Conservative Research Articles

REFLECTIONS ON ABORTION POLITICS IN THE NEW RIGHT-WING AMERICA*

What lies ahead for the longstanding politics of abortion in the United States now that a constitutional right to abortion has ended and—more generally—conservative politics have been consumed by the rise of the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump? I contextualize the state of abortion politics today within the larger half-century history of the battle over the issue by identifying four stages of abortion politics. I then offer some observations on the key political maneuvers that made the overthrow of Roe v. Wade possible. Finally, I outline how the central questions for the future of abortion lie at the intersection of the pro-life movement, the Republican Party, and the MAGA movement.

“They look better on the breasts”: Advertisement, sexuality, and the bra business in postsocialist Poland

This article examines the 1990s transition from socialism to capitalism in Poland through the lens of the changing market of underwear. Based on oral history interviews, archival research of bra production companies, as well as an analysis of contemporary press reports, I examine how the integration of the Polish economy into the global capitalist system post 1989 influenced its sexual culture. This article shows how the end of the public sector’s monopoly on the production of underwear and the rise of the private sector introduced new form of bras that were codified as sexual by the media and manufacturers themselves. These new types of products mimicked Western European brands, distancing themselves from the socialist era underwear, and incorporated new technology designed to model and discipline female bodies. Through a deep analysis of a 1996 article on the bra business from The Electoral Gazette [Gazeta Wyborcza], the biggest daily newspaper in Poland, I show how the liberal media were ambivalent to such changes and portrayed it as differences between generations of women in the face of calls for stricter censorship from conservative politicians and the Catholic Church.

Containing Gender Outlaws, Stigmatizing the Left

This article analyses the formation of cisgenderist and transphobic discourses in the reporting of the Daily Mail during the Thatcher era (1979-1990). It explores the emergence of a discursive strategy that focused on the containment of forms of gender expression that the socially conservative newspaper saw as a threat to the normative understandings of gender that it cherished. At the same time, it discusses how the paper managed the tension between its desire to contain and marginalize these individuals existed and its need to fetishize them for the purposes of commercial and political gain. It ties its reporting on trans people to other important trends in conservative politics, including the moralistic campaigns of Mary Whitehouse to regulate television broadcasting, and the forms of political homophobia that appeared under the government of Margaret Thatcher.

A lay association as a client

Research into the Italian Liturgical Movement emphasised the pedagogical commitment of lay associations, rather than architectural innovation they eventually promoted. The case study presented here discusses a little-known case of ambitious architectural patronage promoted in 1952-53 by the main Italian lay association: the Italian Youth of Catholic Action (Gioventù di Azione Cattolica, GiAC). The winning design by architect Enzo Magnani, the first president of the Catholic Union of Italian Artists (UCAI), was rejected directly by Pius XII, probably as an indirect consequence of the worsening of the political fracture between the GiAC and the main branches of the Azione Cattolica, oriented towards explicit support for conservative and clericalist political positions, rather than ecclesial engagment and liturgical afflatus. The archives of Azione Cattolica Italiana (preserved by ISACEM in Rome) and some private archives allow a first reconstruction of the matter, which had been completely erased from the asssociation’s official history, and probably broke any possible link between associative patronage and liturgical architecture during the decades that followed.

The Theme of Indianism in the Selected Works of Upamanyu Chatterjee

One of the most accomplished and prolific contemporary Indian writers of English is Upamanyu Chatterjee. With a strong sociocultural and Indian foundation, Chatterjee’s fields of expertise encompass a wide range of subjects while remaining deeply influenced by the rich legacy of Indian culture. The Spiritualism and nationalism are included on this list. For him, just like for Aurobindo Ghosh, nationalism entails a genuine dedication to one’s country and its people, regardless of their race, gender, caste, or place in society. India is a nation that embraces many languages, cultures, and religions. Religion- and culture-related disputes have always arisen. The conservative and narrow-minded religious leaders and politicians frequently have mislead the populace, which occasionally have caused riots. Upamanyu Chatterjee asserts that in a country with as many cultures as India, riots are inevitable. India has continued to expand over time despite being the target of multiple invasions and incursions. India’s greatest asset is its spirituality. It has been reinforced by them in all attacks, both internal and external. According to Upamanyu Chatterjee, the evil forces endangering the peace and harmony of the nation can be vanquished by grasping the core values of Indian culture. The comparison and analysis of the nationalistic and spiritualist ethos found in the selected works of Upamanyu Chatterjee is the main goal of this research project.

