For fifty years, American opinion on abortion barely moved.  Then the Dobbs decision happened. 

Posted on May 6, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Laurel Elder, Steven Greene, and Mary-Kate Lizotte, coauthors of Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America, explain how and why public opinion has shifted since the Dobbs decision. 

June 2026 marks four years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion access. This anniversary provides an important opportunity to assess how public opinion has evolved in the wake of this seismic shift.

We have spent our careers researching gender and public opinion, from the gender gap, to the politics of parenthood, to views on candidate spouses. It was a natural extension of our work to examine abortion, one of the most visible and consequential gender-related issues in American politics.

Our research on abortion attitudes began well before Dobbs. What initially drew our attention was the remarkable stability of public opinion on the issue. While political debates often framed the issue as a stark divide between “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” most Americans held more nuanced, situational views, supporting legal access to abortion in some circumstances but not others. Despite high-profile political battles and public debate, aggregate public opinion on abortion remained strikingly stable for nearly half a century.

Dobbs disrupted that equilibrium. In Not Going Back we examine how and why public opinion has shifted and how American politics has been changed as a result.

As policy moved sharply to the right in the wake of Dobbs, with more than a dozen states enacting near-total abortion bans and others enacting strict limitations, public opinion moved in the opposite direction. More Americans now identify as pro-choice and support legal access to abortion under all circumstances. The result is a growing disconnect between law and public sentiment, one that is reshaping the political landscape.

One of our most notable findings is the emergence of a gender gap in abortion attitudes. Contrary to common assumptions, men and women held very similar views on abortion for decades. After Dobbs, however, women have become significantly more supportive of abortion rights than men.

This shift is driven in part by personal experience and exposure. Individuals who know someone who has struggled to access abortion care, who worry about losing access themselves, or who have a deeper understanding of reproductive health are more likely to support abortion rights. In the post-Dobbs environment, exposure to these realities has increased, especially among women.

We also find a notable reversal in issue prioritization. For decades, Republicans and those identifying as pro-life were more likely to rank abortion as a top political issue. After Dobbs, that dynamic flipped. The energy and urgency now lie with those who support expanded access to abortion.

This shift reflects, in part, divisions within the Republican coalition. While Democratic voters are largely aligned with their party’s pro-choice stance, Republicans are more internally divided. Roughly one-third of Republicans identify as pro-choice, creating a sizable group of cross-pressured voters. Our research shows that such cross-pressures are associated with lower voter turnout in the post-Dobbs era, posing an ongoing challenge for the GOP.

Our findings also highlight a key political reality: there is no widely accepted “moderate” abortion ban. In survey experiments, Americans did not view a 12-week ban as meaningfully more acceptable than a 6-week ban. In the post-Dobbs context, a ban is a ban, and bans are broadly unpopular. This creates a difficult strategic landscape for Republican candidates seeking to find more moderate positions on abortion.

The phrase that became our title—Not Going Back—emerged from the data. The forces reshaping public opinion, from policy change to increased personal exposure, are not temporary. As a result, public opinion is unlikely to return to its pre-Dobbs equilibrium. This new landscape will shape how candidates campaign, who wins elections, and how they govern. In short, Dobbs did not simply change policy; it set in motion a lasting transformation in American public opinion and politics.

We invite you to explore these findings in our new book.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, Education, ethics, gender studies, health, History, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, political science, sexuality, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Reforming Philadelphia

Posted on December 7, 2022 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Richardson Dilworth, author of Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, writes about what the history of reform might tell us about contemporary city elections.

On May 16 of 2023, Philadelphians will vote for mayor in the Democratic and Republican primaries, and the general assumption in this overwhelmingly Democratic city is that whoever wins the Democratic primary will also be elected mayor in the general election on November 7. The nine declared Democratic candidates represent a relatively broad ideological mix, from the relatively conservative candidacies of Rebecca Rhynhart and Allan Domb, to the more liberal candidacy of Helen Gym. But given that the current mayor Jim Kenney has reached his two-term limit, we are guaranteed to have a new mayor who will most likely set a distinct policy direction for our city government.

