Sociology

Is religious involvement positively associated with having influential friends or is religious involvement unrelated to this kind of social capital? Building on the distinction between the “bonding” and “bridging” aspects of social capital, I distinguish two kinds of bridging social capital—identity-bridging and status-bridging—that have been a source of terminological confusion. I examine the relationship between religious involvement and status-bridging social capital by analyzing data from a large nationally representative survey of the U.S. adult population that included questions about friendships with elected public officials, corporation executives, scientists, and persons of wealth. The data show that membership in a religious congregation and holding a congregational leadership position are most consistently associated with greater likelihood of having these kinds of friendships. The data also show that frequency of religious attendance is largely unrelated to these measures of social capital and that there are some significant variations among religious traditions and size of congregation.

A nationally representative survey was conducted of adult Americans who were currently involved in prayer groups, Bible studies, or other religiously oriented small groups. The purpose of the study was to determine if these respondents had engaged in forgiving behavior as a result of being in their group and, if so, to ascertain which group activities were most likely to facilitate this behavior. Of the 1,379 respondents, 61 percent said their group had helped them to forgive someone, 71 percent said they had experienced healings of relationships as a result of their group, and 43 percent said they had worked on improving a broken relationship in recent months. Group activities generating “social capital” or “cultural capital” were mostly unrelated to these responses, while activities involving “emotional capital” and “spiritual capital” showed strong positive relationships. Further analysis suggests that forgiving behavior is especially facilitated by groups that emphasize prayer, sharing, and learning about forgiveness. The study also suggests that forgiving behavior may have such consequences as encouraging prosocial involvement, helping to overcome addictions,and promoting emotional well-being.

Data are analyzed from three national surveys conducted in 1984, 1989, and 1992, supplemented by other data from a 1991 and a 1992 survey, to examine the distribution of religious conservatives, moderates, and liberals, and to consider the social and ideological correlates of these religious orientations. The results suggest overall stability in the distribution of these orientations and offer modest support for status group, religious socialization, and religious organization interpretations of their sources. The results also indicate that religious views correspond with positions on a number of contested social policy issues, but cast doubt on arguments about deeper differences in worldview and moral perspectives. The ways in which the data support and help to refine arguments presented in The Restrucruring of American Religion are discussed.

This paper examines the set of musical, social, and technical practices that later became essential for producing techno. In particular, the focus is on how musicians kept time, drawing from examples of James Brown and Kraftwerk. Only at the intersection of Brown's human-centered approach and Kraftwerk's machine-oriented method are the resulting musical practices of techno made understandable.

This chapter probes the conditions under which we might expect an entrepreneurial middle class of independent shopkeepers, merchants, professionals, and small manufacturers to expand or decline with capitalist development. We highlight the predictions offered by structural and Marxist accounts of middle class formation and apply them critically to four canonical cases, including the early American Republic, industrializing England, Tsarist Russia, and the U.S. South during the antebellum-postbellum transition. Our empirical analysis and review of the historical literature suggest that the exogenous imposition of capitalist institutions often fails to propel entry into entrepreneurial activity and may even backfire, as cooptation or resentment among traditional elites generates barriers to small business proprietorship. When middling entrepreneurs exhibit greater agency with respect to the creation of capitalist institutions, their prospects tend to improve but the ability of scholars to draw causal linkages between structural change and the middle class are impaired, owing to problems of endogeneity. Paralleling institutional studies of organizations, the chapter also underscores the importance of myth and ceremonyover mere numerical prevalence-in the ‗making' of an entrepreneurial middle class.-The early history of the middle classes in America is a history of how the small entrepreneur, the free man [sic] of the old middle classes, came into his time of daylight, of how he fought against enemies he could see, and of the world he built.

