REACTION TO THE BLACK CITY AS A CAUSE OF MODERN CONSERVATISM

Social scientists in a variety of fields have long relied on economic-structuralist theories to understand the ascendance and hegemony of the modern Conservative Movement in the United States. In the materialist theory of political change (MTPC), structural crisis in the 1970s destabilized Keynesian-managerialism, and paved the way for neoliberalism. Key weaknesses of this approach include its relatively aspatial scope—comparatively less attention to the spatial variation of neoliberalism’s popularity—and its demotion of other elements of the Conservative Movement into a veritable super-structure of secondary movements. This paper offers a “racial amendment” to the MTPC, and an application to electoral geographies in the state of Ohio since 1932. This amendment synthesizes group threat theory, critical historiography, and Du Boisian theories of Whiteness to suggest that the growing influence of suburban conservatism is not reducible simply to class interest.

GENDER EQUALITY AND RELIGIOUS LAW: THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN AS RABBIS IN THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT AS A CASE STUDY

This article explores one tumultuous encounter between a religious legal tradition and the modern principle of equality—an encounter that also has the potential to shed light on a much wider cluster of questions. The author tracks the ways that the responsa written by prominent Conservative rabbis on the subject of female rabbinic ordination and gender equality implicitly (but unambiguously) reflect the push toward increased equality that weighed on the movement's trajectory, showing that the debate about the ordination of female rabbis reveals two principal trends in Conservative legal rulings, which differ in their responses to the challenge of egalitarianism and their visions of the law, and notes two outlier responsa that cannot be neatly classified within either trend. The author then examines the deep-seated historical, ideational, and sociological processes concurrent with the rise of what some have called the egalitarian age, which have produced these diverging responses and visions, and it determines an appropriate framework to understand them. The author shows that the fight for increased gender equality is situated within an intricate social context that imbues it with meaning and shapes its outcomes and modes of expression. In concluding, the author suggests applying the insights gained in the course of the analysis to other circumstances in which gender egalitarianism clashes with religious tradition. The framework by which the ordination of women in the Conservative movement is analyzed also proves useful, mutatis mutandis, in understanding and comparing the responses of other faith communities as they deal with challenges caused by the egalitarian age.

From Doubt to Distrust: Reassessing the Partisan Climate Gap

Nowhere is the partisan politicization of science more pronounced than on the subject of climate change, with Republican and Democratic voters divided on whether climate change exists and how to address it. Existing research explains the partisan climate gap through a process of manufactured doubt, with a network of corporate and conservative organizations using their considerable resources to deny the reality of climate change and its anthropogenic causes, and to spread denial of climate science among conservative and Republican voters. I argue that this explanation is incomplete and increasingly unable to address the contours of the contemporary partisan climate gap. Building on existing research in science and technology studies, environmental sociology, and political partisanship, I explore an alternative hypothesis for the partisan climate gap: distrust in science. I apply a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis to a large non-probability sample of Democrats and Republicans (n = 1808). Results show that lower levels of trust in science among Republicans explains a larger amount of the partisan climate gap than does climate science denial. Rather than being purely a product of manufactured doubt, contemporary climate partisanship is largely the product of manufactured distrust, reflecting an anti-science conservative movement that predates and extends beyond the climate change countermovement and its efforts to deny climate science. I conclude by discussing how focusing on manufactured distrust, in conjunction with manufactured doubt, can enrich the sociological study of climate change and science communication.