic resources (although these participation d...

Prior research has documented a robust link between higher education and political tolerance. Israel might be an exception to this rule because many Jewish Israelis perceive the country's Arab citizens as a fifth column hostile to the state's Jewish character. During their formative years, young Israelis are exposed to powerful messages reinforcing...

The political liberalism of American Jews is puzzling because it contradicts the assumption that economic self-interest drives political behavior. Attempts to solve this puzzle with “Judaic” explanations compound the problem by offering theories that are static and universal while American Jewish political behavior is dynamic and situational. Using...

This chapter analyzes several new religiosity items. While standard survey measures of religiosity typically are associated with right-leaning political orientations, this chapter argues that these measures are incapable of capturing the communitarian dimension of religiosity that may hold more meaning for liberal citizens. The 2006 ANES Pilot Stud...

The ‘Atlantic Gap’ usually refers to differences in religious commitment between the United States and Europe. In this paper, I argue that the gap extends beyond religious intensity to ‘regimes’ of religion and state, defined as the system of norms, rules, decision styles and other elements that influence how religion is treated in the public squar...

In the domestic politics of Israel, the struggle for human rights principally involves the state’s Arab citizens, roughly 20% of the population. In the eyes of many Jewish Israelis, this minority carries Israeli passports but identifies with an Arab-Palestinian nationality, raising fundamental questions about whether it should enjoy the full rights...

When Susan Meets Al: Toward a Theory of Interreligious Harmony - American Grace: How Religion Divides And Unites Us. By PutnamRobert D. and CampbellDavid E.. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 673 pp. $39.95 cloth. - Volume 4 Issue 2 - Kenneth D. Wald

This article studies the role of religion in American culture and political life. It uses the concept of culture in two different ways-traditionally and in the discipline of political science-before exploring culture and religion through an alternative framework. Culture is also considered as a source of norms and identities for behavior, and tries...

This paper takes up Rogers Brubaker's call to assess differences in diaspora commitment among members of ethnonational groups. The problem is approached through a case study of Arab-American advocacy on behalf of home country interests (the Arab-Israeli conflict) in the host society, the United States. Using a scale measuring politicized ethnic ide...

Contrary to the expectations of secularization theory, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw an increase in the political engagement of religious commitment around the globe. In the legal realm, this upsurge of religiously-based political conflict has become evident in demands by workers that employers respect and honor their reli...

issues raised by Israel's Jewishness, a strategy that would permit me only to scratch the surface, this chapter instead explores only a small number of themes. The central focus linking the questions is Israel's identification as a Jewish state. That is the quality that sets Israel apart from the other nations covered in this volume and,...

How did Republicans manage to hold the White House through much of the past half century even as the Democratic Party held the hearts of most American voters? The authors of this groundbreaking study argue that they did so by doing what Democrats have also excelled at: triggering psychological mechanisms that deepen cultural divisions in the other...

This paper explores Senate policy-making toward Israel from 1993–2002. Previous scholarship suggests that congressional policymaking toward Israel is heavily influenced by the ethnic and religious identification of both legislators and their constituents, not simply by legislators’ abstract perceptions of the national interest. Other literature de-...

With the aid of new religiosity items on the ANES we are able to uncover considerable evidence of a “Religious Left” made up of Christians who hold a communitarian view of their faith. Going beyond the conventional “God Gap” perspective that relies on measures of individual piety, our findings demonstrate that communitarian religiosity influences p...

Previous research has shown that mass perceptions about the sizes of minority populations are influenced by sociodemographic, threat, and context variables. This paper extends the analysis to a population group that has thus far received only limited attention, gays and lesbians. Our analysis of a statewide survey of Florida residents in 2002 shows...

Although finding considerable value in Joshua Mitchell's recent JOP article about political science commentary on religion, we take issue with his contentions about empirical work on religious influence in politics. We argue that Mitchell has propounded an individualized conceptualization of religion that overlooks the communal nature of religious...

In several studies of political behavior in Chicago, Thomas Guterbock has identified “localism,” an affectual commitment to a bounded subcommunity, as the key sentiment generating electoral support for the Democratic organization. Localistic sentiment has been linked to pro-machine voting, Guterbock suggests, because the organization is perceived a...

Why do ethnic diasporas in the United States differ in their readiness for political mobilization on behalf of homeland interests? This study develops a tiered model of politicized ethnic identity emphasizing both individual-level traits and group/collective properties. Using Zogby “Culture Polls,” the theory is tested on three Middle Eastern herit...

