Fundamentalism and Democracy: A Volatile Mix? Anthony Gill Associate Professor Department of Political Science University of Washington http://faculty.washington.edu/tgill As you will become fully aware after reading this paper, this is a very early draft of an ongoing research project. In fact, it is more like a bunch of data analysis surrounded by some words. Let s call it a stream of consciousness. Normally, I don t care if people want to cite this paper or not. I figure if I write it, I should stand by it. This time, however, I will allow citations only if you contact me first. Prepared for the 2002 American Political Science Association s Annual Meeting, August 28-September 1, Boston, MA. American Political Science Association, 2002.
INTRODUCTION. (And now for the obligatory reference to September 11, 2001 that will likely appear in almost every religion and politics paper written after September 11, 2001.) On September 11, 2001, many scholars came to realize that religion might be an important factor in political behavior after all. Even one of my own colleagues admitted that I may now be studying something relevant. Holding aside the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Christian Right, liberation theology, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the fact that denominational affiliation is one of the most salient predictors of voting behavior in the U.S., the travails of the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong in China, Turkish politics, the Pope s involvement in the Polish Solidarity movement, Egypt s Muslim Brotherhood, and Desmond Tutu in South Africa, the events of September 11 may have indicated an awareness that religious beliefs and organizations could potentially play a role in political behavior. It only took the destruction of two major buildings, the significant damage to an edifice housing the brains of the U.S. military, and four downed aircraft for most scholars to realize this. Out from the rubble of the September 11 th ruins evolved a debate about how amenable the Islamic faith is to democratic forms of government. This debate was accentuated by the increase in Palestinian bombings in Israel and President George W. Bush s July speech calling for the emergence of more representative government in the Palestinian Authority. But the debate was not limited solely to musings on the Islamic faith. Many pundits, politicians and professors alike were quick to point out that all forms of religious zealotry are inimical to the compromise and cooperation necessary for the smooth operation of democratic institutions. 1 This paper puts those claims under the microscope 2 to see if they hold up to empirical scrutiny. To be perfectly honest, I admit to being annoyed by all the banter in the past year surrounding religion s relationship to politics, the vast majority of which was not connected to any empirical analysis whatsoever. It was absolutely amazing how many people became instant experts on the nature of religion in politics! The principal question being asked in this study is as follows: Is there a indirect relationship between the intensity of someone s religiosity and support for democratic values? Using the World Values Survey from 1995-ish (henceforth: WVS95), 3 we have a golden opportunity to examine this question in a cross-national context. The WVS95 asked a battery of standard questions regarding religious belief and practice, as well as a series of questions about people s attitudes towards democracy. As an added bonus, the WVS95 also asked questions related to economic liberalization and attitudes towards the use of violence to solve political problems. This paper will also examine the effect (if any) religiosity has on these attitudes. [Pay attention because here is the punch line.] I will conclude that religiosity does have an effect on people s attitudes towards democratic government, but the effect is context-specific. I will further go out on a limb (given that I only have 16 country cases) by hypothesizing that in countries where there is 1 I don t have any citations here, but anyone watching the talking heads on television or their disembodied voices on talk radio will be quite familiar with the standard claims. 2 Actually, no microscope was used during this research. More accurately, I used SPSS for Windows, version 9.0. I did pull out a magnifying glass to look at some small print in the data more closely though. 3 Survey years varied by country, but most were conducted in 1995 and 1996. 1
a significant ethnic divide and/or where there is oligopolistic competition for religious hegemony, religion will play a more salient role in shaping attitudes towards democracy. Countries with a highly monopolized religious market or one that is highly pluralistic will not witness such saliency between religion and democracy. [Critics pay attention here because I m doing your work.] I will throw my hands up in despair in trying to explain Nigeria, an interesting outlier in this study, though I will need to reconnect with David Laitin s (1986) magnificent book on Nigeria for a more comprehensive explanation. Moreover, I leave myself exposed to explain why so much anti-democratic Islamic fundamentalism emanates from countries that do not possess the aforementioned oligopolistic religious competition (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran). Nonetheless, being a tenured professor gives me the right to hazard a very hazardous guess. Now sit back and enjoy the ride. THEORETICAL SECTION Why should democracy and religion be linked? More specifically, why should religious fundamentalism be inimical to the liberal attitudes 4 necessary for a functioning democracy? The theoretical linkages can be stated quite concisely and using some basic reasoning abilities. They do not necessitate an agonizingly long theoretical discussion with the names of lots of scholars thrown in to impress readers. This is not a dissertation, after all. I m just testing the numerous assertions about the antithetical relationship between fundamentalism and democracy that I heard on the radio and television during late 2001 and 2002. Almost all major, monotheistic religions lay claim to some exclusionary principles, especially the many versions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Each of these religions professes some set of eternal Truths. 