Welcoming Strangers: Protestant Churches’ Involvement in Refugee Resettlement in the United States

AbstractProviding shelters and other aid for refugees is one of the core Christian principles, but there exists a great divide in Protestant churches’ response to the refugee crisis. This study examines what contributes to the divide, focusing on how various congregational characteristics relate to churches’ interests and involvement in refugee resettlement. The analysis of the 2018–2019 National Congregations Study data reveals that political conservatism within a church is linked to the disinterest in refugee resettlement. The results also show that churches with more members who have a bachelor's degree and churches participating in international humanitarian works are more likely to have discussions on refugee resettlement. In terms of direct involvement in helping refugees, congregational members’ migration experiences seem to make a significant difference.

Selling Austerity to the Public: Analysing the Rhetoric of the UK Government on its Welfare Cuts

Over the past twelve years, the UK has seen a marked increase in poverty and economic inequality. While numerous factors have contributed to this situation, an undisputedly important role has been played by the continuous program of welfare spending cuts designed and executed by a series of Conservative governments. To alleviate the potential for the unpopularity of austerity measures, the Conservatives have attempted to put a positive spin on their policies by making a series of core claims emphasizing the beneficial effects of the welfare reform. Using the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper examines these claims and offers a critique of each of them. In doing so, the research seeks to expose the use of traditional stereotypes (especially that of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor) in the government’s rhetoric. The paper draws on a corpus of political speeches and media appearances of Conservative politicians, as well as on sociological reports and newspaper coverage. The analysis is principally focused on the two governments led by David Cameron, although some attention is also devoted to subsequent Conservative administrations.

Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

Feminist scholarship has often been profoundly ambivalent about maternalist political mobilisations, seeing them as posing dangers of essentialising motherhood and of colluding with male-centred social orders, conservative politics and top-down state projects. This article looks at the complex and fluid politics of protest groups adopting familial kinship maternalist identities to militate politically for refugees and people seeking asylum, with particular reference to the Australian Grandmothers for Refugees organisation (G4R). A regular purple presence at demonstrations and on social media, the group’s 2000 members’ activities include vigils at ministerial and parliamentary members’ offices and detention centres, webinars, letter campaigns, petitions and parliamentary submissions. The G4R grandmothers’ role in the protests against the Australian asylum regime is part of a wider pattern of female predominance in contemporary organisations involved in such support and activism both locally and globally. The Grandmothers also exemplify the often-overlooked political energy of older women. The discussion explores questions about politicised kinship positionings, maternalist framings and mobilisations, and the cosmopolitan hospitality they offer. I am especially interested in how invocations of kinship-based location operate within these organisations, assuming ‘familial’ responsibility for and care of ‘Others’ within and beyond state and nation. Kinship tropes and imaginaries, while on occasion exclusionary and contradictory, arguably work to achieve a linking of political, ‘enraged’ affect with solidarity with the oppressed, enacting a transformative ethics in the public through effective political mobilisations of fictive kinship, responsibility, kindness, empathy and care.

Kyrie Irving, vaccine hesitancy, and the politics of rugged individualism

ABSTRACT NBA superstar Kyrie Irving has a well-earned reputation for both his elite talent and his unpredictable public commentary. Such expressions have included references to the Earth being flat, advocacy for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and reluctance to proceed with the 2020 basketball season in the midst of a pandemic and resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. He has become most notorious, however, for his refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a position that earned him both praise and scorn. We argue in this article that Irving’s stance prioritizes a form of rugged individualism characterized by neoliberal politics and professional sport. His retreat into rugged individualism contributed to delegitimizing public health policies and prompted vocal defenses of his actions from political conservatives who had condemned his earlier forms of activism. The controversy over Irving’s vaccine hesitancy spotlights the rhetorical effect of his ambiguous voice and its implications for democratic contestation. More specifically, it speaks to the challenges of prioritizing the public good under the conditions of neoliberal political culture.

Conspiracy mentality, subclinical paranoia, and political conservatism are associated with perceived status threat.

Status threat (i.e., concern that one's dominant social group will be undermined by outsiders) is a significant factor in current United States politics. While demographic factors such as race (e.g., Whiteness) and political affiliation (e.g., conservatism) tend to be associated with heightened levels of status threat, its psychological facets have yet to be fully characterized. Informed by a "paranoid" model of American politics, we explored a suite of possible psychological and demographic associates of perceived status threat, including race/ethnicity, political conservatism, analytic thinking, magical ideation, subclinical paranoia, and conspiracy mentality. In a small, quota sample drawn from the United States (N = 300), we found that conspiracy mentality, subclinical paranoia, conservatism, and age were each positively (and uniquely) associated with status threat. In addition to replicating past work linking conservatism to status threat, this study identifies subclinical paranoia and conspiracy mentality as novel psychological associates of status threat. These findings pave the way for future research regarding how and why status threat concerns may become exaggerated in certain individuals, possibly to the detriment of personal and societal wellbeing.

