Matthew T. Loveland

The Radius of Trust: Religion, Social Embeddedness and Trust in Strangers

Data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey were used to examine relationships among measures of religious orientation, embeddedness in social networks and the level of trust individuals direct toward others. Results from ordered logistic regression analysis demonstrate that Catholics and members of other denominations show significantly less trust in strangers than mainline Protestants, while older persons and those who are more trusting of acquaintances show greater trust. Although measures of personal religiosity and activity within a congregation show no statistically significant relationship to trust once important controls are taken into account, measures of embeddedness within secular social networks do.

DEMOCRACY ON THE WEB

This paper addresses a fundamental empirical question using data collected in a northeastern US city: does deliberation occur in online forums? While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are few empirical studies that address its online counterpart. Deliberation is supposed to foster an educative, rational, open and inclusive dialogue that leads to legitimate policy outcomes. In this paper, the authors develop and operationalize a measure of deliberation in order to investigate the extent to which it is manifested online. In particular, the authors study five regionally defined web forums hosted by the primary newspaper of a mid-sized northeastern US city. Drawing a two-week sample of posts from these forums, the authors then examine them for indicators of deliberation. Firstly, this paper addresses research about if and how the internet affects social life, including traditional notions of deliberation. Next, the authors argue that sociological studies of democratic participation require conceptualization of lived deliberation, and outline a Symbolic Interactionist approach to studying online, deliberative interaction in order to do so. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future theory and empirical investigation.

Befriending the “Other”: Patterns of Social Ties between the Religious and Non-Religious:

Aside from the literature on inter-racial and cross-sex relationships, few studies have examined the determinants of relationships that cross social boundaries. The authors contribute to this literature by considering the social boundary between the religious and the non-religious. Surveys of U.S. adults provide evidence of popular aversion toward the non-religious, but this analysis of the Baylor Religion Survey (2005) shows that the majority of religious Americans report a friendship with someone who is not religious at all. The authors find that such boundary-crossing relationships are largely structured by homophily, opportunities for intergroup contact, and religious barriers to intergroup contact. These findings reveal that some religiously themed conflicts that are common among cultural elites may not be particularly salient in the realm of daily social life.

The Gypsy Threat Narrative Explaining Anti-Roma Attitudes in the European Union

In this study, we analyze European attitudes about the Roma. These attitudes are important because they encourage or impede the full inclusion of the Roma in European society. We articulate what we refer to as the Gypsy Threat Narrative and use it to motivate an empirical analysis of how comfortable Europeans are with Roma neighbors, as expressed in a 2008 Eurobarometer survey. We use mixed ordinary least square regression models to account for the hierarchical data structure, and account for a number of factors previously found to correlate with attitudes about the Roma while reporting new findings grounded in the logic of the Gypsy Threat Narrative. We discuss the implications of our study for research on European ethnic relations and for activists working for greater Roma inclusion.

Claiming Society for God: Religious Movements and Social Welfare (in Egypt, Israel, Italy, and the United States)

rary immigrants and addressing what Christian Joppke has described as the paradoxical nature of citizenship: on the one hand, citizenship in a wealthy country is valued and at the same time citizenship is less meaningful than it once was. Cook-Martin conducted 25 formal interviews and more than 60 less structured interviews and observations. He focuses on Argentinians of Italian ancestry who have sought to acquire dual citizenship by obtaining an Italian passport. Their motives are transparently instrumental, as they seek to ‘‘hedge against bad prospects in the mid to long terms’’ (p. 119). The book describes the bureaucratic maze that is the Italian state apparatus and the extraordinary lengths to which people have to go to obtain the proper documents. Not surprisingly, a ‘‘paper industry’’ has emerged to assist people in navigating the maze—a lengthy and arduous process. Given that economic insecurity is the primary motive for seeking dual citizenship, it is not surprising that affective ties to Italy are weak. Cook-Martin suggests that for some there is a symbolic and affective component to the quest for a second nationality, but based on the evidence he provides, it strikes me that such identifications are very limited and weak. One can explain the paradox noted above by simply concluding that this case study reveals that a liberal version of citizenship has trumped a republican one. Individuals preoccupied with the bundle of rights accruing to them on the basis of the passports they possess appear to pay scant attention to obligations. And perhaps the special relationship linking these three nations is not all that policymakers thought it was. After all, despite their efforts, Argentinian authorities did not deter their citizens from immigrating to the United States, and the Spanish town of Aguaviva that recruited Argentinians to stem the tide of population decline concluded that in the end they preferred Romanians to Argentinians. All of this leaves many questions unanswered. Cook-Martin should be commended for raising the right questions and pointing the way to a research agenda for the future in this intelligent and well-crafted book. Anyone interested in immigration’s impact on citizenship today and the challenges to states intent on caging should read it.