Nations, taxes and religion: Did Mohammad have it right?

Maloney, Civan and Maloney (Public Choice, 2009, this volume) extend the existing literature on the economics of religion in several important ways. First, they define the religious good. They then distinguish a sectarian break from a schism, provide some analysis of schisms in the Christian world, and finally, and most interestingly, provide a summary of the religious practices and schisms in Islam. The two main strengths of the paper, and the most promising paths for future research, lie in the definition of the religious good and in the exploration of Islamic practices. Maloney, Civan and Maloney offer a novel perspective from which light might be reflected back upon Christian schisms.     

Religious schism or synthesis?

This article is a response to the article by Maloney et al., which adapts an economic model of Christian schism to Islam. We evaluate the basic assumptions, concepts, and approach of the article and then turn to factual questions to be considered. Their main contribution is to explain ex post the divisions observed in religions in general and Islam in particular as sects or schismatic breaks. The differentiation and application of concepts such as schism and sect across religious traditions is very problematic for the research design and analysis of the article. Despite the justification of generalizations for comparisons among religions in long time periods, the elimination of caveats and particularities undermines the argument.     

Religious market structure and democratic performance: Clientelism

Is there a connection between government intervention in religious competition and partisan clientelism in democratic systems? Drawing on the economics of religion, we argue that alongside commonly examined population-level religious processes (religious diversity), state-level religious processes (government regulation of competition in the religious market) affect institutional performance in electoral democracies. Linking comparative indicators of religion-state relations with measures of partisan clientelism, statistical analysis suggests that uncompetitive religious markets, such as those where a dominant religion is sponsored by the state, create incentives, infrastructures and opportunities that favour clientelism. The study emphasises the importance of light-touch regulation of religion not merely as a normative principle narrowly related to religious freedom, but also as a potential remedy that can enhance the quality of political institutions.     

Religion and Party Choice in Europe

This paper investigates religiosity in relation to party choice in European Parliament elections. Conventional wisdom tells us that as Europe has secularised, the effect of religion on party choice should also have diminished. Yet, this cross-national and cross-temporal study of religious voting in European elections from 1989 to 2004 paints a more nuanced picture. It shows that a) the effect of religion has been declining, but has increased in recent years, b) religion matters in particular for voting for Christian Democratic parties and Conservative parties, c) while generational replacement reduces the overall effect of religion on electoral decisions, the effect of religion has recently increased within each generation, and d) the impact of religion depends on the religious context in which citizens live so that religion plays a bigger role in fractionalised societies. These findings are discussed in the light of a revived importance of religion for European politics.     

The Institutionalist: A Conversation with Hugh Heclo

This interview marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Hugh Heclo's classic, A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in Washington. This engaging conversation touches on such wide-ranging themes as Heclo's early mentorship by Aaron Wildavsky; his nurturing apprenticeship at the Brookings Institution, leading to the publication of A Government of Strangers; the increasingly intense partisanship and schism within the executive branch between career federal bureaucrats and political appointees; the conduct of presidential administrations as never-ending political marketing campaigns; the cynical harnessing of religion in the service of policy objectives; public service and institutional commitment; and the need for political leadership to engage the public honestly and responsibly on matters of fiscal concern.     

Religious Participation and Economic Conservatism

Why do some individuals engage in more religious activity than others? And how does this religious activity influence their economic attitudes? We present a formal model in which individuals derive utility from both secular and religious sources. Our model, which incorporates both demand‐side and supply‐side explanations of religion, is unusual in that it endogenizes both an individual's religious participation and her preferences over economic policy. Using data on over 70 countries from the pooled World Values Survey, we find that religious participation declines with societal development, an individual's ability to produce secular goods, and state regulations on religion, but that it increases with inequality. We also find that religious participation increases economic conservatism among the poor but decreases it among the rich. Our analysis has important insights for the debate about secularization theory and challenges conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between religious participation and economic conservatism.     

Understanding the effects of religious attendance on political participation among ethnic minorities of different religions

In the United States, active church membership among ethnic and racial minorities has been linked to higher political participation. In Europe, the influence of religious attendance on political mobilisation of ethnic minorities has so far been little explored, despite the heated public debate about the public role of religion and particularly Islam. This study uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to theorise the relationship between religious attendance and political participation of ethnic minorities in a European context and extend existing theories to non‐Christian minority religions. The article shows that despite a significantly different context in which religion's place in political life is more contentious, regular religious attendance increases political participation rates of ethnic minorities. Some possible explanatory mechanisms are tested and an important distinction is introduced between those mechanisms that mediate, and those that moderate the impact of religion. The study finds that British minority churches and places of worships vary in how willing and effective they are in politically motivating their worshippers, and concludes that this relates to the political salience of certain religions within the United Kingdom context.     

