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How the everyday habits and attitudes of ordinary liberals and conservatives shape the health of American democracy.

In Everyday Democracy, Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut study Americans’ views of several manifestations of “everyday democracy,” which they define as the attitudes, behaviors, and processes that people experience in daily life and their routine considerations of politics and community. Examples include engaging in dialogue with political opponents and giving politicians license to compromise. Ordinary political moments like these constitute much of politics, and they can lay the foundation that shapes if, when, and how crisis moments unfold.

Paying particular attention to the role of ideology in shaping how Americans emulate daily democratic ideals, this book considers such questions as: How do liberals and conservatives support different aspects of democratic practice, and are there ideological asymmetries between the two groups? If and when asymmetries emerge, what factors might explain them? The authors consider what their findings mean for the health of American democracy broadly.

No Church is monolithic—this is the preliminary premise of this volume on the public place of religion in a representative number of post-communist countries. The studies confirm that within any religious organization we can expect to find fissures, factions, theological or ideological quarrels, and perhaps even competing interest groups, such as missionary workers, regular clergy versus secular clergy, and sometimes even competing ecclesiastical hierarchies. The main focus of the book rests on the divisions arising within select Christian Churches, as they confront the processes of secularization and atheization. The coverage area includes Russia and the Ukraine, East-Central Europe and South-Eastern Europe. Some chapters focus on individual clergy who challenge the mainstream of their given Church either from a more liberal or from a more conservative perspective, while others deal with the divisive forces impacting the religious organizations.

This festschrift to honor Sabrina Ramet’s seminal contribution to the study of religion in the politics of the communist and post-communist world, brings together several generations of scholars from a variety of countries, both those well established in their fields of study as well as young promising academics.