This chapter explores the implications of growing economic and social inequality in California for the state's social contract, as well as the role of government and other institutions in addressing the new polarization. Data from the ILE's 2001-02 California Workforce Survey reveal that a majority of Californians are seriously concerned about the widening economic divide and support public policy measures that would help to narrow it. Respondents with lower incomes and less education are especially supportive of a strong government role in this area, as are noncitizens, Latinos, and African Americans. Because of the concentration of low-wage workers, immigrants, and Latinos in the southern part of the state, attitudes there belie the conservative stereotype of Southern California, traditionally juxtaposed to the relatively liberal attitudes assumed to be typical of the Bay Area. The survey results suggest that today, southern Californians are in fact more supportive of a strong government role than are people in the rest of the state. Southern Californians are also more pro-union than their counterparts elsewhere in the state. Another important topic in the chapter is public policy in regard to the problem of combining work and family responsibilities, with a large majority of survey respondents reporting that they favor compensating workers for family leave, and making child care and elder care more affordable.

Opposition among native workers to immigrants is well understood as a response to the economic and cultural instability caused by globalization. Increased capital mobility weakens the place-based leverage of strike action and collective bargaining, rendering unions susceptible to the protectionist concerns of native members. Yet, immigrant workers still join labor unions and turn to these organizations to improve working conditions and amplify their political voice. Little is known about the conditions underpinning pro-immigrant action by labor unions. This dissertation argues that when immigrant activists mobilize themselves, then partner with native trade unionists, they can pressure union leaders to support their concerns. By analyzing data from more than 120 in-depth interviews with trade unionists, employers, NGO-officials and politicians, conducted during 16 months of fieldwork in Denmark, Germany and the UK, I present evidence for the counterintuitive finding that weak, fragmented unions such as those in the UK more readily engage in pro-immigrant action than strong, encompassing unions such as those in Denmark and Germany. Combining cross-national and cross-sectoral observational and archival data with interviews, I explore three issue areas critical to the demands of immigrant union members: extreme right wing parties and movements, workplace discrimination, and job marginalization. Analysis of immigrant claims-making reveals that those immigrant activists who link their mobilization to the identity template prevalent in their host country, are better able to partner with native trade unionists and secure support from union leaders.

Although sociologists have increasingly abandoned the assumption that secularization is an inevitable byproduct of modernity, they have yet to develop a compelling account for why similar modern countries nevertheless accord religion substantially different roles in public life. This dissertation engages this problem by examining how the United States and Australia came to develop contrasting policies toward religious education in the late twentieth century. Prior to World War II, both countries adopted similar stances on the proper relationship of the state to religion in education: devotional practices were permitted in public schools, while financial support for religious schools was prohibited. Since the late 1940s, however, the two countries have moved in opposite directions. Australia has retained a place for religion in its public schools, while inaugurating generous government support for religious schools. The United States, meanwhile, has retained restrictions on public aid for religious schools while prohibiting devotional practices in its public schools. These changes have occurred, moreover, despite many apparent similarities: both nations are modern, religiously pluralist democracies with common-law legal systems and constitutions with explicit disestablishment clauses.

Drawing upon original archival research, as well as a wide array of other primary and secondary sources, this dissertation accounts for these divergent "secular settlements" by detailing how each country's administrative, judicial, and electoral institutions advanced or constrained three common secularizing processes: state-building, professionalization, and religious conflict. In brief, it argues that American political institutions constituted a "permeable state" which facilitated the progress of these processes, while Australian institutions constituted an "insulated state" which inhibited them.

The first part of the dissertation describes the genesis of the parallel secular settlements of the nineteenth century, focusing on how the state-building process generated public educational systems with similar policies toward religion, but divergent administrative structures. This prologue sets the stage for the second part, which examines how those administrative institutions affected the fate of religious education in state schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. America's decentralized system of educational administration advanced two long-term secularizing processes, professionalization and religious conflict, between 1880 and 1945, while Australia's centralized administrative system constrained them. The permeable American state facilitated challenges to pan-Protestant religious exercises in the public schools by religious minorities and educational professionals, leading to a slow attenuation of religion's position in public education over the early twentieth century. By contrast, the insulated Australian state made these kinds of challenges much more difficult, reducing the leverage religious minorities could bring to bear on policies they opposed, and actively suppressing professionalization among Australian teachers--both of which helped to sustain traditional religious instruction into the third quarter of the twentieth century.

The third part of the dissertation demonstrates how courts and parties provided contrasting opportunities and obstacles for concerted campaigns by religious minorities who sought to renegotiate each country's policy toward religion after 1945. Taxpayer standing and a realist hermeneutic made the American courts accessible and open to sustained litigation in ways that Australia's restrictive standing rules and legalist hermeneutic did not allow. By contrast, Australia's system of preference-voting and flexible party structure facilitated Catholics' political campaign to obtain state support for their school system--a campaign that foundered in the United States thanks to unfavorable coalition dynamics within a rigid two-party system.