5 Since these major religions differ significantly on some of these major Truths (e.g., who is [are] the Prophet[s]?), they must consider other religions incorrect in their professions. And since these professions often affect the way people live their lives, there is likely to be conflict over who is to be obeyed. Similarly, most religions (and all the major ones examined here) have moral codes about individual and social behavior (e.g., though shalt not commit adultery, steal, sodomize, etc.). Since religious leaders and adherents consider these moral codes an important part of their belief system, they are not likely to compromise on laws that make such behaviors permissible. Fundamentalism will be defined here as a commitment to a faith that requires strict adherence to all of the beliefs and behavioral codes of that religion. This is more of a definition of degree, than one of a qualitative nature. In other words, I am not defining fundamentalism as some qualitative break (or threshold) in behavior. For instance, even if a Christian does not hold a literalist interpretation of the Creation story in Genesis, they still can exhibit fundamentalist attitudes and behavior if they subscribe to the vast majority of the behavioral restrictions of their particular denomination (e.g., no drinking, no dancing, strong preference against abortion, etc.) 4 Liberal in the sense of the English Enlightenment. 5 I may sound like a moral relativist here. I m not. At the moment, I m just being a good, skeptical social scientist and leaving my philosophical predilections behind. 2
As for fundamentalism and democracy, the logic here is that under democratic governance the behavior and moral codes of society are up for debate. People with fundamentalist tendencies would see such debate as inappropriate as this would allow humans to determine the acceptability of God s Commandments. Even if members of a specific denomination would still adhere to these strict behavioral codes, they would feel threatened if society at large, including non-members of their denomination, were permitted legally to violate the moral and behavioral codes they considered immutable. Young people, seeing others freely engage in behaviors prohibited by their parents faith, may begin to question their parents beliefs and drift away from the religion. 6 The longterm result would be the waning of membership and possible extinction of the denomination. In the United States, fierce battles over abortion, homosexual rights and education are fought by religious groups who consider compromises on such issues to be against God s will. In many Islamic nations, the rule of shari a (religious law) is considered part and parcel of secular rule; there simply is no room for compromise on religious principles with non-believers (or less strict believers) thus secular governance must be unified with religious governance. For this reason, people with fundamentalist proclivities would be more suspect of the benefits of democratic debate, especially when it comes to enforcing moral behavior. In a slightly different vein, it could also be argued that fundamentalists tend to be less compromising in their attitudes preferring eternal Truths to socially-constructed realities and hence do not have the psychological predisposition to engage in democratic compromise. It has also been argued by some that fundamentalists tend to be less engaged in this-worldly politics, preferring to focus on other-worldly concerns, thus political debate and compromise are simply not of interest to them. This, in turn, makes the more susceptible to calls for authoritarian politics (Deiros 1991). From these arguments we can derive the following proposition: Proposition 1: A greater degree of fundamentalist religious belief and behavior will be associated with a greater suspicion of democracy as a legitimate form of government (or democratic debate as a method of determining social behavioral mores). While one could potentially parse this proposition out more precisely, 7 I believe this is the general thrust of the argument that there is an inverse relationship between fundamentalism and democracy. We can also generate some auxiliary propositions as well. Given that it has been argued that economic freedom tends to go hand-in-hand with liberal democracy s emphasis on individual liberty, we should also expect to find an inverse relationship between fundamentalism and economic liberalization. 6 I am skeptical of this argument in that empirical examinations have shown that strict religions in the United States (e.g., Mormons, Jehovah s Witnesses, Pentecostals) continue to do extraordinarily well as compared to churches with more lax behavioral attitudes (e.g., Unitarians, Presbyterians). 7 Fundamentalists might be willing to engage in democratic debate and compromise over issues that are not core to their beliefs e.g., should the speed limit on highways be 55 mph or 65 mph. Nonetheless, one would expect non-fundamentalists to be of a similar ilk on such mundane matters. 3
Proposition 2: A greater degree of fundamentalist religious belief and behavior will be associated with a greater degree of suspicion for economic liberalization. Finally, as fundamentalists tend to see politics not as compromise, but as an either/or situation, they should be more predisposed to taking radical action when it comes to defending their views. This includes the use of violence in achieving their ends. 8 Proposition 3: A greater degree of fundamentalist religious belief and behavior will be associated with a more favorable attitude towards the use of violence in politics. All of these propositions have been advanced in the media in some form or another, particularly with Islam in mind given the lack of democratic governance in Islamic nations (Turkey being the prime exception). Finally, let it be said that I am approaching each of these hypotheses with a healthy degree of skepticism. I am skeptical that all three propositions hold. I only present them because they have seemed to be part of the general discourse about religion and politics over the past year (if not more so). Again, the purpose of this paper is to test a bunch of casual assertions being tossed about