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This week connects smartphone-era polarization, identity bubbles, Nigerian political branding, and state-backed religious moderation in Indonesia and Malaysia.
New papers trace how digital platforms and state institutions convert religious and political identity into mobilization, legitimacy, and division.
Covers 2026-08-24 to 2026-08-31; 5 free papers from 40 selected papers.
Where pulpits, courts, parties, and movements collide, this show follows the research behind the headlines on faith, power, identity, and democracy.
Episode covers 2026-08-24 – 2026-08-31.
Themes: Nigeria, Indonesia, religion, social media, democracy, Africa, affective polarization, peacebuilding
Methods: qualitative, case-study, survey, historical analysis, philosophical analysis, quantitative
Premium also covers 10 related news stories, including ground.news — Is the Supreme Court forcing religion on us?, x.com — The Mexican Bishops' Conference questioned various ..., and indiatoday.in — China widens scrutiny of religious beliefs in Chengdu's hospitals, schools: Report.
The premium version of this podcast covers all 40 research articles and 10 news stories selected for the episode. Subscribe to the premium podcast.
Generated by paperboy.fm.
Where pulpits, courts, parties, and movements collide, this show follows the research behind the headlines on faith, power, identity, and democracy.
Subscribe for the premium version of this podcast: https://paperboy.fm/podcasts/this-week-in-religion-and-politics/subscribe
Jenny: Why does it feel like our phones can turn everyday disagreements into team sports?
Davis: Because the feed gives you a jersey before it gives you a reason, and suddenly a school-board fight or a church argument looks like a win-loss column.
Jenny: I don't want to blame the rectangle for every bad habit, but when the same pattern shows up across countries after mobile social media takes off in the early twenty-tens, that's harder to shrug off.
Davis: Right, if the phone is helping sort religious identity, party loyalty, and public anger into the same little scoreboard, then we've got a week worth unpacking... welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.
Davis: This week we analyzed 556 religion-and-politics hits and kept 61 papers, from about 110 authors across 32 countries. So the pile is smaller than last week, but the map is a little wider.
Jenny: Right, qualified papers fell from 68 to 61, down 7, and I want to be careful with that. That could mean less publishing volume, or it could mean the search pulled in fewer papers that really fit religion, politics, and power.
Davis: The bigger shift is the front door: query hits dropped from 716 to 556, down 160, while countries rose from 30 to 32. My read is not less global interest, but a week with fewer broad-feed matches and more scattered country cases.
Jenny: Method-wise, this was a qualitative week: 32 qualitative papers, then 8 case studies and 8 surveys. Qualitative just means researchers are reading interviews, texts, speeches, or field notes closely, so the evidence is rich, but usually not built to estimate a population-wide effect.
Davis: The themes fit the through-line: Nigeria showed up 5 times, Indonesia 4, then religion and social media at 3 each. Phones, schools, congregations, courts, parties, and states keep turning identity into political power, sometimes as belonging and sometimes as division.
Jenny: And the author mix is unusually balanced: 39 first-time authors, meaning first-ever paper in the metadata, 33 emerging authors, and 38 experienced researchers. That's roughly a third each, which makes me trust the week less as one school of thought and more as a broad cross-section.
Jenny: Alright, let's get into the papers with Bernardo Mueller's Smartphones and Polarization: Cross-Country Evidence. It's in Comparative Economic Studies, and the big claim is simple but heavy: phones became politically different once they turned into always-on social feeds.
Jenny: Mueller tracks one hundred seventy-six countries from two thousand to twenty twenty-four using annual Varieties of Democracy polarization data. The relationship between mobile-phone subscriptions and polarization turns positive after the early twenty tens smartphone shift, especially before phone markets are saturated and in countries where internet use is higher.
Davis: How does he know this is about smartphones and mobile social media, not just everything else that changed in politics after the early twenty tens?
Jenny: He uses two-way fixed effects, which means he compares countries over time while holding steady country traits and year shocks as much as the model can. Then he adds staggered difference-in-differences, which checks what happens after different countries cross a mass mobile-diffusion threshold at different times, and he reports little evidence that polarization was already rising faster before that threshold.
Jenny: He also backs the story with a World Values Survey polarization measure and an agent-based model, which is a simulated little society showing how engagement-ranked content can widen cultural splits. So I buy this as powerful cross-country evidence, but not as one universal causal machine that works the same way in every country.
Davis: That makes the practical takeaway pretty concrete. If personalized mobile feeds are tied to polarization across one hundred seventy-six countries, then platform rules and civic media policy aren't just content moderation fights; they're democratic infrastructure fights, which is exactly the Platforms and Polarization thread we're going to keep running into.
Davis: Coming off that one hundred seventy-six-country phone paper, here's another study that says the sample you choose can change the story. Raphaël Lefèvre, Jeroen Gunning, and Morten Valbjørn call it The Shia factor: Intra-Islamist dynamics and the growth of armed Islamism, in International Political Science Review.
Davis: Their correction is pretty direct. Research on armed Islamism, meaning groups that make Islam a political project and fight in organized conflict, has centered Sunni actors so heavily that Shia groups often become a side note, even though this dataset counts two hundred twenty-eight major Sunni and Shia Islamist armed groups active from nineteen forty-five to twenty twenty-one.
Jenny: So what changes when Shia groups are counted alongside Sunni groups instead of treated as a separate appendix?
Davis: They build DASSIG, the Dataset of Armed Sunni and Shia Islamist Groups, and use it to compare where these groups appear, when they grow, and how they relate to each other over seventy-six years. The important move is cross-sect interaction, which just means Sunni and Shia armed groups can fuel each other through rivalry, imitation, alliance, or escalation, but the limit is that major-group data can't explain every local faction, grievance, or recruitment pathway.
Jenny: That feels like a real warning for conflict analysts. If you only code a movement as Islamist or not, you miss how identity rules politics inside the category, and this paper's long dataset makes that correction hard to wave away even if the local mechanisms still need closer work.
Jenny: That warning about identity inside the category carries over here, but the arena is Sunday morning instead of armed groups. Jerry Z. Park and Brandon C. Martinez call this one Revisiting Racialized Religious Contexts and Perceptions of White Discrimination and Privilege, and they're asking whether the racial makeup of a congregation is linked to how people understand white grievance and white advantage.
Jenny: The plain finding is sharp. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, with large oversamples of Asian, Black, and Latine Americans, they find that people in predominantly white or multiracial congregations are more likely to see white discrimination while downplaying white privilege, while people in predominantly Asian, Black, and Latine congregations tend to recognize structural privilege and are less likely to buy claims of white discrimination.
Davis: So are people bringing those racial views into church, or are congregational cultures helping shape the views once people are there?
Jenny: That's the key measurement question, and the authors are careful about it. They use multivariate analysis, which just means survey models that compare people across white, multiracial, racial minority congregations, and non-attenders while accounting for other traits, but because this is survey analysis, it can show patterns by congregational context and can't prove the congregation caused the attitude.
Davis: That still lands, because the sample is broad enough that the pattern isn't easy to shrug off as one denomination's weirdness. For a religious leader, the takeaway is not just ask what individuals believe, but ask what the room rewards, because this is Identity Rules Politics at the congregational level.
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