The Plurality of Peter Berger's “Two Pluralisms” in Germany

The aim of this paper is to unfold Peter L. Berger’s new paradigm of the “Two Pluralisms” for the German context, concretizing and localizing the management of religious plurality with regard to central societal fields. It is argued that, besides the bird’s-eye view of the global and national developments, more differentiated analyses of smaller-scale units (like federal states, municipalities, and cities) are needed which zoom into the concrete local negotiation processes, opening them up with regard to their topics, actor constellations, dynamics, and effects. While Berger builds up his new paradigm in the connection of the social macro-level and the individual micro-level, this paper deals primarily with the meso-level and the consequences of the “Two Pluralisms” in the institutional contexts of politics/law, education, symbolic representation, and communication that are currently undergoing a significant change through secularization and religious pluralization while, however, have so far hardly been examined with regard to their dynamics and the intended integrative effects.     

A New Paradigm? Peter Berger’s “The Two Pluralisms”

The article discusses Peter Berger’s suggestion to replace the secularization theory by a “new paradigm” of a double plurality: the plurality of religions and the plurality (rather: polarity) of the religious and the secular sphere. Whether this constitutes a new paradigm seems just as questionable as whether it is a paradigm at all. After having discussed these two questions the article engages with the basic tenets of Berger’s concept by asking whether the paradigm is convincing. The discussion focusses on Berger’s concept of religion, which puts the secular and the religious sphere in opposition to each other – not only in the society but also in the consciousness of the religious subject.     

Peter Berger’s “Many Altars” and the Theology of Religions

My notes on Peter Berger’s recent publication (Berger 2014) come in two parts. In part one, I will address a couple of conceptual ambiguities surrounding the so-called “secularization theory”. In part two, I will deal with Berger’s argument that religious diversity undermines religious certainties and in that sense fosters secularization. As I will point out, theologians are not only well aware of this situation, they are discussing it as part of the so-called “theology of religions,” and they have identified a solution that avoids what Berger rightly characterizes as the two impasses of fundamentalism and relativism.     

The “Miracle” Revisited: The De-radicalization of Korean Political Culture

The radicalism that spawned the 1987 democratic revolution was a product of civic unity across class lines. Lacking the raw power of President Park, Presidents Chun and Roh had no choice but to seek a degree of democratic legitimacy. That same weakness was reflected in their relative surrender of Blue House power over Korean chaebols. Thus there were two winners in the political transformation of those years: minjung power (the Korean equivalent of Philippine “people power”) and corporatism, now largely freed from Parkian restraints. With the subsequent dissolution of minjung unity, however, corporatism emerged as the real winner of the “democratic” revolution. That victory was consummated by the neoliberal reforms mandated by the IMF in return for a mammoth bailout package after the Crash. There was little effective resistance to this IMFism, for the reform spirit of 1987 had perished long before.     

The “timeline” method of studying electoral dynamics

To study the evolution of electoral preferences, Erikson and Wlezien (2012) propose assessing the correspondence between pre-election polls and the vote in a set of elections. That is, they treat poll data not as a set of time series but as a series of cross-sections—across elections—for each day of the election cycle. This “timeline” method does not provide complete information, but does reveal general patterns of electoral dynamics, and has been applied to elections in numerous countries. The application of the method involves a number of decisions that have not been explicitly addressed in previous research, however. There are three primary issues: (1) how best to assess the evolution of preferences; (2) how to deal with missing data; and (3) the consequences of sampling error. This paper considers each of these issues and provides answers. In the end, the analyses suggest that simpler approaches are better. It also may be that a more general strategy is possible, in which scholars could explicitly model the variation in poll-vote error across countries, elections, parties and time. We consider that direction for future research in the concluding section.     

The failure of a Nazi “killer” amendment

Public Choice - We describe a remarkable instance of a motion-proposing and agenda-setting strategy by the Nazi party, NSDAP, during the Weimar Republic. Their purpose was to kill a motion of...     

The Electoral Consequences of Skin Color: The “Hidden” Side of Race in Politics

Despite the significant role that skin color plays in material well-being and social perceptions, scholars know little if anything about whether skin color and afrocentric features influence political cognition and behavior and specifically, if intraracial variation in addition to categorical difference affects the choices of voters. Do more phenotypically black minorities suffer an electoral penalty as they do in most aspects of life? This study investigates the impact of color and phenotypically black facial features on candidate evaluation, using a nationally representative survey experiment of over 2000 whites. Subjects were randomly assigned to campaign literature of two opposing candidates, in which the race, skin color and features, and issue stance of candidates was varied. I find that afrocentric phenotype is an important, albeit hidden, form of bias in racial attitudes and that the importance of race on candidate evaluation depends largely on skin color and afrocentric features. However, like other racial cues, color and black phenotype don’t influence voters’ evaluations uniformly but vary in magnitude and direction across the gender and partisan makeup of the electorate in theoretically explicable ways. Ultimately, I argue, scholars of race politics, implicit racial bias, and minority candidates are missing an important aspect of racial bias.     

“The Big Mo”: The Early Days of Housing Policy Debate

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary year of Housing Policy Debate, this article details the circumstances and the political climate of the late 1980s that led to the origin of this journal. I review the influence and the confluence of the National Housing Task Force of 1987, Jim Rouse (CEO of the Rouse Corporation), the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs, and David O. Maxwell, then the chairman of Fannie Mae, to create the Office of Housing Research (OHR) within Fannie Mae. The article also highlights the role of the National Housing Task Force and the first Fannie Mae Housing Conference in expanding high-quality housing research in the 1990s through the MIT Housing Policy Project and the research and convening efforts of the OHR in Fannie Mae, which included this journal and a continuance of the Annual Housing Conference thereafter.