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Getting Religion: Has Political Science Rediscovered the Faith Factor?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

KENNETH D. WALD  and
CLYDE WILCOX
KENNETH D. WALD
Affiliation:
University of Florida
CLYDE WILCOX
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

To judge by the absence of religion from the pages of the American Political Science Review in its first century, most political scientists have embraced a secular understanding of the political world. We explore the evolving status of religion in the discipline by examining patterns of scholarly inquiry in the discipline's flagship journal. After finding religion an (at best) marginal topic and rejecting some plausible hypotheses for this outcome, we examine the major reasons religion has received so little attention—the intellectual origins of the discipline, the social background of practitioners, the complexity of religious measurements, and the event-driven agenda of political science. Despite the resurgence of scholarly interest in religion during the 1980s, the status of the subfield remains tenuous because of the intellectual isolation of research on the topic.

Type
“THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE” ESSAYS
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 100 , Issue 4 , November 2006 , pp. 523 - 529
Copyright
© 2006 by the American Political Science Association

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