Draft:Geoffrey C. Layman

Geoffrey C. Layman
Born	1968 (age 57–58)
Known for	Religion and American party politics Conflict extension Secular Surge
Title	Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor of Political Science
Academic work
Institutions	University of Notre Dame Vanderbilt University

Geoffrey C. Layman (born 1968) is a political scientist whose research concerns political behavior, political parties, and religion and politics in the United States. He is the Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Layman is the author of The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (Columbia University Press, 2001) and a co-author, with David E. Campbell and John C. Green, of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In the American Political Science Review, Ted G. Jelen described The Great Divide as "the authoritative source on religion and contemporary party politics." With Thomas M. Carsey, Layman introduced the term "conflict extension" for the process by which the major U.S. parties become more polarized across multiple issue dimensions at once rather than replacing one conflict with another. He served as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Political Behavior from 2019 to 2022. Secular Surge received the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Career

In 1996 the Religion and Politics section of the American Political Science Association awarded Layman its Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for his dissertation Parties and Culture Wars: Conflict in the American Party System, listing him at Vanderbilt University. Columbia University Press identified him as an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt when The Great Divide was published in 2001.

A 2006 co-authored article in the Annual Review of Political Science listed Layman's affiliation as the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Layman later joined the University of Notre Dame, where he holds the Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professorship of Political Science and is a faculty fellow of Notre Dame's Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. He served as chair of the department from 2021 until he was succeeded on July 1, 2026.

From 2019 through 2022 Layman and Benjamin Radcliff were co-editors-in-chief of Political Behavior, the official journal of the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of APSA. He is listed among the journal's editors emeriti.

Research

Religion, parties, and The Great Divide

Layman's first book, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (Columbia University Press, 2001), examined how religious and cultural cleavages reshaped Democratic and Republican coalitions from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, drawing on survey evidence that included the American National Election Studies. Reviewing the book in the American Political Science Review, Ted G. Jelen of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, wrote that Layman brought together research on party-system change and on religion in American politics "in an elegant, systematic fashion," and that the book was then "the authoritative source on religion and contemporary party politics."

Conflict extension and party polarization

In a 2002 American Journal of Political Science article, Layman and Carsey argued that recent American party polarization involves what they called "conflict extension": as new issue agendas emerge, the parties become more distinct across older as well as newer dimensions rather than simply replacing one conflict with another. Their 2006 Annual Review of Political Science article argued that contemporary parties had grown increasingly divided on all major policy dimensions—again termed conflict extension—and surveyed evidence on polarization among officeholders, activists, and identifiers, as well as debates about whether American society itself had polarized. Independent scholarship has credited the pair with introducing the term and developing the associated account of mass polarization. In the British Journal of Political Science, Christopher Hare summarized their contrast with "conflict displacement," under which new issues would replace an older primary dimension of competition rather than being added alongside it. A 2018 Vox retrospective likewise described conflict extension, developed with Layman, as a novel explanation centered on party identifiers bringing their issue preferences into line with polarized party elites.

In a 2010 American Political Science Review article, Layman, Carsey, John C. Green, Richard Herrera, and Rosalyn Cooperman used panel surveys of national convention delegates to show that party activists adjusted issue positions in ways that widened Democratic–Republican differences on cultural, economic, and racial issues. The article received the 2012 Jack L. Walker, Jr. Outstanding Article Award from APSA's Political Organizations and Parties section. Layman and Carsey later summarized related findings for a general audience in a 2014 Washington Post Monkey Cage essay arguing that partisan loyalties themselves help drive issue polarization among the public.

Secularization and Secular Surge

With David E. Campbell and John C. Green, Layman has studied the growth of nonreligion and of affirmative secular identity in American politics. In a 2018 American Journal of Political Science article with Campbell, Green, and Nathanael G. Sumaktoyo, the authors argue that political orientations can shape religious and secular identities rather than only the reverse. In Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020), the authors argue that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right, that secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while intensifying polarization between the parties, and that religiously unaffiliated "nones" should be distinguished from people who affirmatively adopt a secular worldview.

In Public Opinion Quarterly, Ryan P. Burge wrote that Secular Surge "stands as the most authoritative scholarly work on the political implications of the nones in contemporary America" and called it "a tour de force" in theoretical contribution and quantitative data. Burge's review likewise treats the distinction between mere nonaffiliation and an affirmative secular orientation as central to the book's account of contemporary party politics. In the Journal of Church and State, Bruce Ledewitz praised the book's empirical findings on backlash, party division, and candidate evaluation while criticizing its measurement of secular worldviews as philosophically underdeveloped.

Secular Surge received the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. It also received an honorable mention for the 2022 Hubert Morken Best Book Award from APSA's Religion and Politics section.

Selected works

Books

• Layman, Geoffrey (2001). The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-12059-3.
• Campbell, David E.; Layman, Geoffrey C.; Green, John C. (2020). Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-83113-0.

Selected articles

• Layman, Geoffrey C. (1997). "Religion and Political Behavior in the United States: The Impact of Beliefs, Affiliations, and Commitment from 1980 to 1994". Public Opinion Quarterly. 61 (2): 288–316. doi:10.1086/297796.
• Layman, Geoffrey C.; Carsey, Thomas M. (2002). "Party Polarization and "Conflict Extension" in the American Electorate". American Journal of Political Science. 46 (4): 786–802. doi:10.2307/3088434.
• Layman, Geoffrey C.; Carsey, Thomas M.; Horowitz, Juliana Menasce (2006). "Party Polarization in American Politics: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences". Annual Review of Political Science. 9: 83–110. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.070204.105138.
• Layman, Geoffrey C.; Carsey, Thomas M.; Green, John C.; Herrera, Richard; Cooperman, Rosalyn (2010). "Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics". American Political Science Review. 104 (2): 324–346. doi:10.1017/S0003055410000160.
• Campbell, David E.; Layman, Geoffrey C.; Green, John C.; Sumaktoyo, Nathanael G. (2018). "Putting Politics First: The Impact of Politics on American Religious and Secular Orientations". American Journal of Political Science. 62 (3): 551–565. doi:10.1111/ajps.12355.

External links

• Faculty profile, University of Notre Dame
• Google Scholar profile

Category:1968 births Category:Living people Category:Political scientists Category:21st-century political scientists Category:University of Notre Dame faculty Category:Vanderbilt University faculty Category:Academic journal editors