Outcomes According to Coronary Revascularization Modality in the ISCHEMIA Trial

BackgroundIn the ISCHEMIA (International Study of Comparative Health Effectiveness with Medical and Invasive Approaches) trial, the risk of ischemic events was similar in patients with stable coronary artery disease treated with an invasive (INV) strategy of angiography and percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) or surgical (coronary artery bypass grafting [CABG]) coronary revascularization and a conservative (CON) strategy of initial medical therapy. ObjectivesThe authors analyzed separately the outcomes of INV patients treated with PCI or CABG. MethodsPatients without preceding primary outcome events were categorized as INV-PCI or INV-CABG from the time of revascularization. The ISCHEMIA primary outcome (composite of cardiovascular death, protocol-defined myocardial infarction or hospitalization for unstable angina, heart failure, or resuscitated cardiac arrest) was used. ResultsAmong INV-CABG patients, primary outcome events occurred in 84 of 512 (16.4%) at a median follow-up of 2.85 years; 48 events (57.1%) occurred within 30 days after CABG, including 40 procedural MIs. Among INV-PCI patients, primary outcome events occurred in 147 of 1,500 (9.8%) at median follow-up of 2.94 years; 31 of which (21.1%) occurred within 30 days after PCI, including 24 procedural MIs. In comparison, 352 of 2,591 CON patients (13.6%) had primary outcome events at a median follow-up of 3.2 years, 22 of which (6.3%) occurred within 30 days of randomization. The adjusted primary outcome risks were higher after both CABG and PCI within 30 days (HR: 16.25 [95% CI: 11.44-23.07] and HR: 2.99 [95% CI: 1.97-4.53]) and lower thereafter (0.63 [95% CI: 0.44-0.89] and 0.66 [95% CI: 0.53-0.82]). ConclusionsIn ISCHEMIA, early revascularization by PCI and CABG was associated with higher early risks and lower long-term risks of cardiovascular events compared with CON. The early risk was greatest after CABG, owing to protocol-defined procedural MIs.

Changes in Politics and Religiosity Among Students at a Protestant University

AbstractCollege is a setting and time of profound change in the lives of emerging adults. This change can include shifts in identity related to politics and religion. Given widespread attention to the alignment of religious people with conservative politics and less religious people with liberal politics (i.e., the “God Gap”), we ask: do college students who become politically liberal lose their religion in the process? Using longitudinal panel data, this study examines changes in political identity and religiosity among students at a Protestant university. Findings reveal changes in students’ politics align with changes in public and private religious behaviors, certainty in belief, agreement with core tenets of the Christian faith, faith maturity, and closeness to God. Whereas students who become more politically conservative increase their religiosity, the inverse is true for those whose politics become more liberal in college.

Identity work in conservative political discourse: a cross-cultural comparison

ABSTRACT This article presents the findings of a cross-cultural study of identity positioning in the political discourse of religious, conservative politicians in Italy and Northern Ireland. Findings point to the use of frames of reference around family, faith, freedom and societal catastrophe. These frames were though amplified through use of self-narratives of suffering in defence of beliefs and traditions. A key driver of the identity positioning work was therefore ‘stake inoculation’. That is the use of cues to defend against accusations of bigotry. This move in English is largely ‘defensive', whereas in Italian it involves a more combative strategy of ‘othering’.

Conservatism, anti-vaccination attitudes, and intellectual humility: examining their associations through a social judgment theory framework.

Previous research has consistently found that more political conservatism is related to higher anti-vaccination attitudes. However, little work has investigated how intellectual humility could potentially contribute to this relationship. Employing the social judgment theory of attitude change, we examined whether conservatism could mediate the association between intellectual humility and anti-vaccination attitudes. Participants (N = 1,293; 40.1% female; Mage = 38.23years, SDage = 11.61, range of age was 18-78) completed a multifaceted measure of intellectual humility, an assessment of four types of anti-vaccination attitudes, and a measure of political orientation. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that decreased levels of most aspects of intellectual humility (i.e., independence of intellect and ego, openness to revising one's viewpoint, and lack of intellectual overconfidence) are associated with more conservative political views, which in turn is associated with stronger anti-vaccination attitudes, particularly worries about unforeseen future effects, concerns about commercial profiteering, and preference for natural immunity. These findings suggest that intellectual humility could reflect one's latitude widths, thereby predicting their openness to vaccine massaging, and thus may play an important role in addressing anti-vaccination attitudes, especially when politics is involved.