In my book, Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, I wanted to provide a short but comprehensive and deep context for understanding political events such as the 2023 mayoral election, by placing it in the long history of what I call “reform cycles.” “Reform” is a broad mantel that has been claimed by innumerable politicians for a variety of reasons. Among historians it is most typically associated with the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th Century. For my purposes, I took the historian’s definition of reform but generalized it into criteria that might be found in any historical period. My criteria were that a reform cycle is defined by:

  • A new idea regarding the city and its purpose in the world.
  • Actors who attempt to take control of city government and reform it in the image of this new idea.
  • Actors conceived of as thwarting reform – sometimes known as “the machine.”
  • Elections in which reformers gain some control over city government.
  • The implementation of ideas that transform the city to some degree.
  • Public recognition, typically provided through the press, that reform occurred.

Using these criteria, I identified the following five reform cycles:

  • The 1840s to the city-county consolidation of 1854
  • The 1870s to the adoption of a new city charter in 1887
  • Mayor John Weaver’s revolt against the machine in 1905, to the adoption of a new charter in 1919
  • The Democratic sweep of elected offices in 1951, to the mayoralty of James Tate in 1962
  • The mayoralty of Ed Rendell, from 1992 to 2000.

My definition of reform cycles raises at least two important questions. First, it appears that race is a notably muted feature in my reform cycles. And second, what about the contemporary period? What can all of this tell us about the 2023 mayoral election?

With respect to race, I argue that the emergence of a substantial Black political class  — a product of the dramatic change in the city’s racial composition after World War II – fell largely into existing machine-reform categories, which was itself a result of the fact that the reform-oriented White political establishment moved relatively quickly to incorporate Black politicians, certainly to a greater extent than in many other cities (such as Chicago for instance). Thus, race-based political organizations such as the Black Political Forum or the Northwest Alliance functioned largely as earlier white reform organizations. And Wilson Goode was arguably a reformer when he was elected as the city’s first Black mayor in 1983. Yet crucially, Goode’s election fails my criteria for defining a reform cycle because it was not recognized as such, for at least two reasons: (1) Goode’s mayoralty was more often defined in the media in terms of race rather than reform, and (2) Goode’s reform status was often overshadowed by larger policy blunders, such as the MOVE bombing and the city’s near-bankruptcy.

With respect to what my conception of reform cycles can tell us about the 2023 election, this is the subject of the third and final chapter of my book, in which I argue that there are currently two overlapping reform cycles, not unlike the reform cycle of the 1870s and 1880s, which was quickly followed by the reform cycle of the 1900s and 1910s. In the 21st Century, we can identify a reform cycle that was driven by the economic resurgence in and around Center City, resulting in the election of Michael Nutter in 2007 and extending at least to the surprise election of Rhynhart as controller in 2017. The issues that defined this reform cycle were campaign finance reform, increased government responsiveness and accountability, planning reform, and environmental sustainability. The second reform cycle is defined in policy terms by social and racial equity and justice and was most visible politically in the elections of Larry Krasner as district attorney in 2017, and of Helen Gym and Kendra Brooks to at-large council seats, in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

Thus, the 2023 mayoral campaigns will fall along a policy and political continuum defined by these two overlapping reform cycles – what journalist Larry Platt has also called a battle between “progressives vs. reformers.” The actual election dynamics will be shaped by at least two long-term trends that have fundamentally altered the city’s electoral politics: Declining voter turnout, which provides greater leverage to smaller groups; and a diminished local media, which makes it harder for campaigns to communicate to a mass audience. The sad result is that our local political universe is more fragmented than in the past. And with so many candidates running in the Democratic primary – so many of which are of high quality – whoever the winner is will undoubtedly be the choice of a minority of voters, making it more difficult for the new mayor to claim a mandate and set an aggressive policy agenda.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, History, Labor Studies, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Books to choose for Election Day

Posted on November 2, 2022 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we offer books on voting and elections in honor of Election Day.

Blue-State Republican: How Larry Hogan Won Where Republicans Lose and Lessons for a Future GOP, by Mileah K. Kromer 

Blue-State Republican is the remarkable story of how his carefully messaged, pragmatic approach to governance helped build a coalition of moderate and conservative Democrats, independents, women, college-educated and Black voters and maintained his GOP base during a time of polarization and negative partisanship. Mileah Kromer takes readers inside Maryland politics to illustrate exactly how Hogan won where Republicans lose and consider whether the un-Trump Republican offers any lessons for how the GOP can win the center-right voters who continue to make up a majority of the country.