in the media during the past year. I don t necessarily agree with them. I hate to repeat myself, but most people seem to miss these important caveats in my papers. METHODOLOGY The World Values Survey offers a great way to test the above propositions in a comparative manner. The 1995-96 wave of this survey contains 55 countries and asks a series of questions regarding religious belief and practice, attitudes towards democracy and economic liberalization, and whether respondents consider violence a legitimate form of political action. Unfortunately, not all questions were asked in all countries, thus the utility of the entire survey becomes somewhat more limited. Nonetheless, there are some interesting countries to use for an examination of the relationship between religion and democracy. I initially have chosen 15 countries for examination. The initial selection criterion was to find countries with significant Muslim populations since the majority of discussion about fundamentalism and democracy in the news recently has been about Islam. The bad news is that most countries with Muslim majorities are not included in the survey, probably because they are not democracies and since most autocratic regimes are not too keen on nosy social scientists snooping around and asking questions. Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey are the exceptions to this exclusion. Unfortunately, researchers conducted the WVS in Pakistan, but appeared not to have asked too many questions. Data on religious belief and democracy are missing from this country sample. I also included nations that had significant-sized Muslim populations, 8 I know, I know. Really religious folks are supposed to abhor violence and Islam is a religion of peace, etc. However, you must admit that there are examples of religious extremists using violence to achieve their ends from Christian fundamentalists bombing abortion clinics to Muslims blowing up Buddhist statues and killing Christian missionaries. Now, since I am sure that somebody is going to freak out about this last statement, I should say that I do not believe that such behavior is inherent in all fervent believers of any faith. These examples are rare and represent a tiny minority. Nonetheless, we still can put this notion to an empirical test. Are fervent religious believers more prone towards violent solutions or not. 4
including Bosnia, India, Macedonia, and Nigeria. (Note that while Montenegro is included in Table 1, the small sample size made it difficult to generate reliable regression results and was excluded from Tables 2 and 3.) I also chose to include several other nations in the proximity of these countries, particularly in the former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia) and the southern regions of the former Soviet Union (Georgia, Armenia). To bring a bit of perspective to the analysis, I also chose to include some majority Christian nations, including Brazil, the Philippines and the United States to see if any observed relationship between religiosity and democracy would hold crossculturally. The 15 countries chosen for analysis thus include countries with long experiences with democracy, countries living under former communist rule (which downplayed the historic role of religion in society), and nations that have had on-again, off-again histories with democracy. Having failed to convince the good folks at the APSA to move the conference to November, I decided to not pursue other potentially interesting cases until time allowed me to do so. The WVS95 was recoded to make a bit more sense. All variables related to religiosity and attitudes towards democracy and economic liberalization were changed to reflect consistent scaling namely higher values were in accordance with higher religiosity, and more positive attitudes towards democracy and economic liberalization. The demographic variables were also recoded so as to be consistent with standard survey procedures e.g., gender was recoded to females = 0 and males =1. The WVS95 dataset was the broken down into separate country datasets and country-specific codes (as reported in the WVS95 online codebook) were relabeled and recoded for consistency. [This is what took so long to do this project.] I then created three scales for the three primary variables in this study: 1) a democratic support index; 2) an economic liberalization index; and 3) a religious intensity index. 9 See appendix for specific recodes and indexation. Note that I changed terminology here. Instead of using a fundamentalist index, the index represents religious intensity. I m not trying to be deceptive here. There was no question or series of questions within the WVS95 that would easily define one as fundamentalist in terms of strict adherence to a set of moral and behavioral codes. The religious intensity index represents certain behaviors and attitudes that would be consistent with those who hold fundamentalist views, including importance of religion in one s life, church attendance, belief in heaven, hell, etc. and importance of God. Granted, it may be that someone could score high on this index yet not be a fundamentalist by a common sense definition. However, lacking any direct measures of fundamentalism, this is the best proxy we are going to get. This index if probably pretty easy to critique, but it would be harder to find a more adequate replacement in a cross-national dataset as fertile as this one. [This is a not-so-subtle challenge to critics. If you want to critique this index, do so by proposing a better measure that is applicable to as broad a range of cases as this one is. The alternative, as I see it, to not using this index is going back to casual assertions about religiosity not based on any empirical grounds.] The index was constructed with sensitivity towards it being useful for all major religions examined in this study, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindi. To check for reliability, all religious groups showed a similar range (1-32) on the religious intensity 9 I am aware that there is an arcane methodological debate between the definition of a scale and an index. I use these terms synonymously. 5