Religion,partisanship and preferences for redistribution

This article offers a new theoretical explanation of the relationship between religion and the demand for redistribution. Previous literature shows that religious individuals are less likely to favour redistribution either because (a) religion provides a substitute for state welfare provision, or (b) it adds a salient moral dimension to an individual's calculus which induces them to act contrary to their economic interests. In this article, it is argued that the effect of religion on an individual's redistributive preferences is best explained by their partisanship, via a process of partisan motivated reasoning. In contexts where parties are able to combine religion with pro-redistribution policies, religious individuals are more likely to favour redistribution as doing so reinforces their partisan identity. In advanced democracies, religious individuals are more likely to be supporters of centre-right parties that oppose redistribution. However, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the historical and political context leads to the opposite expectation. The nature of party competition in CEE has seen nationalist populist parties adopt policy platforms that combine religion and leftist economic programmes. They are able to credibly combine these two positions due to the way in which religion and the welfare state became linked to conceptions of the nation during the inter-war state-building years. Using data from 2002–2014, the study shows that religiosity is associated with pro-redistribution attitudes in CEE. Furthermore, religious supporters of nationalist populist parties are more likely to favour redistribution than religious supporters of other parties. The results of this research add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and economic preferences.     

从“超人间力量”到“人间力量”的回归——马克思主义宗教观思考

马克思从实践的角度对宗教进行了批判,实际上是对宗教产生的世俗社会展开了批判,这种批判主要是基于他所生活的时代背景。然而在我们今天的社会里,宗教世俗化现象明显,宗教作为一种精神文化现象存在,得到越来越多的人的接受和推崇,马克思的"宗教消亡论"也引起了争议。在我看来,马克思认为必将走向消亡的宗教主要是从宗教的政治功能和负面影响而言的,然而作为一种精神、意识和信仰存在的宗教并不会灭亡。     

Religious Belief,Religious Denomination,and Preferences for Redistribution: A Comparison across 13 Countries

Despite clear evidence of a link between religion and welfare state development, research on public support for redistributive social policies has been slow to incorporate religion into models of public preferences. Does religious belief influence support for redistribution? If so, does religion necessarily increase hostility to redistribution as suggested by existing research? Or, do the Catholic and Protestant traditions generate different patterns of preferences consistent with Weber’s notion of a Protestant work ethic? This research explores these questions by comparing public support for redistribution across 13 European states. The data reveal a powerful and complex effect of religious belief on support for redistribution that works on both the individual and cultural levels. The evidence challenges existing research by demonstrating that the impact of religion is not uniform, but varies across different religious traditions, with Catholicism producing significantly greater support for redistribution than Protestantism.     

A matter of timing: The religious factor and morality policies

The question of whether or not religion accounts for variance in the governance of moral issues, between and within countries over time, has long been debated but never conclusively answered. A novel data set encompassing innovative measurements of state regulation of “life‐and‐death” issues and of the religious stratification of society enables us to answer why previous studies reached contradictory results. The time‐series cross‐sectional analysis of 26 countries over 50 years reveals that dominant religious denominations in society indeed influence state governance approaches regarding the issues of abortion and euthanasia. This denominational effect is shown to be contingent on the religiosity of a country's population, but independent from the formal state–church relationship. Lastly, it is shown that the religious effect has an inverse U‐shaped relationship with time, exposing the timeframe of analysis as decisive for inferences drawn in the study of morality policy.     

Jürgen Habermas on public reason and religion: do religious citizens suffer an asymmetrical cognitive burden,and should they be compensated?

In his recent writings, Jürgen Habermas asks how the liberal constitutional principle of separation between church and state, religion and politics, should be understood. The problem, he holds, is that a liberal state guarantees equal freedom for religious communities to practise their faith, while at the same time shielding the political bodies that take collectively binding decisions from religious influences. This means that religious citizens are asked to justify their political statements independently of their religious views, resulting in a burden that secular citizens do not experience. To compensate, Habermas demands from secular citizens that they open their minds to the possible truth content of religion, enter into dialog and contribute to the translation of religious reasons into generally acceptable reasons. This article focuses on Habermas’s assumption that religious citizens suffer an asymmetrical cognitive burden that should be compensated, and his claim that his approach to religion in the public sphere is less restrictive than that of John Rawls.     

Universal Love or One True Religion? Experimental Evidence of the Ambivalent Effect of Religious Ideas on Altruism and Discrimination

Contrary to the expectations of secularization theory, religion remains socially important and affects politics in multiple ways—especially regarding conflict between religious communities. Theoretically, religion can increase altruism, but belief in the superiority of one's faith may facilitate intergroup discrimination and related conflict. Previous findings remain inconclusive, however, as specific religious ideas have hardly been tested. In this article, we argue that the content of religious ideas has causal effects on intergroup discrimination. We hence test the impact of two opposing, prominent religious ideas on altruism and discrimination: universal love and the notion of one true religion. Conducting dictator games with Christians and Muslims in Ghana and Tanzania, we find causal effects: Whereas the idea of one true religion increases intergroup discrimination, that of universal love fosters equal treatment. The policy implications hereof are obvious—promoting tolerant religious ideas seems crucial to avoiding conflict.     