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, edited by James Wolfinger 

Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress provides an in-depth historical analysis—from the days of the Great Migration to the present—of the people and movements that made the city a center of political activism. The editor and contributors show how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House.   

Philadelphia Battlefields: Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City, by John Kromer 

Should the surprisingly successful outcomes achieved by outsider candidates in Philadelphia elections be interpreted as representing fundamental changes in the local political environment, or simply as one-off victories, based largely on serendipitous circumstances that advanced individual political careers? John Kromer’s insightful Philadelphia Battlefields considers key local campaigns undertaken from 1951 to 2019 that were extraordinarily successful despite the opposition of the city’s political establishment.

Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences, by Mary-Kate Lizotte 
 
In this era in which more women are running for public office—and when there is increased activism among women—understanding gender differences on political issues has become critical. In her cogent study, Mary-Kate Lizotte argues that assessing the gender gap in public support for policies through a values lens provides insight into American politics today. There is ample evidence that men and women differ in their value endorsements—even when taking into account factors such as education, class, race, income, and party identification. 

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele 

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. (Women running for Congress make twice as many phone calls as men to raise the same contributions.)  The editors and contributors to Good Reasons to Run, a mix of scholars and practitioners, examine the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. They focus on the opportunities, policies, and structures that promote women’s candidacies. How do nonprofits help recruit and finance women as candidates? And what role does money play in women’s campaigns?

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant 

Where Black people live has long been an important determinant of their ability to participate in political processes. The Great Migration significantly changed the way Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Many white Democratic politicians came to believe the growing pool of Black voters could help them reach their electoral goals—and these politicians often changed their campaign strategies and positions to secure Black support. Furthermore, Black migrants were able to participate in politics because there were fewer barriers to Black political participations outside the South. 

Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns, by Kelly Dittmar 

From the presidential level down, men and women who run for political office confront different electoral realities. In her probing study, Navigating Gendered Terrain, Kelly Dittmar investigates not only how gender influences the campaign strategy and behavior of candidates today but also how candidates’ strategic and tactical decisions can influence the gendered nature of campaign institutions. Navigating Gendered Terrain addresses how gender is used to shape the way campaigns are waged by influencing insider perceptions of and decisions about effective campaign messages, images, and tactics within party and political contexts.

 Forthcoming in December:

Are All Politics Nationalized? Evidence from the 2020 Campaigns in Pennsylvania, edited by Stephen K. Medvic, Matthew M. Schousen, and Berwood A. Yost 

Given the news media’s focus on national issues and debates, voters might be expected to make decisions about state and local candidates based on their views of the national parties and presidential candidates. However, nationalization as a concept, and the process by which politics becomes nationalized, are not fully understood. Are All Politics Nationalized? addresses this knowledge gap by looking at the behavior of candidates and the factors that influence voters’ electoral choices.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, gender studies, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, political science, race and ethnicity, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The Top Five Reasons to Pack the Supreme Court

Posted on August 11, 2021 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Stephen Feldman, author of Pack the Court! explains why Democrats should expand the number of Supreme Court justices.

Democrats should pack the Supreme Court if and when they have the opportunity. Yet, many object to court packing, arguing that it would destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a judicial institution. According to this view, the Court’s legitimacy is based on a law-politics dichotomy: The idea that law and politics must remain separate and independent. The justices must decide cases by neutrally applying the rule of law. If politics infect the Court and its decision making, then Court decisions are tainted.

Although many Republicans and Democrats share this view of the Court, it is seriously mistaken. Here, then, are five reasons to support court packing.

1. History of the Court’s Size. History reveals that Congress has repeatedly changed the number of justices based partly on political grounds; seven times by express statute. The Court has fluctuated between a minimum of six and a maximum of ten seats. Nothing in the Constitution precludes Congress from changing the Court’s size. From 1861 to 1869, for instance, politically driven Congresses changed the number of authorized Court seats from nine to ten to seven to nine. Most recently, for more than a year from February 2016 to April 2017, Mitch McConnell and a Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee de facto reduced the Court to eight justices when they refused to open confirmation hearings for Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.

2. History of the Appointment and Confirmation Processes. Despite the usual insistence that politics must be irrelevant to the Court’s business, presidents choose and congresses typically confirm (or reject) Supreme Court nominees based heavily on political considerations. Contrary to conservative claims that Democrats politicized and ruined the confirmation process in 1987, when they refused to confirm Robert Bork, presidents starting with George Washington have seen Congress shoot down their nominees for political reasons. Throughout American history, nearly one-fourth of the Supreme Court nominees have failed.

