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AbstractIn the United States, Evangelical Protestants' political attitudes have been attributed to their conservative theological beliefs. As this religion's membership has increased around the world, other Evangelicals would logically be expected to demonstrate a similar conservatism in their political views. And yet, this anticipated result does not hold. In Brazil, for example, Evangelicals maintain moderate-to-liberal attitudes on several issues. To address this anomaly, this article relies on the Pew Forum's Multi-Country Religion Survey to examine the impact of religion on Evangelicals' ideology as well as attitudes on moral and economic issues in the United States and Brazil. While doctrinal orthodoxy predicts Evangelicals' moral conservatism, neither religious component examined significantly predicts Brazilian Evangelicals' ideology or economic attitudes. Significant differences in Brazilian and American attitudes on these dimensions in general suggest that the political environment plays a much larger role in whether — and how — religion influences these political attitudes.

The procedure developed by The American Voter (Campbell et al., 1960) to understand determinants of the electoral decision first demonstrated the importance of short-term forces as vote components. Using a similar categorization scheme of these components from the National Election Studies, this paper examines the importance of these short-term forces in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, augmenting the basic components model by developing summary measures of the combined impact of these forces as well as analyzing the vote components for political independents. The authors conclude that, in comparison with the 1952 and 1956 elections, these short- term forces were relatively mild in these two recent elections and that, despite the conventional wisdom, the way in which short-term forces affected Independents did not impact the outcome of the elections generally. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]