systems. Such is not the case, and it would have been helpful for them to have explained why. Socialist monetary systems suffer chronic but hidden fi nancial imbalances. Central planners direct resources to ineffi cient uses, using the fi nancial system as a means of enforcing their dictates. When banks and other state enterprises act ineffi ciently, they do not go bankrupt, transferring contro...

Recent analyses of the cultural dimensions of protest have gone some distance in correcting the structuralist and instrumentalist biases of early resource mobilization and political process models. They remain limited, however, by their retention of dichotomous conceptions of culture and structure in the emergence of protest, of cultural and instrumental orientations in ongoing collective actio...

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The res...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion ...

The present paper addresses a timely topic by exploring the contribution of cultural, ethnic, and contextual attributes to close relationships within particular armed-political conflict. It is based on a series of studies to examine the daily lives of Jews and Arabs with different cultural orientations within the context of armed political conflict. In Study 1, we surveyed 697 Jewish and 300 Ar...

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that valuing conformity, security, and tradition over ...

Cultural ecology is today at a place of rapidly expanding interconnections with the growing number of human-environment approaches in geography and other fields. Productive interconnections are evidenced, for example, in the extensive debate and discussion within geography that surround the varied relations (e.g., theory, methods, roles of science and representation, scale and subject matter) o...

BACKGROUND End-of-life decision making constitutes a major challenge for bioethical deliberation and political governance in modern democracies: On the one hand, it touches upon fundamental convictions about life, death, and the human condition. On the other, it is deeply rooted in religious traditions and historical experiences and thus shows great socio-cultural diversity. The bioethical disc...

The article provides a critical assessment of the more recent literature that relies on theoretical frameworks such as post modernism and globalization to deal with national identity, ethnicity and cultural mobility. Explaining sensitive and complicated issues such as identity requires the extensive use of the native historical, cultural and sociological sources related to the Iranian experienc...