3. Analytical Argument Against the Law-Politics Dichotomy—Understanding the Law-Politics Dynamic. The law-politics dichotomy is a myth, propagated over the years for professional and political reasons. Contrary to this myth, law and politics dynamically interact in Supreme Court decision making. Law is neither the handmaiden of politics nor mere window-dressing, hiding political machinations. But law should never be understood as being separate and independent from politics, at least in Supreme Court decision making. In most cases, the justices sincerely interpret the relevant legal texts—the Constitution, statutes, executive orders, and so on—but interpretation is never mechanical. The justices’ political ideologies always influence their textual interpretations, so law and politics always intertwine in the adjudicative process. Politics, in other words, shapes the justices’ interpretive conclusions even though the justices focus on the law. Unsurprisingly, then, the justices’ legal interpretations and judicial conclusions ordinarily coincide with their respective political preferences.

If the Court decides cases pursuant to a law-politics dynamic—and the law-politics dichotomy is a myth—then the primary criticism of court-packing vanishes. If Supreme Court decision making is not and never has been apolitical, then court-packing cannot undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an apolitical institution. Court-packing cannot infect the Court with politics because the law-politics dynamic is already (and always) inherent in legal interpretation and Supreme Court adjudication.

4. Politics of the Roberts Court. Despite claiming to follow the rule of law, the Roberts Court has consistently decided cases in accord with a conservative political agenda. Corporations and the wealthy usually win; the poor might not even get into court. Employers win; unions and employees lose. Whites win; people of color lose. Men win; women lose. Christians win; non-Christians lose. Republicans with entrenched political power win; Democratic voters lose. Gun owners win; everybody else loses.

If the Democrats were to enact progressive legislation—for example, statutes restoring and fortifying voting rights, creating universal health care, strengthening environmental protections and fighting climate change, restricting gun ownership, and protecting documented and undocumented immigrants—the Roberts Court, with its current personnel, would likely construct constitutional barriers to weaken or invalidate such laws.

5. Public Support for the Court. Would court packing cause many people to lose faith in the Court’s authority? The question here is not how the Court actually decides cases, but rather how the public perceives the Court. Nevertheless, political science studies suggest that the Democrats should go ahead and pack the Court. The public’s diffuse support for the Court is resilient, sustained by “a reservoir of favorable attitudes or good will.” Even when the Court issues a decision contrary to an individual’s personal views, that individual is unlikely to lose faith in the Court. If anything, when news of Court activities draws an individual’s attention, then that attention (to the Court) will likely reinforce the individual’s positive views of the institution. In a sense, the more one knows about the Court, the more one is likely to find its decisions legitimate (the opposite is true for Congress). In fact, many Americans understand that Supreme Court decision making entails a combination of law and politics—the law-politics dynamic. The people’s support for and loyalty to the Court does not depend on the myth of the law-politics dichotomy. To the extent that individual views of the Court’s legitimacy might change in response to a court-packing plan, partisan shifts would likely cancel each other out.

In conclusion, the potential for court packing is baked into the checks and balances of our tripartite national government. As history demonstrates, the Constitution grants Congress and the president control over the size of the Court as well as the nomination and confirmation processes. Therefore, at any particular time, politics determines whether court packing is possible and appropriate. When the time is right, as it is today, then a court-packing proposal would likely reinforce rather than weaken the Court’s legitimacy.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, ethics, History, law & criminology, philosophy, political science, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Labor unions and national reform

Posted on January 27, 2021 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Dominic Wells, author of From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging, considers how labor unions will fare under President Biden.

Labor unions have been on a steady decline for decades, but with the Biden administration there is a renewed hope in the labor movement for a reverse of the trend. Joe Biden has promised to be a pro-union president, proposing to strengthen the right to organize and to hold employers accountable for violating labor laws. 

Although there is no doubt a Biden administration is good news for organized labor, there is good reason to question whether Biden’s pro-labor agenda will come into fruition. Democrats have been promising to protect collective bargaining without delivering on those promises for years. While in office, President Barack Obama promised to join the picket line if American workers were being denied their rights, but when historically pro-union states in the Midwest began stripping away collective bargaining rights, Obama left his picket sign in his closet. 

