Race, risk, and American religious groups' views of Nazi Germany in 1935.

What explains American religious groups' views of Nazi Germany before the U.S. entered the Second World War? Using a comparative-historical approach, we employ a novel set of data on 25 of America's most prominent religious denominations to answer this question. We find that two factors were crucial in explaining religious elite discourse about Hitler in the U.S. in 1935: whether leaders believed in white supremacy and whether their denominations were incumbents or challengers in the American religious field. Our findings underscore the growing theoretical consensus that racial resentment is key to support for authoritarianism and call attention to religious groups' complicity in its growth, both active and passive.

Adapting Coercion: How Three Industrialized Nations Manufacture Vaccination Compliance.

CONTEXT: This research examines the development of vaccination policy in Britain, the United States, and Australia to begin to understand the different forms of coercion that industrialized states utilize to achieve vaccination compliance from the majority of their citizens. METHODS: This research applies a comparative-historical analysis of the three countries listed, using a combination of primary and secondary documents. FINDINGS: The different degrees of compulsion in the vaccination policies of Britain, the United States, and Australia is explained through an analysis of the path-dependent ways that each nation adapted coercion in response to civil society resistance. Each nation has moved up and down a continuum of coercion searching for a policy that balances overcoming passive noncompliance without engendering active resistance. Arriving at different balancing points between these two objectives, the three nations have now institutionalized policies with different degrees of coercion. CONCLUSIONS: This research shows that vaccination policy is not just created top-down by the state, but through an ongoing interactive process with citizens and civil society. Furthermore, as vaccination is a "wicked problem" that faces ongoing civil society resistance, states will need to perpetually adapt the coerciveness of their policies into the foreseeable future.

Unequal views of inequality: Cross-national support for redistribution 1985-2011.

This research examines public views on government responsibility to reduce income inequality, support for redistribution. While individual-level correlates of support for redistribution are relatively well understood, many questions remain at the country-level. Therefore, I examine how country-level characteristics affect aggregate support for redistribution. I test explanations of aggregate support using a unique dataset combining 18 waves of the International Social Survey Programme and European Social Survey. Results from mixed-effects logistic regression and fixed-effects linear regression models show two primary and contrasting effects. States that reduce inequality through bundles of tax and transfer policies are rewarded with more supportive publics. In contrast, economic development has a seemingly equivalent and dampening effect on public support. Importantly, the effect of economic development grows at higher levels of development, potentially overwhelming the amplifying effect of state redistribution. My results therefore suggest a fundamental challenge to proponents of egalitarian politics.

Processes of social flourishing and their liminal collapse: elements to a genealogy of globalization.

This article aims at exploring a long-term historical perspective on which contemporary globalization can be more meaningfully situated. A central problem with established approaches to globalization is that they are even more presentist than the literature on modernization was. Presentism not only means the ignoring of history, but also the unreflective application to history of concepts taken from the study of the modern world. In contrast, it is argued that contemporary globalization is not a unique development, but rather is a concrete case of a historical type. Taking as its point of departure the spirit, rather than the word, of Max Weber, this article extends the scope of sociological investigation into archaeological evidence. Having a genealogical design and introducing the concept of 'liminality', the article approaches the modern process of globalization through reconstructing the internal dynamics of another type of historical change called 'social flourishing'. Taking up the Weberian approach continued by Eisenstadt in his writings on 'axial age', it moves away from situations of crisis as reference point, shifting attention to periods of revival by introducing the term 'epiphany'. Through the case of early Mesopotamia, it shows how social flourishing can be transmogrified into globalizing growth, gaining a new perspective concerning the kind of 'animating spirit' that might have driven the shift from Renaissance to Reformation, the rise of modern colonialism, or contemporary globalization. More generally, it will retrieve the long-term historical background of the axial age and demonstrate the usefulness and importance of archaeological evidence for sociology.