CHRONOLOGY OF EXPERIMENTAL WORK APPEARING IN POLITICS AND RELIGION

• Djupe, Paul A., and Calfano, Brian R.. 2009. “Justification Not by Faith Alone: Clergy Generating Trust and Certainty by Revealing Thought.” Politics and Religion 2:1–30.

• Braman, Eileen, and Sinno, Abdulkader H.. 2009. “An Experimental Investigation of Causal Attributions for the Political Behavior of Muslim Candidates: Can a Muslim Represent you?” Politics and Religion 2:47–276.

• Calfano, Brian R., and Djupe, Paul A.. 2011. “Not in His Image: The Moderating Effect of Gender on Religious Appeals.” Politics and Religion 4:338–354.

• Calfano, Brian R., Djupe, Paul A., and Wilson, Angelia R.. 2013. “God Save This ‘Broken’ Land: The Efficacy of Closed-Circuit Voter Targeting in a U.K. Election.” Politics and Religion 6:50–73.

• Adkins, Todd, Layman, Geoffrey C., Campbell, David E., and Green, John C.. 2013. “Religious Group Cues and Citizen Policy Attitudes in the United States.” Politics and Religion 6:235–263.

• McCauley, John F. 2014. “Pentecostalism as an Informal Political Institution: Experimental Evidence from Ghana.” Politics and Religion 7:761–787.

• McLaughlin, Bryan, and Wise, David. 2014. “Cueing God: Religious Cues and Voter Support.” Politics and Religion 7:366–394.

What is telling now in 2016 in this special issue is that almost half of the pieces are set outside of the United States and the nature of the questions are diversifying from what has come before in the journal. The issue opens with an experiment involving clergy in Brazil by Amy Erica Smith. Simply varying question order before asking about clergy's political activity helped illumine the mechanisms driving some major trends in Latin American politics over the last 30 years — Catholic priests respond to market threats while evangelical clergy respond to ideological and secularization threats. These results also help connect religion and politics work with the illusive religious economies approach, which has required some creative thinking to document. Since the theory was motivated by the American case, it stands to reason that related dynamics are hiding in plain sight in the United States.

There is something of a cottage industry of playing games in developing nations because they reveal so much about coalitions and the strength of social ties and norms. Michael Kalin and Niloufer Siddiqui had surveyors go door-to-door in Quetta, Pakistan to play a variant of a dictator game (a non-anonymous donation exercise), in which a political candidate's religiosity was randomized before being informed of the candidate's purported corruption. There's some nuance in the findings, but participants were more willing to punish outgroup candidates who demonstrated more piety — a hypocrisy penalty — that I would suspect would be found the world over. Moralization is a useful strategy for minorities to gain leverage (which may be part of the reason why Sunni participants downgraded pious candidates across the board), but such standards once raised can form a powerful cudgel that spares no one.

There are numerous ways to use religiosity as a candidate for office and Sumaktoyo, Ottati, and Untoro follow recent work (e.g., Beard et al. Reference Beard, Ecklund, Ford, Gaskins and Tollison2013) to untangle the effects of expressing personal from public religion. In tension with Kalin and Siddiqui's finding for Sunni men in Pakistan, primarily Muslim respondents in Indonesia and Christians in the United States show a preference for candidates who demonstrate personal religiosity. Support drops for candidates who advocate government favoritism for majority religions. This is good news for established democracies and raises productive questions between the two pieces. When would we expect to see a principled disjuncture between private and public values? Perhaps the degree of overtness of the religious cue serves as a heuristic for voters to answer this question. McLaughlin and Wise find that overt cues are much more divisive in the United States.

A related question for democratic robustness is on full display in 2016, but has not been a stranger to really any campaign in the United States: are we willing to sanction those who step outside of the bounds of democratic norms in their discourse? This is a sort of mirror image of the tolerance question, a citizen-level companion to the elitist theory of democracy, where elites are “carriers of the creed” and a reservoir of tolerance. Karpowitz, Monson and Patterson, find that political agreement heavily conditions sanctioning behavior so that Republicans and Democrats split over whether to sanction ugly sentiments expressed toward Muslims, Mormons, and Evangelicals in 2012. Two of those groups could be said to be active political players contending for power in 2012 (through Mitt Romney of course), so the First Amendment may play a role in limiting sanctions there. Muslims stand out as a target of enmity not at the top of a ticket (no, President Obama does not count). So, there are intriguing questions raised here about how institutions condition social sanctioning behavior in support of democratic norms.

The same social identity logic is applied to United States interventionism, with Americans much more willing to be their “brother's keeper” when intervention supports fellow Christians, Wu and Knuppe find. Let's flip this around to ask whether shared social identity can encourage people to support the other and adopt a more expansive, generous immigration policy. Nteta and Wallsten ask this with 2012 CCES data and find that respondents with higher religiosity are generally, but not universally, more willing to adopt the argument presented by a denominational leader. The two together continue a line of inquiry about when people are willing to adopt new arguments. A shared identity appears initially to be quite limiting, unless it is recruited to serve others, which highlights the complicated ways in which religion may at times reinforce boundaries and at others break them down. There is also an interesting dialogue between Nteta and Wallsten's work and some of my own. I have found that religiosity is not sufficient to induce adoption of arguments from clergy, while this experiment provides good causal evidence that it does. We do not yet have enough evidence to sort out which is right or what conditions the effect of religiosity on argument adoption, but it is a line of research worth pursuing.

To be above board, I played no role in the evaluation of the manuscript that appears as the last article in this issue. The issue did not have an 8^th experimental article, it fit the goal of the issue, and we asked Professor Wilson to pick the toughest reviewers she could. We (Andy, Ted, and I) are proud to join this robust collection of experimental work that highlights the productive conversations that work in religion and politics is having advancing knowledge in the discipline and subfield.