measure. 10 For this reason, countries in East Asia were excluded as many contain religions that do not require strict attendance at services, or which do not have many of the same theological beliefs as the faith traditions listed above. For instance, examining South Korea, with a significant Christian population, would not be appropriate because many indigenous Korean religions would automatically score lower on this religious intensity index, yet this would not really indicate a lack of religious intensity based upon their theological prescripts. LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY. Most of the popular and scholarly discussion about religious fundamentalism (or fervency) and democracy has centered on the Islamic nations of the Middle East (e.g., Saudia Arabia, Syria), Northern Africa (e.g., Algeria, Egypt) and South-Central Asia (e.g., Iran, Pakistan). The major commonality of almost all of these nations (Turkey excepted) is that they are dictatorships. Unfortunately, dictatorial regimes are not very keen on the idea of social scientists asking their citizens questions about democracy and political change. The supposed intensity of religion in these countries also makes it difficult for survey researchers to explore questions related to spiritual belief and practice. The survey evidence used here comes mostly from nations with more liberal polities. While Pakistan was surveyed, the number of questions asked was highly restricted and did not focus on religiosity and democracy. It may be the case that the presence of an autocratic regime and religious fundamentalism affects the relationship between religious intensity and democratic values in ways that are qualitatively different than in liberal societies. Given the lack of democratic values as an alternative to autocracy, it may well be that religious fundamentalism intensifies authoritarian tendencies and a lack of respect for tolerance and compromise. The majority of the 9-11 highjackers and supporters of al-qaeda, none of whom seemed particularly enthralled with liberal democracy, come from such societies (John Walker Lindh excepted). In this respect, this study may not be generalizable beyond the conclusions generated from more open polities. Turkey, being the only fully Islamic society with a reasonably functional democracy in this study, is an interesting test of whether Islamic fundamentalism is inherently anti-democratic even when exposed to a long period of democratic values. Azerbaijan with much more limited exposure to democratic principles and practices, also provides some variation. The difficulty establishing democratic institutions in many of the provinces of what is left of Yugoslavia also provides an interesting test. And finally, Nigeria, which is divided roughly in half between Christians and Muslims, and which has intermittent exposure to democracy, also introduces an intriguing comparison. In short, while the generalization of this study is admittedly limited, there is sufficient variation in political histories to at least begin thinking about how religious fundamentalism might affect the prospects for democracy in more autocratic regimes, though more theorizing is likely to be needed in these latter cases. 10 The only exception here was based on a national, not religious, subsample. The Nigerian case excluded one of the measures thus the maximum value for the index was 28, not 32 (see index). However, since each regression analysis was run separately by country, there was no biasing effect by this exclusion. My big worry was that the range for Hindus would be smaller in the Indian sample. However, looking only at Hindus in this sample, the range for religious intensity was 1-32, just as for all other religious groupings. 6
The other major limitation to this study is that negative results between religiosity and democracy do not necessarily imply that democracy is doomed in a given nation. While values and attitudes can play a large role in determining political outcomes, 11 they are not the be-all and end-all. At a minimum, if all individuals (or a vast majority) have anti-democratic preferences, the chance that a democratic government will be workable in a country is slim. However, if the society is divided between those with democratic and anti-democratic preferences, the political outcome will be determined by other factors, namely the power distribution among various groups and the institutional context. Granted, a small minority can sometimes subvert movement towards democracy (think Algeria), but that is not always the case (think Belgium). Kalyvas (2000) wrote a brilliant analysis on comparing both Algeria and Belgium that anybody seriously thinking about the issue of democracy in Islamic countries should read. Thus, the bottom line here is that any finding that religiosity is negatively correlated with democratic values in a specific country needs to be put into the broader context of that country s institutional and political setting. ANALYSIS AND RESULTS. We begin our analysis simply looking at cross-national comparisons of the major dependent variables (democratic support and economic liberalization) and the primary independent variable (religious intensity), as well as percentage of various religious denominations in each country sample (see Table 1a). These data are reorganized in Table 1b to show countries rank ordered by mean scores. Not surprisingly, the US ranks high on all three variables religious intensity, democratic support and economic liberalization. What is more interesting is that Bangladesh scores higher than the U.S. in each category, though the difference is not statistically significant. Nigeria also ranks high in terms of religious intensity even though the maximum value any respondent could score was 28. Adjusting for this, we could estimate that Nigeria s score on the full scale would have been approximately 29.3, placing it in the number one position. Both Brazil and the Philippines, which rank high in terms of religious intensity, rank relatively low on the democratic support index. Not surprisingly, nations formerly under communist rule during the 20 th century ranked low in religious intensity. As for their scores on democratic support, no definitive pattern emerges. However, it is noteworthy that most of the Yugoslav nations tend to rank low on support for economic liberalization. One other observation should be