Publications
Lydia Bean studies how civic leaders and nonprofits create belonging, operate strategically, and achieve policy change in a country divided by religion, race, and partisanship. Her research is focused at the intersection of organizations, leadership, culture, race, class, religion, and politics. Her previous publications examine the political influence of local leaders in civic organizations, and how participation in religious congregations informs social policy attitudes. She has published in leading journals including Social Science Quarterly, Sociology of Religion, and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She has also written on policy change in a polarized democracy in national publications like Inside Philanthropy, Democracy, and Washington Monthly.
Books
2014 The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada. Princeton University Press.
Recent Publications
2019 Lydia Bean and Maresa Strano. December 4. “How Red States are Steamrolling Blue Cities.”Washington Monthly.
2019. Lydia Bean. July 27. “Texans deserve paid sick leave, but special interests are trying to steal it.” Opinion in the Dallas Morning News.
2019 Lydia Bean and Maresa Strano. September 9. “As State Governments Stifle Local Democracy, Funders and Nonprofits are Fighting Back.” Inside Philanthropy.
2019 Lydia Bean and Maresa Strano. July 11. “Punching Down: How States are Suppressing Local Democracy.” Political Reform Report, New America.
2018 Lydia Bean and Brandon Martinez. “Evangelical Ambivalence towards Gays and Lesbians.” Reprinted in Sociology of Religion: A Reader (3rd edition) William A. Mirola, Michael O. Emerson, & Susanne C. Monahan, editors. Routledge.
2018 Lydia Bean. Winter 2018 (47). “Yes, We Speak ‘Faith’ Here.” Invited Essay for Symposium: What is Red State Liberalism? Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
2017 Lydia Bean. October 2017. “For Evangelicals and Catholics, Rejecting Elites Meant Ignoring the Clergy: How Voters Learned to Make their Faith Suit their Partisanship.” The Washington Post (Invited commentary featured in the Special Edition on the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.)
2016 Lydia Bean and Steven Teles. Spring 2016 Issue. “God and Climate: In the mid-2000s, Progressives courted evangelicals to join the fight against climate change. It worked—for a while.” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
2015 Lydia Bean and Steven Teles. November 13. “Spreading the Gospel of Climate Change: An Evangelical Battleground.” New Models of Policy Change Project, New America.
2014 Lydia Bean. “Compassionate Conservatives? Evangelicals, Economic Conservatism, and National Identity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(1): 164-186.
2014 Lydia Bean and Brandon C. Martinez. “Evangelical Ambivalence toward Gays and Lesbians.” Sociology of Religion 75(3): 395-417.
2014 Lydia Bean and Brandon C. Martinez. “Sunday School Teacher, Culture Warrior: The Politics of Lay Leaders in Three Religious Traditions.” Social Science Quarterly 96(1): 133-147.
2008 Lydia Bean, Marco Gonzalez and Jason Kaufman. “Why Doesn’t Canada Have an American-style Christian Right? A Comparative Framework for Analyzing the Political Effects of Evangelical Subcultural Identity. The Canadian Journal of Sociology 33(4): 899-943.
2006. Robert Sampson and Lydia Bean. “Cultural Mechanisms and Killing Fields: A Revised Theory of Community-Level Racial Inequality” in The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America. John Hagan, Laurie Krivo and Ruth Peterson, editors. New York University Press.