the individual Justices on both courts, for assisting my research, answering my questions, and letting me see the daily life of constitutional justice. The staff at the Institute for Law and Public Policy, particulary director Olga Siderovich, hosted my visit in Moscow in 1993 and provided both expert guidance and terrific company. I would also like to thank Serguei Oushakine, who introduced me to Russia and generally made my life in that part of the world both possible and enjoyable. And, finally, the editors of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review deserve much praise for their willingness to take this on, their good humor, and their extraordinary patience. 1 HERMAN SCHWARTZ, THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL JUSTICE IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 1 (2000). The only potential exception to this generalization is Estonia, which created a constitutional panel within its Supreme Court instead. Id. at 249 n.2, 253 n.7. 2 The phrase is associated with debate between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen in 1931, which took place as the Weimar Republic teetered toward collapse. Schmitt's pra note 2, at 192. For a discussion of Kelsen's contribution, see MARTIN SHAPIRO & ALEC STONE SWEET, ON LAW, POLITICS, AND JUDICIALIZATION 147-48 (2002). 9 This is especially true of cases that are referred to the constitutional court by an ordinary court judge who has a constitutional question that cannot be resolved by her court. The judge in such a case is supposed to send the constitutional question to the constitutional court for resolution, staying the proceedings in her court until she gets an answer. When the constitutional court provides the answer to the constitutional question, the case in the ordinary court can be resumed.

In Hungary's April 2010 general elections, former prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party won an overwhelming majority of the seats in parliament. The elections gave voters a choice among the discredited Socialist Party (MSzP), which had governed for the preceding eight years, a new youth party of unclear aspirations (Politics Can be Different or LMP); the neo-Nazi right (Jobbik); the center-right Fidesz; and a few smaller parties that did not muster enough votes to cross the 5 percent threshold into the unicameral, 386-seat Hungarian National Assembly. 1 Given that the bottom had fallen out of the economy on the Socialists' watch and that the party had been mired in scandal, it was not surprising that Fidesz won 53 percent of the popular vote. That was normal party politics. What happened next was a mistake of constitutional design. During Hungary's transition away from communist rule in 1989 and 1990, the constitutional drafters had been worried about two things: a fractured parliament in which small parties would be unable to form stable majority coalitions, and a deeply entrenched constitution that would be too hard to change once the new democrats figured out how they wanted to design their political institutions. To allay the first of these worries, the framers opted for an election law that put its thumb on the scale in favor of larger parties-effectively using extra seat bonuses as a means of ensuring stable government. In order to address the second concern, the

Most women who have been sexually assaulted see at least some situations in the world as being more dangerous following their assault experiences. Based on in-depth interviews with 94 women who were either raped or avoided being raped during an attack, this study examines the effect of the events that occurred during the attack and the circumstances surrounding the attack as factors that determine later perceptions of danger. Women who have been raped are more likely to change their perceptions of the safety of the world in radical ways than women who have avoided being raped, olthough women who avoid being raped often make substantial reassessments as well. For both raped women and avoiders, one's likelihood of making a radical change in one's perceptions of dangerousness depended to a large degree on the sort of situation in which the attack took place. Women were less likely to change their perceptions of dangerousness i f the attack took place in a situation where they believed they were in some danger before the attack. If the attack took place in circumstances which the women defined as safe, however, a much more extreme reaction was likely to occur.

When the well-known paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, he was told by his doctor that he had eight months to live. But being a scientist who understood statistics, he realized that the doctor was telling him the central tendency of a distribution rather than an individualized prediction of the trajectory of his individual life. And what he cared about, being human, was not aggregate rates of mortality but what was going to happen to him. He wanted to know what he could concretely do to increase the likelihood of living longer. For this, the general statistics were not particularly helpful because they only indicated a simple correlation between the date of diagnosis and the date of death. They said nothing about all of the other factors that would allow some particular case to be out in the long tail of the mortality distribution, which is where a particular individual would want to be. So Gould set about trying to disaggregate the statistics, noting: Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions.. .. I had to place myself amidst the variation. (Gould 1991:476) Unpredictable things occurred that made his prognosis betterF new cancer regimens became available; he noted that having a good attitude helped. Having been diagnosed with less than a year to live, Gould managed to thrive another 20 years before succumbing to an entirely different form of cancer (Dunn 2002).

