Political scientists have acknowledged the importance of ethno-nationalism as a constitutive element of radical-right politics, but have typically empirically reduced the phenomenon to its downstream attitudinal correlates. Sociologists, on the other hand, have extensively studied nationalism, but have rarely weighed in on debates about institutional politics. In this study, we bring these literatures together by considering how nationalist beliefs shaped respondents' voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalism in the U.S. population. The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties, both in the 2016 primaries and the general election. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have become predominantly ethno-nationalist and Democrats have increasingly endorsed creedal and disengaged conceptions of nationhood. This points to the rising demand for radical candidates among Republicans and suggests a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce deep partisan divisions and undermine the stability of liberal democratic institutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a potent stressor, yielding unprecedented levels of mental distress. However, public health responses and personal reactions to the pandemic were politically polarized, with Democrats highlighting and Republicans downplaying its severity. Did Republicans subsequently experience as much mental distress as Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic? This study examines partisan patterns in mental health outcomes at three time points throughout the pandemic. Results demonstrate a clear partisan distress gap, with Democrats consistently reporting worse mental health than Republicans. Trend data suggest that the 2020 pandemic patterns are a continuation and exacerbation of an existing partisan distress gap. Consideration of race, however, demonstrates a widening partisan distress gap, specific to white Americans. Among white Americans, therefore, Democrats experienced a substantially greater increase in distress in response to the pandemic than Republicans.

Over the past few decades, a steadily increasing number of people have identified as “nonreligious.” Scholars have suggested that this trend is in part due to attitude conflict within churches, where a political backlash of sorts has driven religionists away from their affiliations. While past research has largely focused on drawing descriptive patterns of those who have already disaffiliated from churches, there has been less of an effort to measure those religionists who experience attitude conflict with their churches—I call these individuals conflicted religionists. Using data from the Baylor Religion Survey (Wave II, 2007), a nationally representative sample, I expand the political backlash model and provide a novel measure of conflict by (1) measuring conflict on two specific and important issues: same-sex marriage and abortion, (2) identifying the socio-demographic makeup and magnitude of conflicted religionists, and by (3) measuring the association between attitude conflict and church attendance. Overall, the results show that a considerable proportion of religionists are indeed conflicted. Results from multivariate analyses suggest that political orientation is a clear and important predictor of attitude conflict. Moreover, Evangelicals stand out as being especially unlikely to conflict, even after other variables are controlled. Finally, using Coarsened Exact Matching techniques, I show that conflicted religion is associated with significantly lower church attendance. This paper provides the first known attempt to measure attitude conflict in churches and takes initial steps toward understanding the relationship between conflict and religious participation. Broader implications for the study of religion, politics, and social change are discussed.

Religion appears to have taken a nosedive during the pandemic, including previously persistent forms of intense religion such as strong affiliation and biblical literalism. However, this apparent secularization is the result of mode effects. The gold standard General Social Survey switched to online rather than face-to-face interviews and the response rate plunged to 17%. Parallel analyses of GSS panel data demonstrate that this mode switch introduced substantial nonresponse bias. Illustratively, biblical literalism was almost 50% higher among those who declined to participate (36%) than those who participated in the online survey (25%). Rather than declining, intense religion persisted if not rose over time among those willing to participate in a push-to-web survey. The apparent decline was simply a result of disillusioned, distrusting, disinformed, disadvantaged, and disconnected people being much less likely to agree to participate in push-to-web surveys. Intense religion and other social phenomena are underrepresented and thereby underestimated in online surveys with substantial nonresponse, including those using population sampling methods. The trend in survey research toward these types of surveys could be expected to give a false impression of secularization and other social change going forward -- including making society look less disillusioned, distrusting, disinformed, disadvantaged, and disconnected than it is.

There is a large and growing body of literature on the political polarization of socio-politicalattitudes. This work, however, often treats parties as homogeneous groups, missing underlying within-partyvariation. This paper argues that social scientists should measure attitudinal trends at three levels: 1) theaggregate, 2) parties, and 3) within parties. Using several waves of ANES data between 1992 and 2016, Iapply this analytic strategy to the study of immigration attitudes—one of the most salient issues currentlyoccupying the U.S. political arena. The results suggest a number of important findings. First, immigrationattitudes have been fairly stable at the aggregate level, and have, if anything, become more pro-immigrationover time. Second, while immigration attitudes have become slightly more favorable over the past twentyyears, these trends in the aggregate mask drastic party polarization since 2008, with Republicans becomingsharply more anti-immigration and Democrats becoming more pro-immigration. Third, while the partieshave clearly grown apart, the attitudes within the parties have not trended uniformly: while Democrats havebecome more pro-immigration over the last several years, they have also grown more variable on this issue.The growing divide among Democrats can be explained by emergent ideological and partisan cleavages, withliberals and “strong” Democrats largely driving the party’s pro-immigration trends. In contrast, Republicanshave become more anti-immigration and consistently so; while there were previously significant differencesamong Republicans along regional, religious, and racial lines, these differences have collapsed, and the resultis a largely uniform Republican party on immigration. I conclude with a discussion of how studying withinpartyvariation may provide valuable insight into how parties establish policy platforms and selling pointsin campaigns; further, clear within-party divides may serve as signs of future party realignment along thelines of salient, dividing issues.