made about the cross-national comparisons of religious intensity relates to the standard deviations. In survey research, standard deviations can be interpreted as the degree to which respondents tend to agree on a question. The smaller the standard deviation, the more respondents tend to share a common answer (centered around the mean). Interestingly, the three nations scoring highest on the religious intensity scale Nigeria, the Philippines, and Bangladesh have 11 For those of you who follow my work with some regularity, this admission may come as a huge shock to you. I m usually pigeon-holed as a rational choice guy, which is to some degree a justified stereotype I do think rational choice explains a great deal of human behavior. But I have also realized that ideas, values, and norms (i.e., culture) does matter (as do psychological predispositions). However, I am against simple-minded arguments that simply pose that politics is all about identity or culture. Standard rational choice arguments hold culture and preferences as constant; they do not discard them entirely. 7
remarkably low standard deviations, indicating that the bulk of the respondents in each country tended to cluster around the high end of the religious intensity scale. All three of those countries also displayed minimum scores well above the lowest possible score of one. As the mean score of religious intensity drops, the standard deviation for each country tends to become larger, showing a greater diversity in religiosity in those countries. What this indicates is that there is a category of countries that could be termed super-religious given that almost all respondents cluster at the top of the scale. Given the communal nature of religious practice, there may be some tipping threshold wherein countries that have a significant number of intense believers pull the rest of this society into a situation of high religious belief and practice. Religious capital may be contagious. (This is a wild hypothesis that I do not explore here, but is worth thinking about more.) Moving beyond descriptive statistics, we now turn our attention to the country-bycountry regression analysis that allow us to engage in a bit of inferential statistics. The point here is to see if, at the level of the individual respondent, religious intensity is associated with democratic values/attitudes, and if so, in which direction. Several control variables were introduced into this analysis including the standard demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, education). Subjective social class was used instead of income level since we are dealing with perceptions here. A few occupational categories were included, including white collar, student and unemployed. Why wasn t blue collar used? Well, I had to make a choice and that was that choice I made. Including all relevant occupational categories in terms of dummy variables would raise the hideous specter of multicollinearity. And we wouldn t want that, now would we? (For the record, all regression models were checked for problems with collinearity and everything came out just peachy.) Dummy variables for ethnic divisions and religious divisions were included as controls where appropriate. I basically chose large ethnic and/or religious divisions where they were known to exist. For countries like Turkey, where darn near everyone self-identifies as one religion, I did not use any control variables for religion. See the appendix for descriptions of control variables and the country-specific coding for ethnicity and religion used in the study. Results are reported as beta coefficients (coefficient divided by its standard error) as a way to make cross-variable comparisons. I know that there is some controversy with this approach, but in survey research where measurement scales can vary substantially, this is a reasonable way to approach the analysis. I also report the p-values to allow the reader to decide whether they consider the coefficient to be statistically significant at their own preferred level of comfort. Religious Intensity and Democratic Support. The findings reported in Tables 2a are interesting. For the most part, education seems to have the strongest positive impact on democratic values. The effects of other control variables were mixed, depending on country. Religious intensity (a proxy for religious fundamentalism [see above]) is statistically significant (at the p<0.10 level) in 10 of the countries examined. Table 2b focuses on this single variable and ranks the beta coefficients across countries. In 7 of the 10 countries where religious intensity was significant, the relationship was negative: increased religiosity was associated with lower values on the democratic support index. In two of these countries Macedonia and India religious intensity was the most salient variable (as determined by rank comparisons of 8
standardized beta coefficients). Indeed, in all 7 of the countries where the religious intensity variable was significant and negative, that variable ranked high. In three cases, the religious intensity variable was significant and positively-associated with democratic values. (Depending on one s tolerance for determining statistical significance, one could squeeze a fourth country into that list Azerbaijan given that the p-value was.108, just barely above the p<0.10 level.) Granted that we only have 15 country-cases here, but do you notice a pattern in Table 2b? The countries where religious intensity is negatively correlated with democratic values tend to be countries that have experienced some serious form of conflict between ethnic groups in society in the recent past. Bangladesh, I think, may be the primary exception. Three of the four countries that show a positive relationship between religiosity and democratic values are dominated by one religion and were formerly incorporated into the Soviet Union, where religious expression was suppressed. It would seem logical that those with high levels of religiosity would also favor democracy since it would likely secure their right to practice. Nigeria is the odd country out in terms of significant social cleavages. One would expect religion to be a mobilizing cleavage for ethnic disputes, but as Laitin (1986) has shown, ethnic divisions within Nigeria are