In the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' the unconvincinglooking but immensely self-confident King Arthur and his rag-tag band of knights gallop on their imaginary horses through the 'wild forest in search of the Holy Grail. Encountering one obstacle after another, our heroes (for they are clearly meant by the logic of storytelling to be our heroes) 2 overcome these challenges by making the most of the distinctly unroyal conduct of quibbling, distracting the opposition, and sometimes just running away. 3 At one point in their quest, however, the path of Arthur's little band is physically blocked by giant human figures dressed in forbidding black armor, screaming in chorus. Their leader introduces them as "Knights Who Say NI!" The Knights' main weapon is to shout "NI!" (also sometimes "Peng,"

Version prepared for the Yale Legal Theory Workshop, 21 September 2006. This paper is actually a long abstract of a book I am writing by the same name. As a result, you will see many references to "the book" throughout-which is meant to be the larger work with this same general shape. In addition, because this is only a summary of a long and detailed argument, the usual dense apparatus of footnotes and references is substantially thinned here. If you want to see particular chapters or arguments in elaboration, let me know. I have published some pieces of the book already and have indicated in this narrative outline where chapters have been drawn from already published work. Comments, criticisms and questions are most welcome as the book is still under construction.

Law. A rough version of these ideas was presented at the symposium on Constitution Drafting in Post-Conflict States, William & Mary School of Law, February 2007, and the discussion and comments at that conference helped immeasurably in improving them. I am indebted to Stanley Corngold for his extraordinary erudition and shared enthusiasm about Franz Kafka that allowed me to go beyond Hannah Arendt's reading of him, to Gr6goire Mallard for helping me to understand Ren6 Char, and to Serguei Oushakine for his sense of history and memory. 1. The German Constitution (Basic Law) of 1949 was written while the country was still under occupation at the end of a war.

I had hoped to join you all in beautiful downtown Baltimore, but I can't come next weekend. The reason why I can't is connected to the ticket I'm submitting anyhow. The Hungarian election is 6 April and I'm working flat out on things connected to that election. My ticket explains the new Hungarian election system, which I argue is rigged to favor the governing party. Hence the length: you can't make an accusation like that without giving evidence. So, in a series of five blog posts that will (I hope) appear on the Krugman blog, I have laid out why I think that the opposition can't win unless it gets far more than a majority of the votes.

Jack Balkin"s Living Originalism 1 is a major contribution to American constitutional theory. But it may be a contribution to American constitutional theory only because it is, well, so distinctively American. By exploring why Balkin"s theory is so American, I hope to show what we might learn from comparative constitutional law in thinking about constitutions, including the American one. In particular, I will explore why Balkin"s approach to theory would be a non-starter in the constitutional culture that has become the most influential in the world, the one anchored by the post-World War II German constitution. In the American debate over constitutional meaning, originalism looms large. Balkin rethinks originalism by starting with the framework that the Constitution created at the time it was drafted and then tracing how successive generations "build out" 2 that framework to fill in the plan. But Balkin"s invocation of originalism as an "on the wall" 3 theory is itself very American. Inquiring this closely into a constitution"s original meaning is done almost nowhere else in the world, with some lonely holdouts at the High Court of Australia. 4 Instead, purposive interpretation-or one of its

The discussion of John Rawls's work over the last twenty years has made contractarianism a familiar term in political theory.' But although Rawls's work was rooted in the familiar social contract theories of Locke, Rousseau and Kant and although other theorists have made some use of the approach, the general discussion of the concept of contractarian argument in the modem literature has remained focused on Rawls's particular conception of it.' Criticisms of Rawls's theory have been assumed to be criticisms of contractarianism in general, and the limitations in Rawls's use of the "social contract" idea have been assumed to be limitations that any contractarian would encounter. In part, this is because Rawls himself has contributed so much in his more recent writings to the critical discussion of the methods used in A Theory of Justice. 3 We think it is time, however, for the discussion of contractarianism to be detached from the analysis of that particular work, so that it can be considered on its merits as a general approach to political and legal evaluation. Our aim in this article is to present contractarianism in an attractive light. But we do not assume that there is just one contractarian method. There are many, and a consideration of contractarianism as a general theoretical approach involves a consideration of the differences among these various methods and the choices that must be made in their design. In this article, we consider some of those choices-between negative and positive contractarianism; hypothetical, tacit and actual consent; holistic and particular evaluations; rational choice and Rousseauian assumptions about the motivation of the contracting parties, and so on. These choices