Regulating School Reforms: An Analysis of the Impact of Religious Interests on State Education Policies

This project analyzes the role of religious populations on the restrictiveness of state education policies, and looks into the impact of evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) on private school choice, public school choice, and home schools It measures the size of the state's religious population using both congregational measurements and population rate measurements provided by the Glenmary Research Center, and tests hypotheses with ordinal logistic regression. Ultimately, this research finds that the size of a state's religious populations is an important predictor of policy restrictiveness. Private school choice policies are best predicted by Catholic adherents and LDS adherents; Charter school policy restrictiveness is best predicted by evangelical adherents and LDS adherents; and home school policy restrictiveness is best predicted by evangelical adherents, with LDS adherents providing some predictive power for home school policies

Gender and Conditional Support for Torture in the War on Terror

The events of September 11 have clearly changed the way that Americans think about politics and policy and may have changed attitudes about the treatment of America’s perceived enemies. At the same time, revelations about American interrogation techniques in the war on terror have forced a national dialogue on human rights during a time of war. Americans do tend to oppose a variety of harsh interrogation techniques, but opposition appears to be conditioned by gender, partisanship, and the context in which an interrogation might take place. We explore how conditions shape attitudes on interrogation techniques in the war on terror, with a particular focus on gender and contextual framing. We analyze data from a unique 2004 national survey of American adults to test several hypotheses. Our results suggest that gender strongly shapes opposition to harsh interrogation techniques, but contextual framing also shapes opposition. Partisanship and contextual framing also mediate the influence of gender on attitudes