The strength of organized labor today is in the public sector, which is largely governed by state legislation. In my book, From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging, I analyze the expansion and restriction of collective bargaining rights for public employees from 1960 into the 2010s. I show that there was a time when republicans, at least at the state-level, viewed collective bargaining in the public sector as a legitimate practice. Faced with consistent strike activity from public employees, republican governors and state legislatures were willing to support collective bargaining. Pressure from unions and provisions that prohibited striking helped make collective bargaining legislation bipartisan in many states. 

By the 2010s, bipartisan support for labor unions was nearly nonexistent. Republican state legislatures, with the help of model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), led efforts to weaken public employee unions. In From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging, I analyze two of the most high profile cases in stripping away the rights of public employees, Ohio Senate Bill 5 and Wisconsin Act 10. These cases demonstrate how labor unions can be successful (or unsuccessful) in protecting their rights and the Ohio case shows that, though unlikely, a bipartisan coalition to protect collective bargaining is still possible. 

Victories for labor unions in the 21st Century have mostly equated to protecting their own existence. There have been few legislative victories expanding rights in recent years. One of the rare successes for organized labor was in Nevada, where rights were extended to state employees in 2019. Outside of formal bargaining rights, teacher unions won raises and other favorable legislation following strike efforts in West Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado in 2018.    

A Biden administration is certainly better for organized labor than the Trump administration, in the public sector and private sector. It means labor unions will have a seat at the table again. It means a more labor friendly National Labor Relations Board. It means there will not be a national right-to-work law. However, if history is any indication, it is unlikely that there will be any national legislation expanding collective bargaining and the right to organize. These battles will likely continue to be fought in state legislatures. Biden is proposing federal guarantees to the right to bargain for teachers, firefighters, and police officers, but his administration and the new Democratic Party controlled Congress will be focused on the public health crisis at the start of his term. If major labor reforms at the national-level are going to happen, they will need to happen in the first two years before Democrats likely lose their slim majorities in at least one chamber of Congress. There is reason for members of the labor movement to be hopeful for national reform, but as a member of a public employee union myself, I will not be holding my breath. 

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, economics/business, History, Labor Studies, political science, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Women and Political Candidacy

Posted on June 3, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, the editors of Good Reasons to Run describe their new book, a collection of essays about women with political ambition.

2018 saw a record number of women run for public office in the U.S.  If current trends continue, 2020 may break those records.  The numbers of women’s political candidacies are soaring — at least, on the Democratic side of the aisle.  And in this moment of crisis, women leaders have emerged as heroes in many countries.

Yet women historically and even in the recent past few decades have been reluctant to declare themselves political candidates.  Even when more qualified, women lag way behind similarly-situated men in “political ambition,” the desire to run for or hold office.

How do scholars make sense of the long-term trend of men showing more political ambition, but also account for the recent spikes in women running?  Why have the gains been so one-sided in terms of party, with Republican women falling further and further behind?  How might answers to these questions differ if we look at racial subgroups or at women outside the U.S.?

Good Reasons to Run_smThis timely collection of research essays explores these and other questions through a five-part structure, with top scholars in the women and politics field presenting original research.  For those interested, there is an extensive methodological appendix online, with entries for many of the chapters.  But the editors and contributors to this volume wanted it to be useful to the public as well as to scholars, and they present the research findings in an accessible, narrative style. (For a sample from the editors’ Introduction, click here.)

Ultimately this book speaks to the power of context, motivation, recruitment, and assistance (especially financial) in helping women become candidates. Political ambition, it concludes, is not something with which most candidates are simply born; it is often created (or not), nurtured (or not), and brought to fruition (or not) by specific factors in the campaign environment.  Each of the 18 substantive chapters illuminate certain of these factors through new research, according to five main themes (“Who Runs?,” “Why Run?,” “Why Not Run?”, “How Nonprofits Help Women Run for Office,” and “The Special Role of Money”).  Together these investigations help us understand how and why people become candidates, with a special focus on gender and with some attention also to race-gender intersectionality, the role of party, and the question of how we might encourage a more diverse crop of candidates in both parties in the future.