This dissertation makes a number of contributions to contemporary debates about secularization. First, it develops a new, "political-institutional" approach to the study of secularization. Drawing on insights from institutional theory and historical sociology, this approach asserts that secular settlements emerge, not simply from broad modernizing trends or the self-interested calculations of political leaders, but instead from the interaction of general secularizing processes (such as state-building, religious conflict, and professionalization) and each country's specific political institutions. This approach offers increased explanatory power relative to four existing formulations. Second, it reveals that the state, as an institutional structure, has both mediating and constitutive effects on secularization. Both by conditioning the political and professional activities of would-be secularizing actors, and by actively calling into being the very actors who subsequently seek more secular outcomes, the state is a key factor in explaining variation in secularization. Finally, it demonstrates that the actors advancing more secular outcomes are animated by a wider variety of motivations than has typically been acknowledged. Although most existing studies focus on anticlerical or self-interested motives, this study reveals that practical administrative considerations and religious commitments have also been important forces driving the development of new secular settlements.

Scholars have documented that a new type of fiscal compact took hold in the United States during the twentieth century as taxpayers supported progressive taxation on incomes in exchange for public investments by government aimed at securing widespread prosperity. Yet by focusing primarily on the national level, existing literature examining the link between tax structure and social policy in the United States has missed a key element of American fiscal exceptionalism. By moving to the state level, my analysis finds that very different fiscal bargains, or models of “fiscal citizenship,” developed across the American states between the late 1940s and early 1970s, in many cases dramatically departing from the national model. Indeed, in some states, taxes were understood not as a way to underwrite progressive investments but rather as a means to force groups “escaping” taxation to contribute more toward the cost of government, as a way of preserving an exclusionary social order, or as a tool for purchasing autonomy from federal intervention.

Understanding the factors shaping this period of reforms is critical for strengthening theories of the exceptional American welfare state, particularly since the United States is distinctive in its strong reliance on state-level revenue generation to support social policy expenditures. In this dissertation, I examine what factors were responsible for the development of such diverse fiscal compacts across the American states by undertaking a comparative historical analysis of four key cases of state tax reform: New York, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina. I find that types of social contracts negotiated between taxpayers and the American states during these critical tax debates depended on the balance of power between labor and business groups and the prevailing racial order in each state.

For over a century, American religious organizations have waged a battle against scientists and their allies over the idea of human evolution. What began as a dispute about the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection has, over time, developed into a long-running policy conflict over the teaching of evolution and creationism in public schools. At the heart of the matter is a puzzle: Despite a nationwide shift in the policy status quo favoring evolution and two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that placed creationists at a severe institutional and political disadvantage relative to their opponents, what accounts for the ability of creationists to keep the dispute alive and to continue to score policy victories; and conversely, why have scientists and their allies failed to end the conflict? This outcome, called "contested policy change," raises big questions about policy sustainability and the relationship of political and non-political actors to the policy process. Specifically, how can a new policy grow stronger over time, while the winners who advocated for the policy change get weaker, and the losers actually manage to get stronger?

To answer these questions, we must first reconceptualize the conflict in two dimensions. The first dimension is the policy conflict between pro- and anti-evolution organizations. At stake is the question of whether evolution or creationism (in its various forms) should be taught in public schools. The second, often overlooked, dimension is the "ideational" conflict between religious authorities and scientists. Motivating this dispute is the question of how human life began. Both conflicts are being waged by individuals and organizations--political and non-political--which occupy two distinct organizational fields.

In this dissertation, I argue that perpetuation of the policy conflict can only be explained in relation to the battle of ideas. Specifically, creationists were successful because they engaged in the practice of "field bridging," drawing resources from the organizational field associated with the battle of ideas (i.e., "the ideational field") to sustain and advance their policy agenda. Field bridging is a general mechanism of policy change, which can be found in any policy conflict in which non-political actors are major participants. There are three general mechanisms by which field bridging can advance an organization's policy goals. First, organizations can secure needed material resources from their organizational fields to stay alive and press their policy demands. Second, organizations can supply new ideas to actors in the policy field. Third, organizations can recruit external support from the organizational fields in which they are embedded. In the case at hand, creationists employed all three mechanisms in the wake of their 1960s-era policy defeats. By reframing their policy demands under the banner of "creation science," securing new material resources, and recruiting "creation scientists" and conservative Protestants to the cause, creationist policy activists were able to garner the attention of numerous policy makers during the 1970s and 1980s, while securing a few high-profile victories in several states.

On the other hand, scientists let down their guard after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in 1968. Although some scientists recognized the growing threat posed by the reinvigorated creationism movement, it would take an entire decade for scientists to begin to organize themselves at the state and local level to challenge creationists in the policy field. Although they eventually found their organizational footing, scientists' most decisive policy victories only came about because of their alliance with church-state separationist organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Despite a second decisive Supreme Court victory in 1987, scientists continue to find themselves fighting a seemingly neverending policy conflict against the organizations of the creationism movement, now operating under the banner of "intelligent design." Until one side or the other is able to conquer the battle of ideas, policy strife is likely to persist.