Stand‐Your‐Ground (SYG) laws have recently received increased attention due to the controversial verdict in the 2013 George Zimmerman trial. At the time of the trial, 22 states had adopted SYG laws, with Florida adopting the first SYG law only a few years earlier. This article explores how policy learning contributed to the diffusion of these laws among U.S. states. It is found that learning exhibits atypical and complex patterns of diffusion not observed in previous studies. We posit that this dynamic is likely attributed to the fact that SYG is a controversial version of a morality policy, and these types of policies may exhibit multiple properties of policy learning theory. In addition, we find that multiple internal determinants including racial context, gun purchase rates, and poverty influence the likelihood of SYG adoption. Related Articles Related Media PBS Newshours. . “Americans Rally in Protest of Zimmerman Verdict.” http://video.pbs.org/video/2365046883/ C‐Span. . “Guns and Stand Your Ground Laws.” http://www.c-span.org/video/?c3548463/guns-stand-ground-law

For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism‐based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious‐based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory‐based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.

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The issue of same-sex marriage and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality has received considerable attention from policy scholars. This is unsurprising given the issue is one of the defining social policy battles of the last decade. State governments at the forefront of this battle have responded by proposing a multitude of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-related policies. In this study, we comparatively assess the diffusion of two of these policies across US states: the legal recognition of same-sex marriages and state constitutional amendments defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. While previous studies have examined the diffusion of same-sex marriage bans across states, none have offered a comparative examination of how both sides of this contentious issue have advanced their policy preferences alongside each other. Using event history analysis, we analyze a unique set of covariates to test two diffusion hypotheses: learning and imitation. We find that for both policies, policy learning is the primary mechanism occurring, suggesting that policymakers learn from one another for the same policy area, even if the policies have different motives or objectives. However, the effect of learning is more prominent for anti-gay policies, suggesting there are differences between policies.

The resurgence of religion around the globe poses a challenge for both empirical and normative social scientists. For the former, the question is whether the terms at their disposal are adequate to comprehend religious selfunderstanding and, therefore, human motivation and conduct. For the latter, the question is whether those terms confuse or clarify the way in which religion may be brought into public dialogue without violating the tenets of pluralism or toleration. How, then, do social scientists of both persuasions currently understand religion? I begin by distinguishing religious experience from other sorts of experience, with a view to demonstrating, first, that the two preeminent terms adopted by social scientists today-"preference" and "choice"-cannot comprehend religious experience. To do this, I provide a brief exposition of what I call the "fable of liberalism," in order to explain why the terms "preference" and "choice" have achieved the currency that they have and what problems their invocation was intended to address. Second, I consider two other terms social scientists often invoke-"value" and "identity"-and suggest that these terms also are inadequate for understanding religious experience. The first set of terms arises in the eighteenth century, out of the Anglo-American tradition; the second set of terms arises in the nineteenth century, out of the German tradition. None of these terms are able to comprehend religious experience, which antedates these sets of terms by centuries. I end by suggesting, first, that empirical social scientists would do well to reconsider whether terms that arose during specific historical moments in order to circumvent or to supersede religious experience can help them understand human motivation, let alone predict human conduct, whenever or wherever religion is involved; and, second, that the attempt by well-meaning normative social scientists to bring religion into the public sphere by treating it in terms of "preference," "choice," "value," or "identity" distorts religious experience, and cannot succeed as a strategy for reintroducing religion into public dialogue, since religion is not what they wish to render it in terms of.