more salient than religion. As we see in Table 2a, ethnic identification is negatively associated with support for democratic values. Religiosity in Nigeria, it would appear, seems to work as an antidote to the anti-democratic tendencies of ethnic division. The four countries where religious intensity was not significant show varied characteristics. Three of the countries Brazil, the Philippines and Slovenia are majority Catholic (although in Brazil there as many practicing Protestants as Catholics). The United States has had the longest standing experience with democracy of any of the countries in the sample, thus it would seem reasonable to expect that socialization to democratic norms and values would tend to negate any authoritarian tendencies among fundamentalist religions. The fact that the U.S. is one of the most religiously pluralistic countries in the world, with no single denomination holding a majority position, would also seem to promote norms of tolerance and cooperation, which are essential to democratic governance. Two of the countries with non-significant results for religiosity Brazil and the Philippines have had sporadic experience with democratic governance during the past 50 years and appear to be on the path towards stable democratic rule. Both countries, though, tend to have dominant Catholic cultures, though the number of practicing Protestants equals the number of practicing Catholics in Brazil (not to mention the Afro-spiritists who are also quite numerous). Some tension between Catholics and evangelicals has been witnessed in the past three decades, but nothing amounting to sustained violent conflict. A minority Islamic population in southern Philippines has also been in conflict with the majority Catholic population, though this tension seems to be fairly isolated geographically. Slovenia is also a majority Catholic country and has been the one region of Yugoslavia that has avoided severe ethnic conflict. Interestingly, the Muslim dummy variable is only significant in two cases Macedonia and Serbia. Moreover, being Muslim in these cases is associated with an increased sense of democratic values. Again, this should not be surprising. In both cases, Muslims represent a minority religion in a nations where they were abused quite extensively. It shouldn t be a surprise then that these ethnic groups would want a more responsive polity i.e., one where they had a voice and that voice would say stop 9
beating us up. In Bosnia, where Muslims also have been subject to some pretty brutal aggression, we see that those holding to the Orthodox faith tend to be more authoritarian, though Muslims do not seem to hold more democratic views than the public at large. Unfortunately, do to a lack of clarity in the religious denomination coding for Nigeria, it is not possible to sort out respondents by faith. However, those self-identifying themselves to be a member of an ethnic group (as opposed to defining themselves as Nigerian ) were all less prone to hold democratic attitudes. This is particularly true of the Hausa, who live in Northern Nigeria and tend to be Muslim. (There was substantial variation in denominational responses among the Hausa in WVS95, so much so that it was difficult to use ethnicity as a proxy variable for religious denomination.) The Nigerian case confirms Laitin s (1986) earlier findings that ethnicity, not religion, is the most salient dimension of conflict among Nigerians. India and Turkey are both interesting for what does not appear among the denominational and ethnic variables. In India, where conflict between Hindus and Muslims have led to numerous bloody confrontations, religious affiliation (Muslim and Hindu) is negatively associated with democratic values, but neither are significant. Likewise in Turkey, where Kurds have struggled for independence, the Kurdish variable is not significant at all. Both cases pose interesting contrasts to Nigeria and prod us to conduct evermore research [doesn t everything?]. In short, if one had to draw some tentative conclusions from the regression results, it might be said that religious intensity tends to be negatively associated with democratic values where pre-existing ethnic tensions are high. Let s speculate further (and I m going out on a limb again here). Because religious organizations represent an easy means of mobilizing collective action (see Gill 2002), it is likely that ethnic combatants rally their supporters through church networks. This is even easier where ethnicity and religion are tightly intertwined (as in Bosnia or Macedonia). Where an ethnic group is in the minority and facing increased repression, it should not be surprising that these groups would want to democratize the political system. Nonetheless, religious intensity even among these subordinate groups may fuel a certain level of militancy that is not consistent with democracy. Where democratic norms have been in place for some time, or in situations where there is a religious monopoly or substantial pluralism, religion becomes a less salient variable. This is consistent with Rodney Stark s theory that religious conflict is most likely to arise in situations of oligopolistic competition as compared to monopoly or pluralism [can t find the Stark cite, but I ve talked to him about this frequently and he said he wrote it down somewhere.] On the other hand, all of the above here may be premature (and convoluted) speculation based on inductive observations. What is all of this says more importantly is that religious intensity, per se, is not necessarily associated one way or the other with democratic attitudes, but that the role of religiosity depends upon the specific context of the nation in question. [Note: A couple sociologists are working with me in bringing some of this context into the picture. We still think that we can detect some general patterns and have been engaged in some deductive theorizing about the role of church-state relations (religious regulation) and ethnic conflict. One of these guys was off gallivanting in Europe while the other was trying to finish his dissertation and become a first-time father, so we didn t get very far. We re going to write something up soon, though.] 10
