Political Science

The persistence of religious conflict necessitates analysis of its causes, features, and consequences. This project focuses on one dimension of religious conflict in particular – its impact on democracy. Specifically, this project addresses how religious differences (both in terms of piety and religious diversity in a given country) translate into regime outcomes. It analyzes two mechanisms by which salient religious divisions lead to non-democracy; first, by legitimizing authoritarian regimes, and second, by unsettling democratic arrangements.

The Arab Spring has been described as a youth rebellion driven by grievances about unemployment
and dissatisfaction with existing regimes. In this article, we assess these claims by examining
the characteristics of the current youth generation in the Arab world in comparison with
earlier cohorts. We find that some of the conventional assumptions about this generation—that
they are less religious, more likely to be unemployed, and more likely to protest—are true, but
others—that they are more supportive of secularization, more interested in politics, and more
dissatisfied with their regimes—should be reconsidered. Using the first wave of the Arab
Barometer survey, we discuss how patterns of political attitudes and behavior vary across cohorts,
and cast doubt upon the claim that the Arab Spring was the result of an angry youth cohort that
was especially opposed to the old regimes.

This paper analyzes the conditions that facilitate the ousting of Latin American presidents and the mechanisms that prevent their downfall. Drawing lessons from the impeachment of Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, I extend previous arguments about the "legislative shield" to show that the same forces that sometimes conspire to terminate an administration other times work to resist its demise. The argument underscores the interaction between legislators and social movements, two prominent actors in the literature on presidential instability. I present a two-level theory to identify possible configurations of mass and legislative alignments, and test some implications of the theory with data for 116 Latin American presidents over 28 years.

This article systematically assesses whether open political competition ends the coup trap. We use an original data set of coup reports, electoral competition, and socioeconomic data spanning the 20th century in 18 Latin American countries. Our models, which are robust to multiple-comparison tests, generate support for a central claim: While recent experience with military coups increases the risk of incumbents being overthrown, the establishment of open political competition ends cycles of political instability. The risk of being overthrown consequently declines with time for presidents in noncompetitive systems, but remains stable-and, on average, substantially lower-in competitive polities. Coups do not vary with levels of development or of inequality, economic growth rates, or the legislative powers of the presidency.

In "The Rejection of Political Theology: A Critique of Hans Blumenberg," Richard Faber reconstructs two alternatives to Carl Schmitt's political theology. Faber draws the first alternative from Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg, whose later work explores how metaphor orients thought, proposes a "polytheistic" alternative to "monotheistic" political theology. Polytheism is an early modern metaphor for plural sovereignty, underlying the checks and balances of liberalism. Sympathetically, Blumenberg believes a polytheistic political theology turns away from Schmitt's "monotheistic" picture of sovereignty where one sovereign decides the state of exception. After expositing Blumenberg's polytheistic political theology, Faber rejects it. Instead, he turns to Walter Benjamin's eschatological political theology. Monotheists have been promised an apocalypse, a violent divine intervention, to restore justice in the future. Unlike the Schmittian state of exception, this hoped-for intervention would ground no new legal constitution. Benjamin radicalizes the state of exception into the 'pure violence' of a Marxist revolution aimed at destroying the political state altogether.

This paper explores Kierkegaard as a theorist of revolution. Two Ages (1846) ends with a manifesto for 'unrecognizable revolutionaries' to subvert the media public. Kierkegaard attacks an essential characteristic of the media public, leveling, which represents a distraction from passionate ethical subjectivity and a sedative for revolutionary political action. Social revolution, however, remains an eschatological hope. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard provides a critical theory to defend the individual subject from the modern age's hyperextension of rationalism. In many ways, Kierkegaard anticipates the pessimistic Frankfurt School critical theorists who, a century later, criticized the total reach of instrumental reason through the public sphere. Does this permit us to reread the outwardly conservative Dane in the tradition of critical theory? In what sense is revolution desirable for Kierkegaard? This essay explores what it means for Kierkegaard to call for a revolutionary response to the world in the mass media age.

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, University of Pittsburgh ON-LINE APPENDIX We estimate the risk of democratic breakdown using a discrete-time survival model with frailties by country. The dataset is formed by 644 regime-years for 20 countries, and it includes 26 breakdowns (4% of the sample). The dependent variable is a dichotomous indicator coded as 1 for years when the competitive was replaced by an authoritarian system and 0 otherwise. Given the binary nature of the outcome, we employ a logit estimator to model the risk of breakdown. Accordingly, a positive coefficient in the regression results indicates an increase in the probability of breakdown as a result of a unit-increase in a given independent variable. The predictors included in the model are: Preference for democracy can be roughly interpreted as the proportion of actors with a normative commitment to democracy in each country between 1945 and 2010.

This paper argues that religion plays a central role in the political imagination of modernity and, subsequently, in modern state formation. The argument is explored in early modern Calvinist political theory and state formation in the Dutch Republic from 1560-1618, and then extended to contemporary Islamist political theory and state formation in Afghanistan under the Taliban movement from 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a watershed moment that demonstrated the extent to which contemporary religious ideas could penetrate social relationships and effect individual behavior. 7