Filed under: american studies, gender studies, History, political science, sociology, transnational politics, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition

Posted on October 17, 2018 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post an blog entry by Paul Djupe and Ryan Claassen, co-editors of The Evangelical Crackup?, from the blog Religion in Politics.

For academics who study American religion and politics, there has been no greater gift than the 2016 election. Rarely do we get the chance to see the strands pulled apart to reveal the true connections, but the conventional wisdom-breaking campaign of Donald Trump helped us bring some questions into sharper focus. In this post, we’d like to recap a few of the most interesting observations, from some of the top scholars working in (American) religion and politics today, from the volume we edited.

Honestly, we did not foresee that we would produce quite this book. The “?” in the title came later. If everything we thought we knew materialized, evangelicals might have taken a principled stand in rejection of the Republican nominee and his morally-challenged character. Instead, as the venerable scholar of evangelical politics, Clyde Wilcox, posted on Facebook (to the effect of), “I’ve been studying evangelicals for 30 years and don’t know them anymore.” That is a crackup in itself, but it is not the one we thought we would be writing about. Let’s turn to the top 11.

  1. Evangelicals were on their own in the 2016 elections.

One of the most startling realizations of 2016 was that white evangelicals were willing to so warmly embrace a candidate with such a character deficit and dubious religious bona fides. One possible explanation is that white evangelicals were essentially left to their own devices, which Djupe and Calfano explore in Chapter 1. White evangelicals did not know many #NeverTrump evangelical leaders. Their clergy were not speaking out in large numbers and when they did they were perceived as Trump supporters. And evangelicals’ perceptions of elites were strongly colored by their immediate surroundings. The signs point to religious abdication in the 2016 election.

  1. Evangelicals’ presence in the GOP activist ranks continues to grow.

Since the 1970s, religiously involved evangelicals have tripled their presence among Republican activists (at the national convention). They are the only religious group whose representation has increased markedly over time, though religiously engaged Catholics have increased their presence a bit too. So find Layman and Brockway in Chapter 2, characterizing evangelicals as the “life of the party.”

  1. Evangelicals’ shift into the GOP from the 1960s on was driven by racial attitudes more than social issues like abortion.

Picking up Randall Balmer’s thread about the genesis of the Christian Right, Ryan Claassen compares the relative effects of abortion and racial attitudes on Republican voting across the critical time period of 1972 to the present. Of course support for Republicans is linked to abortion attitudes, but the shift over time would not have been so strong without racial conservatism. This provides strong evidence the engine of evangelical voting patterns is racially charged, which resonates with Balmer’s origin story of the Christian Right rooted in opposition to federal civil rights actions.

  1. Republican platform language has become more religious and more strident in the last 2 decades.

Ever since the 1980 national convention, the Republican platform has called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. But the shift in platform language was just beginning. As Kevin den Dulk describes in “the challenge of pluralism” (Chapter 4), Republicans have increasingly employed religious language and more particularistic religious language. In the near term, the strategy to reinforce the evangelical-Republican fusion makes sense, but in the medium to long term?

  1. Evangelical political tolerance levels have been increasing as their minority status and educational attainment grow.

Even for their most disliked groups, like atheists and gay Americans, evangelicals have grown steadily more tolerant of their basic rights to participate in society. There’s a wonderful tension here between Andrew Lewis’ Chapter 5 findings and den Dulk’s Chapter 4. The explanation for the different approaches to pluralism are fairly obvious, tracking the incentives to elite party leaders versus followers, but would otherwise be out of reach if they were not side by side.

Evangelical Crackup_sm

  1. Young evangelicals are not much different than older ones and young evangelical liberals are in many ways dissimilar from other young liberals.

Prognosticators look to young evangelicals to ascertain the future of evangelical politics.  If the shared culture that made older evangelicals politically distinctive fails to unite young evangelicals in the same way, then the evangelical base of the Republican party may turn out to be the “house built on the sand” (Matthew 7:26).  In Chapter 8 Jeremy Castle examines young, liberal, evangelicals to see whether a crackup is underway.  He finds that, even among young evangelicals, liberal politics remain rare.  More importantly, he finds that evangelical culture continues to shape the attitudes and behavior of the liberal subculture within evangelicalism.  Accordingly, he concludes that the existence of young, liberal evangelicals does not signal that a crackup of the relationship between evangelicals and the Republican party is on the horizon.