Research across disciplines, including political science, has embraced the idea that individuals often possess ambivalent attitudes, but there is considerable disagreement about how to measure ambivalence. Determining an effective way of capturing such phenomena is important to our understanding of politics and public opinion. The literature offers...

Illegal resource use is a major threat to conservation in protected areas throughout the world, yet accurately estimating the number of poachers has been difficult. People violating the law seldom identify themselves for fear of retribution; thus quantifying illegal resource use is constrained by methodological problems. We evaluate the effectivene...

This article examines the applicability of critical election theory to British party development under the Third Reform Act. Contrary to claims by several authors, the general elections of 1886 and 1906 showed none of the features associated with critical realignments— high rates of participation, electoral instability, durable changes in the socia...

T o 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...

What accounts for individual differences in the level of politicized ethnic identity among members of an ethnonational diaspora? By politicized ethnic identity, we refer to the disposition to assign priority to the interests of the homeland in the politics of the host society. The question presumes that even the most thoroughly mobilized of diaspor...

In attempting to account for the relatively late emergence of a powerful workers’ party, students of British political development have advanced two competing explanations. A cultural approach, based on a conversion model of electoral change, argues that Labour's emergence was hindered by the low level of political consciousness among the British w...

Reviewing data from focus groups composed of Jewish college students, pollster Frank Luntz let slip a revealing aside. After bemoaning the apparent detachment of young American Jews from “their Israeli cousins, ” their “frighteningly weak and ill-defined” self-association with Israel, he boldly declared that such estrangement from their foreign

Like his namesake in the classic short story, Florida's daniel Webster appears to be on the losing side of a pitched battle with the King of Lawyers. For the contemporary Daniel Webster, a Republican who chairs the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee, Satan wears the guise of the state's 1885 constitution and the black-robed judiciary that enforces...

Social Forces 84.2 (2005) 1319-1320 Christian Smith and colleagues want to bring human agency into the study of secularization. They argue that the transformation of religion is often portrayed as the product of social processes and autonomous cultural forces as if secularization happened without human intervention. To the contrary, the essayists c...

This paper explores the contours of support for the state of Israel in the House of Representatives from 1997 to 2002. In an analysis of votes and cosponsorship decisions, we find that when Congress considers innocuous resolutions of support for Israel, support is consensual and nonpartisan. However, as the violence escalated between Israel and the...

After a long period of postwar neglect by mainstream scholars, religion assumed a new prominence in political science during the late 1970s. Despite the latter-day significance accorded religion by the discipline, the product of several unexpected real-world events, much of the recent research has focused on specific episodes or groups without draw...

Objective. Although national surveys indicate that Americans have become more accepting of the prospect of a Jewish presidential candidate, this could reflect some voters' desire to be seen as having socially correct opinions. The present study uses a survey technique known as the “list experiment” to assess public reaction to the nomination of Jew...

span style="font-size: 100%; font-family: Arial; color: #000000;" data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"The partisanship and ideological self-identification of Southern Jews in the United States are compared with those of Jews living outside the South. While there are few differences in the marginal distributions of these variables between the regions whe...

Religion and Social Policy, Paula Nesbit, editor. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. Pp. xiii+278. £20.95. - - Volume 23 Issue 1 - Kenneth D. Wald

When social movement activists achieve an institutional position at the policymaking table, does their political behavior moderate with the norms of that institution? We explore this question by examining the behavior and attitudes of Christian Right activists appointed to serve on the 1997–98 Florida Constitutional Revision Commission (CRC). This...

One of the most prominent ideas subsumed within the “American exceptionalism” literature is that evangelical Protestantism has always had an unusually powerful influence on U.S. political culture. In contrast, more recent literature points to the transnational influence of social movments, including those based in evangelicalism and other religious...

In what has sometimes provoked a "culture war" over America's schools, gays and lesbians have sought an expanded voice in the making of education policy. This paper explores the factors that promote gay representation on school boards, how this variable in turn influences gay representation in both administrative and teaching positions, and how all...

Does religious commitment have a common political impact across national frontiers? To date, that question has been explored empirically only for Roman Catholics, who might be expected to behave similarly because of centralizing resources in their tradition. This article explores the extent of transnational political attitudes among Jews in the Uni...

American Jewish History 89.3 (2001) 343-344 In the presidential election of 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled an electoral coalition that largely structured American political life for a generation. As political scientists and historians have demonstrated, it was an unwieldy coalition that combined such disparate groups as Catholics, white Sout...

Objective. Scholars continue to debate whether morally charged political issues constitute a distinct type of policy question or produce essentially the same political dynamic as public controversies lacking an overt moral dimension. The debate will not be resolved until scholars test the determinants of putative morality policies with predictors d...