Religious tides: The time‐variant effect of religion on morality policies

Morality policies evince a much closer relationship to religious doctrines than is the case in other policy areas and hence constitute a most likely case for the observation of religious effects on policymaking and regulatory change. Yet we still lack generally accepted answers to the questions of whether and how religion matters to morality policy. In this paper, we present a theoretical argument that helps to overcome the seemingly contradictory expectations derived from the secularization and religion matters hypotheses. We postulate a bottleneck effect of religious opposition: while religious influence matters most during early stages of the policy process when the problem definition of a moral issue is still in flux, it diminishes during later stages when the issue has made it onto the political agenda. We find evidence of the bottleneck effect in a dataset of policy permissiveness covering 26 countries and spanning 50 years for five morality policies (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, pornography, and same‐sex marriage). The data is analyzed via a multilevel model and using Bayesian inference.     

Religious Pluralism and Democratic Inclusion: The American Recipe for Peace

There is no simple formula for religious peace in the United States, such as “separation of church andstate.” Instead, the US Constitution establishes two opposing principles -- religious freedom and civicinclusion -- that must be continually rebalanced. The legal result is a “serpentine wall” between church andstate that creates zones of cooperation as well as separation. Moreover, the relatively peaceful coexistence ofdiverse religious communities within the United States is due, not simply to the principles of the FirstAmendment, but also to the de-spatialized and de-ritualized character of American religion, and to the absence of explicitly confessional parties in the American polity.     

Laborde’s religion

ABSTRACT

Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion proposes liberal principles to address political controversies over religion. One is the public reason requirement that reasons for state policies should be accessible. Another is the civic inclusiveness requirement according to which symbolic religious establishment is wrong when it communicates that religious identity is a component of civic identity. A third is the claim that liberal states have meta-jurisdictional authority to settle the boundary between what counts as religion and what counts as non-religion. The article considers whether Laborde has managed to articulate these three principles in a way that is operationalisable and can serve to provide solutions to practical controversies over religion. It is argued that Laborde’s formulations leave important issues open, and some ways of settling these issues are considered.     

Religion, Spirituality, and the Workplace: Challenges for Public Administration

The relationship between religion and politics in the United States is a much-studied academic area, particularly evident in political institutional and behavioral venues such as interest groups, electoral behavior, and political culture. One academic area that has not received much attention is the influence of religion on public administration. Recently, however, public administration scholars have begun to mimic their counterparts in the business world by examining the role of religion and spirituality in the public workplace, especially with regard to organizational performance, ethical behavior patterns, decision making, and the personal spiritual health of employees. This article examines the role and impact of religion and spirituality in the workplace, reviews court cases and political measures regarding religious expression in the public sector, explores a private sector model to explain the interrelationship between religion and spirituality in the public workplace, and challenges public administrators to consider the positive role that religion and spirituality can play in the public workplace.     

After the fall: the impact of government regulation on church attendance in Eastern Europe, 1990–2004

Previous literature modeling the demand for religion has identified socioeconomic factors, religious human capital and religious market structure as being the fundamental determinants of the level of participation in religious services and practices. Building on the existing literature, this study analyzes the effect of government regulation and intervention on religious activity. Using religion-related data as well as demographic and economic data from 22 Eastern European countries after the fall of Communism, the existence of any form of religious restrictions is found to reduce church attendance rates.     

Explaining the Breakdown of the Religion–Vote Relationship in The Netherlands, 1971–2006

This article examines the extent to which changes in the effect of religion on voting in The Netherlands since the 1970s can be explained by ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches. The first includes religious integration and education. The latter category encompasses the restructuring of the party system and changes in party positions. Hypotheses are tested employing logistic and conditional logistic regression analyses of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies (1971–2006) supplemented by data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Weakening religious integration largely explains the decline of political boundaries between non-religious voters and Catholics and Calvinists. In line with earlier research, the article finds that the creation of a single Christian Democratic Party (CDA) has reduced the religion–vote relationship. However, this merger effect largely disappears after taking into account party positions. Moreover, party positions influence the religion–vote association: the effect of religion on voting increases as religious parties emphasise traditional moral issues in their manifestos.     

Religion and Euroscepticism: Direct,Indirect or No Effects?

Taking as starting points the (growing) political significance of religion and increasing scepticism towards European integration, this study sets out to investigate the impact of religious divides and religiosity on attitudes towards the EU, both on the micro and on the macro level. In addition to considering direct effects, it focuses on the mediated nature of relationships between religion and Euroscepticism through immigration attitudes and authoritarian value orientations. Drawing on data from the 2006 European Social Survey the authors find that individuals' religious attachments have only indirect relevance for explaining Euroscepticism when controlling for immigration attitudes and value orientations. Religious context, however, does contribute to explanatory models of Euroscepticism, with citizens of Protestant countries being more Eurosceptic than those in religiously mixed or in Catholic countries. The authors furthermore show that both authoritarianism and anti-immigration attitudes are to some degree influenced by individuals' denomination and level of religiosity and in turn predict Euroscepticism. Yet, even indirect effects of religion on Euroscepticism are small or appear to cancel each other out. The article concludes that religion on the micro level is largely irrelevant for explaining Euroscepticism, whereas it is an important macro-level explanatory variable.