  1. Evangelical Latinos are a bridge to the Republican Party.

Latinos have shown a steady drift to the Democratic Party for decades, but the rise of evangelicalism among Latinos in and outside of the US raises questions about whether this trend will continue. It turns out, as Taylor, Gershon, and Pantoya find in Chapter 9, that Latino evangelical Protestants are distinctive – they are more Republican than other Latinos, but they are not as Republican as white evangelicals (see also Burge’s post on this question). For now, Latino evangelicals are a small portion of the population[1], but their numbers are growing – they are the group responsible for stemming the losses among the Southern Baptist Convention, for instance. It remains to be seen what the strident rhetoric and policies from Trump are doing to Latino evangelical support.

  1. Evangelicals are not more insulated from disagreement than others.

Among the reasons given for why evangelicals’ politics are so distinctive is that they pray in an echo chamber – a disagreement-free zone. While it’s true that evangelicals have more church-based friends, they report disagreement in their core social networks at the same rate as other religious groups. Djupe, Neiheisel, and Sokhey find in Chapter 11 that, on average, their networks feature partisan disagreement among a quarter to a third of their discussion partners. This does not mean that they respond in the same ways to disagreement, but that question remains for another project – in fact, a related question is investigated in Chapter 12.

  1. Evangelicals may have come to the Republican fold for the culture, but they stay for the economics.

McGauvran and Oldmixon dispel notions in Chapter 15 that evangelicals are not on board with free market economics of the Republican Party (putting aside Trump’s violation of that orthodoxy in terms of free trade). However, there is a good bit of nuance that is worth thinking about. Evangelicals have gained in socio-economic status in the last 40 years and income helps solidify evangelical support for conservative economic policies. Interestingly, so does more engagement in evangelical religious communities. There’s quite the research question hiding in plain sight for the researcher with congregational data.

  1. Young evangelicals react more negatively to their parents than non-evangelicals.

Observers have focused a great deal of attention on young evangelicals, thinking that they cannot possibly share the same racially tinged politics as their parents and grandparents. Dan Cox, Robbie Jones and colleagues look for signs of better intergroup relations and find an interesting pattern. Young evangelicals feel less warmly toward the evangelical label when they are surrounded by fellow evangelicals in their social networks; on the other hand they embrace evangelicalism more when they do face diversity. This result does not portend a crackup within evangelicalism any time soon, though it is important to note that the analysis does not include former evangelicals – those who have left the faith tradition for whatever reason (and that list is likely to include political disagreement).

  1. Evangelicals have consolidated or perhaps are demonstrating ‘ironic continuities’.

We were lucky to have Robert Wuthnow and John Green offer concluding comments on our guiding question and their conclusions do not differ except in shading. Wuthnow notes that while everything has changed since the 1980s, evangelicals have remained consistent in their Republican support. That fact pushes him to distinguish ‘political evangelicalism’ from the religious practice of ‘evangelicalism.’ Green is on the same page as far as identifying the consolidation of evangelicals at the core of the Republican Party, emphasizing their political fit and shared identity, but does not admit to sharing a sense of irony about it.

These are just a few of the nuggets that appear in The Evangelical Crackup. You can also find work on religious authority (Ryan Burge), the spread of ‘In God We Trust’ mottos (Tobin Grant and Joshua Mitchell), new measurement schemes for evangelicals (Tobin Grant and David Searcy), the distribution of the Christian Right and Left in the states (Kim Conger), in addition to a sustained treatment of Christian conservative legal organizations at the heart of so many current and enduring disputes (Dan Bennett). Djupe taught these chapters while they were in press and really enjoyed the conversation across chapters. The ability to talk about the development of the movement’s connections to the GOP and the near comprehensive examination of evangelicals across units of analysis certainly belie easy assumptions about evangelicals, but also offer a compendium of findings that should be of interest to researchers as well.

Paul A. Djupe, Denison University Political Science, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog (see his list of posts). Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

Ryan L. Claassen, Kent State University Political Science, is author of Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans (2015) and author and coauthor of numerous political science articles. Further information about his work can be found at his website.

Notes

1. In the 2016 CCES, those with an Hispanic identity constitute just over 7% of the sample (4747/64600) and 570-630 of them (depending on the measurement strategy) are evangelical – 12.6% of Latinos and about 1% of the total sample.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Education, ethics, gender studies, Mass Media and Communications, political science, Religion, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started