School-based health centers (SBHCs) provide access to health services by bringing providers to children (and sometimes parents) and furnishing low cost services in an atmosphere of trust. While the number of SBHCs has continued to grow and some clinics have continued to expand their services, others have barely survived and some have even closed. T...

Few issues in American politics inspire such passion as that of civil rights for gays and lesbians. In this group of original essays, scholars and activists writing from a number of different perspectives provide a comprehensive overview of this heated debate. Contributors thoroughly investigate the politics of the gay and lesbian movement, beginni...

As a newly emergent political minority, lesbians and gay men have begun to seek representation in political office, particularly at the local level. Using a purposeful sample of 126 cities and counties, the authors explore openly gay candidacies for, and election to, public office in the early 1990s. They employed four theoretical models—urbanism/s...

Seeking the Spirit - WuthnowRobert: After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. ix, 277. $29.95.) - Volume 61 Issue 4 - Kenneth D. Wald

Homosexual adolescents are at risk within schools for many health problems. Hostile school environments can often exacerbate their problems. This article summarizes research on issues related to youth sexual orientation, noting controversies surrounding school involvement in the United States and describing programs instituted by school communities...

The adoption of local gay rights ordinances and policies is approached from two broad theoretical frameworks--the urbanism/diversity approach and alternative perspectives rooted in social movement theory. The adoption of gay rights ordinances/policies is a function of: (1) the level of urbanization and social diversity; (2) the social and political...

This study examined both the content of school district programs related to sexual orientation, and the social and political determinants of these school programs. Data were collected from districts within all 126 U.S. communities with legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and from a random sample of 129 U.S. j...

Religious group membership may affect political behavior through multiple paths of influence and may be engaged in different political contexts. This study first distinguishes between associationalism, a measure of commitment to formal religious organizations, and a communal dimension that entails immersion in social networks dominated by coreligio...

Utilizing several theories of sociocultural mobilization, this paper examines the contours of secular-religious conflict in contemporary Israel. According to a survey of adult Israelis, resistance to religious coercion among the secular population is driven primarily by symbolic, social, and cognitive forces rather than perceived discrimination or...

In their 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace, the Catholic bishops attempted to sway American public opinion against the arms race. Polling data suggest that The Challenge of Peace stimulated a sharp but short-lived reaction against military spending among American Catholics. The message was best received by Catholics strongly tied to their churc...

One of the more consistent characterizations of both American Fundamentalism and other versions of conservative Evangelicalism is that these groups represent authoritarian religious and social systems. Such characterizations are not entirely without some basis in fact. Fundamentalism will almost always appear authoritarian, and so too will forms of...

The political cohesiveness of religious groups varies widely. Some churches develop an almost complete identity with a political party or tendency while others exhibit a high degree of political pluralism. This paper explores some of the mechanisms that might account for the variability in political solidarity from one church to the next. On the ba...

The affinities between the "New Christian Right" and earlier mass-based moral reform movements have prompted scholars to revive the "status politics" model of right-wing protest. This model asserts that moral reform movements attract groups who resent their cultural, political and moral devaluation by the dominant society. The model has rarely been...

Every step towards our goal is dependent on gaining the assent and support of at least a numerical majority of the whole people. Thus, even if we aimed at revolutionizing everything at once, we should necessarily be compelled to make each particular change only at the time, and to the extent, and in the manner which ten or fifteen million electors,...

This article seeks (1) to bring some coherence to a growing, but rather disparate, volume of “religion and politics” research, and (2) to chart some directions for future research. Given the vast nature of the field of inquiry, the focus of the discussion is limited specifically to behavioral studies of the role of religion in American political li...

Most studies of contextual influences on political attitudes and behavior have treated geographical areas as the operative social environment. As early research on social influence processes noted, the conditions that promote consensus among inhabitants of a common environment are likely to be present in formal organizations that encourage face-to-...

Many survey-based studies have reported that feelings of political discontent are only modestly associated with the willingness to engage in acts of political violence. The following paper suggests that researchers may underestimate the strength of this relationship by failing to distinguish between violence that is intended to change the existing...

Do individuals of differing religious orientations also differ in their philosophies of human nature? This question was examined by interviewing a representative sample of the adult population of Memphis, Tennessee. Altogether, 359 adults were questioned about their religious beliefs and practices, their answers yielding scores on four religious di...

According to the durable “closeness-turnout hypothesis,” a close election will generate high interest in a campaign and appear to invest the individual vote with unusual significance, thus stimulating high participation rates. But from the competing perspective of “selective information flow,” the perception of a close election will reach only the...