Schulte, Daniel. (2025). To Ban or Not to Ban: Explaining Abortion Policy in Poland, Russia, and Turkey. Studies in Comparative International Development, 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-025-09470-6.
Abstract: What explains the timing when right-wing governments in backsliding hybrid regimes adopt and implement restrictive morality policies such as abortion bans? This article uses comparative historical analysis to explain the puzzle of divergent abortion policy outcomes in Poland, Russia, and Turkey. Its scope is right-wing government-led backsliding hybrid regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (1995–2022), a region historically pioneering abortion liberalization. The article inductively builds a theory of morality politics in backsliding hybrid regimes, distinct from dynamics in full democracies or autocracies. It builds on existing literature on social movements, coalitions, the chief executive, and the judiciary, while pointing out the limits of several alternative explanations (doctrine, religious-nationalist fusion, religiosity, public opinion, and transnational actors). In backsliding hybrid regimes, the strength of the anti-abortion social movement is a background condition influencing the relative level of restriction, and the chief executive’s decision is central for the choice to ban at all or even more. In this regime type, incumbents must still win elections, and some executives are more strategic than others in weighing potential political consequences of bans. The article moves the study of morality policy beyond Western democracies and has implications for public health and human rights.
Schulte, Daniel. (2025). Rallying around the mosque or flag: The effects of morality and security agenda setting on political performance in Turkey. Mediterranean Politics, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2025.2512657
Abstract: This article examines electoral autocrats’ strategic communication with morality issues including traditional family values and religious buildings. While a prominent “rally ‘round the flag” literature examines securitization, there is little research on strategic communication with morality issues. How do the agenda setting effects of morality issues compare to those of security issues? I examine the impact of agenda setting on citizens’ attitudes with a survey experiment fielded in Turkey during an economic crisis. I find mixed results: the security treatment significantly increases citizen support for government policy, while the religious building morality treatment significantly decreases perceived importance of the economy; the family values treatment did not significantly impact either government support or importance of the economy. Additionally, morality and security treatments increase support for government policy among high religiosity respondents. These findings shed light on morality issues’ role in the authoritarian toolkit in religious contexts.
Ralph-Morrow, Liz, Daniel Schulte, J-P Salter, Alexandra Hartman. The Promises and Pitfalls of Using
Student-Generated Data to Teach Qualitative Analysis. PS: Political Science and Politics. conditionally accepted.
Abstract: A specific challenge of qualitative methods teaching is including both skills for data generation and data analysis, with recent audits of political science curricula revealing that the latter is particularly neglected at the undergraduate level. There are few published discussions on the importance of teaching analytical mechanics, or guidance provided on how best to find and use data for teaching. In this article, we explain how we integrated an exercise that enabled our class of over 100 undergraduate students to generate their own original data and then to practise deductive coding and analysis. In addition to discussing our teaching experiences, we also draw on interviews with our students to reflect on the success and challenges of our approach, and to offer suggestions to others who may wish to replicate our strategy in a large undergraduate setting.
Abstract: Questions of societal import have both normative (what should be done) and descriptive (what is the case) dimensions. In this chapter, we address disagreements about the latter through the lens of political cognition, a research effort spanning cognitive psychology and experimental political science. We consider various explanations for fierce disagreements about “facts on the ground” and find that first, extensive evidence shows that judgments sort by political partisanship. Second, individual differences in threat sensitivity and uncertainty tolerance predict partisan group membership, which aids understanding of group differences but not necessarily differences in descriptive beliefs. Third, no evidence suggests a historically unusual deficit in scientific understanding. Fourth, some evidence implicates well-studied features of thought (confirmation bias, motivated reasoning), but these features appear to be symmetrical across the partisan divide. Finally, emergent evidence implicates people’s assessments of information sources, processes that are also susceptible to motivated reasoning and partisan cueing and moreover are challenged by a media environment that is historically unusual. We conclude that the most promising conceptualizations of disagreement over empirical matters will acknowledge that partisan cues are often valid cues indicating the beliefs of people’s groups and address difficulties of information source assessment in our current, unstable information environment.
Abstract: This chapter examines Russia, a postcommunist country with a dominant Orthodox religious society. Building on Jeffrey Haynes and Anja Henning’s useful theoretical framework, the chapter explores the role of faith-based organizations in social welfare in the contemporary Russian Federation around five main topics: the historical path of church–state relations; the objectives of religious actors’ public agency; the Russian Orthodox Church’s means and strategies in the public square; the effects of church–state cooperation; and public perceptions of religion. The authors focus on the civil and political roles of the Russian Orthodox Church after it reemerged after the communist era, including the revival of its charity traditions and the current church–state symphonia, and ask whether these activities strengthen or weaken postcommunist Russian civil society.
Daniel J. Schulte, Ph.D. 