Sacralising the secular: constructing ‘religion’ in social movement scholarship

ABSTRACT This article investigates how social movement scholars construct the category of ‘religion’ within the discipline. Using some of the conceptual tools from the critical study of religion – namely, problematising the distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ – it analyzes a sample of articles within the journals Social Movement Studies and Mobilization between 2010 and 2020 that deal with a broad range of religious, spiritual, and ‘religion-like’ or ‘secular sacred’ phenomena. I find three key trends within the data: social movements literature has a narrow construction of what constitutes ‘religion’; those things designated ‘religious’ are often instrumentalized in service to ‘political’ ends; and social movement scholars are more likely to study conservative and extreme politics where it intersects with groups considered ‘religious’ than with those considered ‘secular.’ The article invites scholars of social movements to consider how particular conceptions of both ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are naturalised within the field.

Identity Politics, Political Ideology, and Well‐being: Is Identity Politics Good for Our Well‐being?

Research indicates that political progressives have lower levels of mental well‐being than political conservatives. However, while attention has been paid to why conservatives have higher levels of well‐being relatively little attention has been used to examine why progressives may have comparatively low levels of well‐being. Recent events connected to a “Great Awokening” suggest that identity politics may correlate to a decrease in well‐being particularly among young progressives and offer an explanation tied to internal elements within political progressiveness. Regression analysis with data from the Baylor Religion Survey indicates that identity political variables, but not a desire for higher government spending, are consistently negatively related to lower well‐being and mediate the ability of progressive political ideology to predict lower levels of well‐being. By paying attention to political progressives, rather than political conservatives, a nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between political ideology and well‐being begins to emerge. It is plausible that political progressives are not equally prone to lower levels of well‐being as those committed to a class‐based type of progressive activism seem to be better off than those tied to issues of identity politics.

Choosing Stagnation. The Kosygin Reforms and the Rise of Brezhnev’s Stagnationary Coalition

This essay seeks to restore stagnation as a category of analysis to understand late-Soviet socialism. It argues that the conservative politics of the Brezhnev period and its tepid economic growth were the results of a choice by Soviet elites to prioritise political stability over a consumerist reconfiguration of the Soviet growth model. This choice was undertaken in the context of the Kosygin reforms, measures aimed at arresting the looming stagflation of the late Khrushchev era. The defeat of the reforms marked a political caesura at which stagnation became an acceptable risk for the party elite.

The Far Right Culture War on ESG

This article examines connections between religious nationalism, extremist movements, and environmental politics, with a focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks and debates in the United States since 2020. It begins with a brief history of ESG, then examines responses from mainstream conservatives and far-right groups to the growth of ESG. It argues that the current backlash against the use of ESG is part of a larger conservative culture war against “woke” politics. The article offers a detailed look at the role of the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action and its “ESG Hurts” campaign, and shows how climate denial, conspiracy theories, and hostility to race and gender politics are interconnected parts of a growing ideological movement rooted in Christian Nationalism and climate denial.

La dialectique du rationnel et de l’effectif: une ontologie hégélienne pour changer le monde

The different interpretations of Hegel's controversial formula of the Preface of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, declaring that “Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig”, correspond to the different readings of the overall orientation of the Hegelian notion of objective spirit in general and his political philosophy in particular. This could be illustrated by several examples such as the case of Rudolf Haym (1857) who famously considered the formula as the very expression of Hegel's political conservatism, and the recently published interpretation by J.-F. Kervégan (2021), according to which we should read Hegel's formula as an epistemological judgment and his entire political philosophy as epistemology. After a critical discussion of these two examples, I propose to distinguish between a formal and a speculative paradigm of interpretations, and I present, within the latter, an analysis of the dialectical relations between Hegel's notions of effectiveness (Wirklichkeit) and rationality (Vernüftigkeit), so that the formula of the Preface would not only maintain the role of philosophy in changing the world, but also indicate new potentialities regarding the realization (Verwirklichung) of revolutionary political thought.

Ideological Mate-guarding: Sexual Jealousy and Mating Strategy Predict Support for Female Honor.

Feminine honor dictates that women should cultivate a reputation for sexual purity via behaviors such as dressing modestly and maintaining virginity before marriage. The dominant explanation for people's support for feminine honor is that female infidelity threatens male partners' honor. Beyond this, the literature affords little understanding of the evolutionary and psychological origins of feminine honor. We propose that feminine honor functions as an ideological form of mate guarding that is shaped by sexual jealousy and mating strategy. Two correlational studies (N = 892) revealed support for predictions derived from this ideological mate-guarding account. In Study 1, dispositional jealousy and mating strategy (more monogamous orientation) predicted male participants' support for a mate's (especially a long-term mate's) feminine honor. Moving beyond mate preferences, in Study 2 male and female participants' dispositional jealousy and mating strategy predicted support for feminine honor of women in general. Results applied beyond masculine honor norms, religiosity, political conservativism, and age. These findings enhance the understanding of the origins and maintenance of feminine honor and related norms and ideologies that enable control over women's socio-sexual behavior.