Suchergebnisse

In much of the Muslim world, Islamic political and economic movements appear to have a comparative advantage. Relative to similar secular groups, they are better able to mobilize supporters and sustain their cooperation long-term. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Turkey, a historically secular country that has experienced a sharp rise in Islamic-based political and economic activity. Drawing on rich data sources and econometric methods, Avital Livny challenges existing explanations - such as personal faith - for the success of these movements. Instead, Livny shows that the Islamic advantage is rooted in feelings of trust among individuals with a shared, religious group-identity. This group-based trust serves as an effective substitute for more generalized feelings of interpersonal trust, which are largely absent in many Muslim-plurality countries. The book presents a new argument for conceptualizing religion as both a personal belief system and collective identity.

ABSTRACTStudent involvement in faculty research is on the rise because it serves at least three sets of interests: (1) students' desire to build their résumés and develop close relationships with faculty members; (2) faculty members' hope of getting research support from bright, attentive assistants; and (3) universities' wish to publicize these opportunities to incoming student and faculty cohorts. At times, faculty members may come to see their undergraduate researchers as a source of inexpensive but high-quality labor, forgetting that they are students who are at the university to learn critical skills. In this article, I make the case for a student-centered approach to the undergraduate research experience (URE), which combines a traditional apprenticeship with a curriculum in the "what," "why," and "how" of research and expands the program over multiple semesters, supporting a team of student apprentices. I argue that this approach meets more of students' goals while also supporting faculty and university interests. I describe the multi-semester URE that I have developed and provide tools to faculty members who want to adapt this program to their home institution.

AbstractSocial scientists have long been interested in how religious beliefs and practices impact and are impacted by socio-political and economic processes. Most recently, scholarly attention has focused on the interplay between religiosity and local actors, events, and institutions. Until now, measures of religiosity have relied heavily on self-reports in surveys, but these cannot always be safely collected and tend to be costly. Even where available, survey-based measures may be too obtrusive and are rarely representative of sub-national units. Here, I propose an inexpensive method that uses satellite imagery to unobtrusively estimate religiosity across small geographic units. I hypothesize that night-lights are affected by the behavior of fasting Muslims during Ramadan, especially in places where daytime activities are otherwise unchanged (i.e., where there is no "day-night inversion"). I explore and confirm the validity of this measurement strategy in the Turkish case, using a series of high-quality surveys and electoral results, representing 973 administrative districts. I conclude with a discussion of the external validity of this method and an overview of the ethical concerns raised by the use of remote sensing to estimate religiosity, in the Muslim world and elsewhere.