Faithful citizenship : institutional contexts and contested domains in faith-based organizing for immigrant rights
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through three papers, this dissertation explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. The first paper establishes the perils of church expansion into political advocacy through a nationally representative survey experiment testing the impact of program domain distance on the evaluation and support of churches among their primary audiences. The second paper uncovers the mechanisms behind church-based political recruitment through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers as they attempted to recruit Hispanic immigrants in a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights. Finally, the third paper uses data from the 2006 Pew Changing Faiths Survey of Latinos in the United States to analyze the impact of church institutional contexts on Latino mobilization in the 2006 immigrant rights marches. Together, these papers argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, political entrepreneurs who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Coddou, Marion |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
| Primary advisor | Olzak, Susan |
| Thesis advisor | Olzak, Susan |
| Thesis advisor | Fields, Corey |
| Thesis advisor | Parigi, Paolo, 1973- |
| Advisor | Fields, Corey |
| Advisor | Parigi, Paolo, 1973- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Marion Coddou. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Marion Coddou
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