Religious Intensity and Economic Liberalization. I just wasn t interested in how religious intensity affected democratic values, but I also tested how it affected attitudes towards economic liberalization. Why? Well, to start with, it is often assumed that a relationship exists between attitudes towards democracy and free markets. Modernization theorists like Walt Rostow considered these things to go hand-in-hand, while many who come more from the dependency school of thought think the relationship is inverse, specifically in the developing world where neoliberal market reforms are often imposed by less-than-democratic methods. 12 Second, it was fairly easy to set up a economic liberalization index (see appendix) and run some regressions. Finally, I m interested in the subject, so why not put it to the test? My a priori expectations were that religious intensity would be negatively associated with economic liberalization, if at all, as most highly religious people tend to prefer community solutions over economic individualism. One might question this in the context of the Christian Right in the United States, but a close examination of that looseknit movement shows a great deal of economic populism. Looking at Tables 3a and 3b, we find some pretty interesting, and surprising, results. First, left-right ideology is quite expectedly associated with economic liberalization; the more conservative (right-wing) a person is, the more they hold views consistent with economic individualism. Subjective social class and status as white collar employee 13 also plays a significant positive role in a number of countries as well; the (perceived) rich tend to favor economic liberalization. Unemployment status seems to have little effect except in India where the relationship is positive, quite the contrary to intuitive explanations. Does religious intensity matter with respect to attitudes toward economic liberalization? Yes, and actually more than I had anticipated. In the United States, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Croatia, India and Turkey, religious intensity is positively associated with economic liberalization. It is the most salient predictor in the latter two countries as well (see table 3b). Why should this be? I have no idea. Really. Only in one country is the effect between religiosity and economic liberalization significant and negative Bosnia. But even there, the relationship is not very pronounced. As with democratic attitudes, being Muslim was positively associated with economic liberalization in Serbia, though not in Macedonia. What to make of all this? I honestly don t know. Religious Intensity and Preference for Political Violence. Another means of testing whether religious fundamentalism is antithetical to democratic practices is to see to what extent those holding intense religious beliefs are more prone to using violence as a means to political ends than less religious sectors of society. The logic is similar to that of the relationship between religious intensity and democratic values. Those with intense religious beliefs and practices are likely to be more exclusionary in their opinions towards others, and more likely to see violence as a valid means of defending and/or promoting their religious agenda. I hypothesize that this 12 I m a bit skeptical of this. First, I don t equate IMF structural adjustment with neoliberalism. Second, neoliberal reforms in many parts of the developing world fall short of really being neoliberal. But that is for another time and place. 13 Surprisingly, these two variables are not highly correlated in any of the country surveys, at least not to the point of causing problems with multicollinearity in the regression models. 11
will be particularly true in countries where religious conflict has been high, or in situations of intense competition between oligopolistic faiths. In situations where single denominations dominate, or where there is a multitude of religions so that no one holds a single majority, there should be no relationship between these two variables. An alternative hypothesis could be advanced that since most religions preach peaceful resolution to conflict in at least part of their theology, people holding more intense religious views will be less likely to see violence as an acceptable means of pursuing political ends. Then again, it could all depend on the specific national and denominational context and which message religious leaders tend to emphasize. Let s find out. The WVS95 allows us to examine the relationship between religious intensity and political violence. Variable 164 in WVS95 asks respondents to indicate how much they agree with the following statement: Using violence to pursue political goals is never justified. I recoded this 4-point indicator so that 4 represents strongly agree and 1 equals strongly disagree. I then divided respondents in each country in to quartiles depending on their value on the religious intensity index and perform a simple ANOVA test. 14 Results are presented in Table 4. As can be seen, there is substantial cross-national variation in the average propensity to see violence a legitimate means towards political ends. While all nations fall below the scale s mathematical centerpoint of 2.5, the Philippines and Bosnia rank above 2.0. Croatia, Brazil and Bangladesh fall at the low end of the scale. More importantly, only four countries Armenia, Nigeria, Slovenia and Bosnia exhibit a statistically significant relationship between religious intensity and using violence. And in each of these cases, respondents scoring in the upper quartile of the religious intensity index were less prone to violence than their less religious counterparts. This would seem to be weak confirmation for the hypothesis that theological messages of peace tend to make the more religious less prone to violence. Again, however, the results suggest that institutional and historical context may play a significant role. More should be done on this analysis, including breaking down the comparisons by denomination or ethnic group. Inconclusive Conclusions. As this paper [let s call it a really, rough draft] only represents the starting point of a much larger study (combined with a couple of sociologists), the conclusions to be drawn here are rather tentative. Overall, it does appear as if religious folk act differently than non-religious folk. No surprise there. In many cases, religious intensity appears to be associated with less favorable attitudes towards democracy. Does this mean that religion (and particularly its fundamentalist variant) is inherently a stumbling block on the road to democratic governance? No, I don t think such a conclusion is warranted for several reasons. First, countries that have had some ongoing, albeit bumpy, experience with democracy do not show a strong relationship between religious intensity and less democratic attitudes. Thus, the socialization to democratic practices may override the attempts of exclusionary religious organizations to use the state to impose certain moral 14 Admittedly, I should be running a multinomial logistic regression to control for other factors, but I m having some difficulty in interpreting the results in SPSS. I need to do a refresher on this technique. 12
