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Recent religious declines in the United States are for a large part driven by the growing number of Americans who were raised religiously but left religion in the transition to adulthood. Nonetheless, their views and behaviors may still be influenced by their religious upbringing. We explore such legacy effects by examining how changing religiosity during the transition to adulthood influences volunteering among young adults. Analyzing panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we estimate two types of effects: effects of cumulative religious trajectories in youth, and effects of religiosity in youth that are not mediated by religiosity in adulthood. We find that histories of religious involvement shape volunteering in adulthood, but the precise nature of such effects varies across dimensions of religiosity and types of volunteering. Religious service attendance in youth promotes volunteering in adulthood mostly indirectly, through influencing religiosity in adulthood, and exclusively for activities organized by religious groups. By contrast, religious identification in youth promotes volunteering in adulthood also through other channels, and its effects on secular volunteering may persist even when people are not religious in adulthood. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of ongoing declines in religiosity in the United States.

This study examines whether religion's effect on volunteering spills over to nonreligious individuals through personal ties between religious and nonreligious individuals. We use three different analytic strategies that focus on national, local, and personal network level contexts to identify the network spillover effect of religion on volunteering. We find that if nonreligious people have close friends with religious affiliations, they are more likely to volunteer for religious and nonreligious causes. However, this network spillover effect cannot be inferred from the relationship between volunteering and national or local level religious context—a common approach in the literature. In fact, we find that the average level of local religious participation is negatively associated with volunteering among the nonreligious in the United States. This novel finding suggests that to fully understand religion's civic role in the wider community, we need to consider how religion might influence the civic life of people outside religious communities, not just those within them. Our findings also suggest that in spite of methodological advances, studies that purport to test mechanisms at one level of analysis by using data at a larger level of aggregation run a high risk of committing an ecological fallacy.

Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion's impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.

We call for a relational approach to constructing protest event data from news sources to provide tools for detecting and correcting errors and for capturing the relations among events and between events and the texts describing them. We address two problems with most protest event datasets: (1) inconsistencies and errors in identifying events and (2) disconnect between data structures and what is known about how protests and media accounts of protests are produced. Relational data structures can capture the theoretically important structuring of events into campaigns and episodes and media attention cascades and cycles. Relational data structures support richer theorizing about the interplay of protests and their representations in news media discourses. We present preliminary illustrative data about Black protests from these new procedures to demonstrate the value of this approach.

AbstractThis study examines how the religious composition of a local U.S. population shapes an individual's religious involvement. We reconsider Berger's plausibility thesis and unpack its theoretical mechanisms by (1) conceptualizing religious diversity from each religious group's perspective, because a specific local religious environment has different implications depending on one's religion; (2) decomposing the diversity of the population into the religious outgroup's share and diversity; and (3) including non-affiliated as part of local religious contexts. Furthermore, we adjust for the detailed categories of religious family in a multilevel framework, which addresses the problem of non-substantive correlation and potential heterogeneity among religious groups. Focusing on Protestants, Catholics, and non-affiliated, the analysis reveals that although religious diversity, especially the share of the religious outgroup, tends to be associated negatively with an individual's religious involvement, there are important differences in how religious diversity is related to religiosity among different religious groups including Protestants and Catholics.

This study examines the relationship between online social media use and protest participation during the Arab Spring, pro-democracy movements that swept across vast parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). What role did online communication media play in individual decisions to participate in these high-risk political activities? We address this question by drawing on microdata from the Arab Barometer Wave III (2012–2014), a large cross-national survey of citizens nested in administrative divisions across a dozen Muslim-majority countries. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we investigate the multilevel associations between online activities and the likelihood of getting involved in anti-government protests. Adjusting for individual- and regional-level confounders, as well as country fixed effects, we find that online political activism specifically, rather than Internet and social media use in general, is associated with higher odds of protest involvement during the Arab uprisings. In addition, we find that the positive linkage between individual online activism and protest is weaker in communities with a higher proportion of politically cyberactive residents.

This study investigates the link between social relationship and subjective well-being in the context of social stratification. The authors examine how perceived quality of social relationships and subjective social class are linked to self-reported happiness among men and women in South Korea. The study finds that one's perception of relative social standing is positively associated with happiness independently of objective indicators of socioeconomic status, while social relationship quality strongly predicts the happiness among both men and women. However, the mediation pathway and moderating effects vary by gender. For men, the nexus between subjective social class and happiness is partially mediated by the quality of interpersonal relationships. No similar mediating effect is found among women. The study also finds gender difference in whether the link between social relationship quality and happiness varies by subjective social class. The happiness return to positive social relationships increases as men's subjective social status becomes higher, which is consistent with the resource multiplication hypothesis. No similar moderation effect is found among women. Combined, these results reveal potentially different pathways to happiness across gender in Korea, where social status competition, collectivistic culture, and patriarchal gender relations are salient in daily life.

Member-based civic associations, or citizen groups, have two crucial roles in American democracy. They advocate for members' interests in the public arena, but also operate as Tocquevillian "schools of democracy" linking citizens to politics and equipping them with the skills of democratic citizenship. Yet scant research has examined the interrelationships of these two roles. Does the work that civic associations do in developing democratic participants enhance the work they do advocating for members' interests in the public arena? We bring together two previously disparate strands of research on civic associations by arguing that a key factor affecting the political presence of civic associations is leadership quality. We focus on the relationship of leadership quality to political presence, using data from a unique 2003 study of 226 local entities of the Sierra Club. We show that organizations with more skilled and committed leaders have higher levels of political presence. This contrasts with previous research that has focused primarily on community context and resources as explanatory factors. This study shows that political presence is related to the extent to which leaders develop their skills and demonstrate commitment to the organization.

For much of our history, civic associations have served as schools of democracy for the millions of Americans to whom they taught leadership skills, democratic governance and public engagement. Civic associations rooted in a membership to whom they are accountable, in governance by elected leaders, and in a commitment to public advocacy not only make claims on public officials but teach the practice of democracy itself by engaging citizens in working together on common goals. In fact, many have argued that the recent trend replacing such associations with professional advocates and professional service providers has eroded valuable civic infrastructure (Putnam, 2000; Skocpol, 2003). But not all civic associations are in decline. Some continue to thrive as they develop leaders, engage their members and influence public life—and afford scholars the opportunity to learn why they work when they do.