Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-05T00:09:28.521Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Getting Religion: Has Political Science Rediscovered the Faith Factor?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

KENNETH D. WALD  and
CLYDE WILCOX
KENNETH D. WALD
Affiliation:
University of Florida
CLYDE WILCOX
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
“THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE” ESSAYS
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 100 , Issue 4 , November 2006 , pp. 523 - 529
Copyright
© 2006 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Blum John Morton. 1956. Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality. Boston: Little Brown.
Converse Philip E. 1966. “Religion and Politics: The 1960 Election.” In Elections and the Political Order, ed. Angus Campbell. New York: Wiley, 96– 124.
Crawford Alan. 1980. Thunder on the Right. New York: Pantheon.
Crick Bernard. 1967. The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foster Charles R. 1961. A Question on Religion. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill.
Fox Richard Wightman. 1993. “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (Winter): 639– 60.Google Scholar
Garand James C., and Micheal W. Giles. 2003. “Journals in the Discipline: A Report on a New Survey of American Political Scientists.” PS: Political Science & Politics 36 (April): 293– 308.Google Scholar
Jelen Ted G. 1998. “Research in Religion and Mass Political Behavior in the United States: Looking Both Ways after Two Decades of Scholarship.” American Politics Quarterly 26 (January): 110– 34.Google Scholar
Leege David C. 1996. “Religiosity Measures in the National Election Studies: A Guide to Their Use, Part 2.” Votes and Opinions (newsletter of the APSA organized section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior) 2 (July/August): 6– 9, 33– 36.Google Scholar
Leege David C., and Lyman A. Kellstedt, eds. 1993. Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Lienesch Michael. 1982. “Right-Wing Religion: Christian Conservatism as a Political Movement.” Political Science Quarterly 97 (Autumn): 403– 25.Google Scholar
Miller Warren E., and J. Merrill Shanks. 1996. The New American Voter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Modelski George. 1964. “Kautilya: Foreign Policy and International System in the Ancient Hindu World.” American Political Science Review 58 (September): 549– 60.Google Scholar
Reed Myron S. 1981. “An Alliance for Progress: The Early Years of the Sociology of Religion in the United States.” Sociological Analysis 42 (Spring): 27– 46.Google Scholar
Ross Dorothy. 1991. The Origins of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rothman Stanley, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte. 2005. “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” The Forum 3 (1), available at www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art.Google Scholar
Sarkar Benoy Kumar. 1919. “Hindu Theory of International Relations.” American Political Science Review 13 (August): 400– 14.Google Scholar
Smith Donald E. 1974. “Religion and Political Modernization: Comparative Perspectives.” In Religion and Political Modernization, ed. Donald E. Smith, 3– 28. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Smith Rogers M. 2004. “The Puzzling Place of Race in American Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 37 (January): 41– 45.Google Scholar
Somit Albert, and Joseph Tannenhaus. 1967. The Development of American Political Science. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Verba Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wald Kenneth D., Adam L. Silverman, and Kevin Fridy. 2005. “Making Sense of Religion in Public Life.” Annual Review of Political Science 8 (June): 121– 43.Google Scholar
Wildavsky Aaron B. 1984. The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader. University, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.