or behavioral codes. Turkey may be the primary exception here. However, in this case, a secular state has gone on the offensive to actively seek the secularization of society. Seeing this as an attack on religion likely spurs a distrust of democratic institutions and practices among the highly religious. This brings me to my second point. The nature of the relationship between religious intensity and democracy may not be a matter of inherent conflict. Different religions can coexist side-by-side under a democratic rubric without undermining the principles of toleration and political compromise. However, where pre-existing conflicts exist between different ethnic groups, religious organizations can be used to mobilize political power in ways that threaten the viability of democratic norms. The classic case here may well be Yugoslavia. Also, the nature of church-state relations may have a large impact on how the religious view their government. If government is used to consistently attack and marginalize religious institutions, religious individuals are unlikely to smile kindly upon their government. To the extent that government represents democracy, yet excludes viable participation and respect for minority dissention, people with more intense religious views will not likely develop democratic norms and attitudes. Thus, the issue of whether fundamentalism can coexist with democracy will likely be determined by institutional configurations specific to the church-state relations in various countries. This is where this project is headed. The immediate conclusion of this paper is that religious intensity and democratic values are not necessarily at odds with one another. REFERENCES Deiros, Pablo A. 1991. Protestant Fundamentalism in Latin America. In Fundamentalisms Observed, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gill, Anthony. 2002. A Political Economy of Religion in Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies: Essays on Religious Markets and Religious Pluralism, edited by Ted G. Jelen. Lanham: Rowman-Littlefield. Kalyvas, Stathis. 2000. Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Religious Parties Comparative Politics 32 (4): 379-99. Laitin, David. 1986. Hegemony and Culture: Political and Religious Change Among the Yoruba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 13
TABLE 1a Descriptive Statistics for Key Variables Religious Intensity N Mean Median Std Dev Democratic Support Index Min/Max N Mean Median Std Dev Min/Max Armenia 1011 18.1 19.0 7.9 1/31 1248 21.7 22.0 3.5 9/31 Azerbaijan 1168 21.5 23.0 5.6 1/32 1203 26.0 26.0 2.4 11/32 Bangladesh 1128 26.9 27.0 3.0 12/32 955 25.7 26.0 2.3 11/32 Bosnia 795 20.7 23.0 8.4 1/32 992 23.2 23.0 3.7 12/32 Brazil 1011 24.4 25.0 4.7 1/32 999 19.5 19.0 4.0 8/32 Croatia 763 17.8 19.0 9.2 1/32 1000 24.9 25.0 3.8 14/32 Georgia 1657 20.4 22.0 6.5 1/31 1842 22.3 22.0 3.7 10/32 India 1163 22.0 23.0 5.7 1/32 962 21.3 21.0 4.0 8/30 Macedonia 501 17.0 17.0 7.9 1/32 613 21.7 22.0 3.6 12/32 Montenegro 111 12.3 12.0 9.0 1/31 143 23.9 25.0 3.7 14/32 Nigeria 2403 25.6 26.0 2.6 5/28 1704 23.7 24.0 3.9 9/32 Philippines 1062 27.1 28.0 2.3 15/32 1099 20.6 20.0 2.6 13/30 Serbia 731 12.5 12.0 8.4 1/31 857 23.7 24.0 4.0 9/32 Slovenia 666 14.1 14.0 9.2 1/32 798 22.4 23.0 3.3 12/32 Turkey 1221 23.7 25.0 6.1 1/32 1441 23.3 23.0 3.4 11/32 USA 1167 24.9 27.0 6.9 1/32 1250 25.2 26.0 3.5 11/32 See Appendix for variable descriptions. Higher numbers represent greater religious intensity (maximum value 32) and support for democratic values (maximum value 32). 14
TABLE 1a Continued Descriptive Statistics for Key Variables Economic Liberalization Index N Mean Median Std Dev Selected Religious Groups (% of sample) Min/Max Muslim Catholic Orthodox Other None Armenia 1965 34.4 34.0 7.7 6/60 0.0 0.7 0.3 84.8 13.2 Azerbaijan 1666 36.0 36.0 7.4 11/60 91.0 0.1 1.9 0.3 6.0 Bangladesh 1330 43.0 43.0 8.9 8/60 85.6 1.0 0.2 12.8 0.3 Bosnia 1155 36.4 36.0 6.4 15/60 27.2 14.4 25.8 2.7 29.2 Brazil 1065 36.2 36.0 8.0 11/60 0.0 69.9 0.0 17.9 11.9 Croatia 1105 36.9 37.0 7.2 6/60 1.2 82.7 1.2 0.7 12.3 Georgia 2321 38.2 38.0 7.7 6/60 3.9 1.5 81.6 1.3 6.1 India 1409 35.9 35.0 8.7 6/60 12.0 3.7 2.0 77.4 3.4 Macedonia 805 34.5 33.0 6.9 6/55 24.0 0.7 45.9 0.3 27.5 Montenegro 195 33.2 33.0 7.2 14/58 21.3 8.3 63.3 0.0 5.4 Nigeria 2586 37.8 37.5 7.5 6/60????? Philippines 1178 37.5 37.0 6.7 15/60? 84.8 0.0 1.9 0.1 Serbia 1092 34.6 34.0 8.1 6/60 5.7 6.3 65.5 0.9 17.9 Slovenia 878 35.4 35.0 7.7 6/60 1.0 71.0 1.8 1.8 22.9 Turkey 1764 37.5 38.0 8.4 6/60 95.6 0.2 0.2 0.0 2.9 USA 1432 42.5 43.0 8.0 12/60 0.5 24.8 1.9 35.3 19.0? = coding in World Values Survey not clear. See Appendix for variable descriptions. Higher numbers represent greater support for economic liberalism (maximum value 60). Religious data ignore NA responses and religious groups of minimal impact (<0.5%) unless listed in table. Other religion definitions country specific: Armenia: Armenian Apostolic Church Azerbaijan: Jewish and Protestant Bangladesh: Hindu; Catholic = Christian, Orthodox = Buddhist Bosnia: Jewish and Protestant Brazil: Protestant (includes evangelical and Pentecostal) Croatia: Jewish and Protestant Georgia: Jewish India: Hindu; Catholic = Catholic + Protestant, Orthodox = Jain. Macedonia: Jewish Philippines: Iglesia ni Cristo, Muslims not clearly coded in WVS codebook. Serbia: Protestant Slovenia: Protestant USA: Protestant; Orthodox = Jewish. 15