The relationship between religion and political participation has not been rigorously investigated, typically employing only basic measures of church attendance or denomination. In this study, we utilize precise measures of various religious behaviors, traditions, and beliefs to examine their influence on political participation. Copyright (c) 2008 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

In this analysis, the authors use Greeley's "religion as poetry" model to frame an analysis of images of God and trust among the highly religious. Using the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, the authors regress four ordinal measures of social trust on two images of God measures and a bank of religion and demographic controls. The authors find that having a loving image of God creates greater levels of trust in all four measures among the highly religious. They also find that having an image of God as angry creates less trust in all four measures of trust. Implications for theory and research on trust and civic engagement are discussed in the conclusion.

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Sustainability research has focused on large corporations, yet most United States businesses are small-to-medium sized. What motivates smaller enterprises to adopt sustainable practices? Findings in the craft beer industry indicate that while brewers support environmental conscientious and small sustainable acts exist in breweries, financial barriers to sustainable technology persist.

A growing body of scholarship studies the emergence of moral markets—sectors offering market-based solutions to social and environmental issues. To date, researchers have largely focused on the drivers of firm entry into these values-laden sectors. However, we know comparatively little about postentry dynamics or the determinants of firm survival in moral markets. This study examines how regional institutional logics—spatially bound, socially constructed meaning systems that legitimize specific practices and goals within a community—shape firm survival in emerging moral markets. Using a unique panel of firms entering the first eight years of the U.S. green building supply industry, we find that (1) a regional market logic amplifies the impacts of market forces by increasing the positive impact of market adoption and the negative impact of localized competition on firm survival, (2) a regional proenvironmental logic dampens the impacts of adoption and competition on firm survival, and (3) institutional complexity—the co-occurrence of both market and proenvironmental logics in a region—negates the traditional advantages of de alio (diversifying incumbent) firms, creating an opportunity for de novo (entrepreneurial entrant) firms to compete more effectively. Our study integrates research on industry emergence, institutional logics, and firm survival to address important gaps in our knowledge regarding the evolution and growth of environmental entrepreneurship in moral markets.