Does Tolerance of Religion in the Public Space Depend on the Salience of the Manifestation of Religious Group Membership?

The question of the role of Islam in the public space has become a new pivotal point in political disputes about civil liberties in Western Europe. This debate challenges the scholarly literature on tolerance by highlighting that our understanding of the situational factors shaping tolerance judgments remains limited. This study therefore investigates how the salience of the signaling of religious group membership influences religious tolerance. Based on a unique question-wording experiment embedded in an approximately nationally representative survey, I demonstrate that conspicuous manifestations of religious outgroup membership spark stronger intolerance than subtle manifestations and that anxiety mediates the effect of conspicuous manifestations of religious outgroup membership. Finally, I demonstrate that the effect of the salience of religious outgroup membership is strongest among those who are highly opposed to secularism. I conclude by discussing how these findings constitute an important extension of the extant work on tolerance and feed back into the discussion regarding the role of religion in the public space.     

Axiomatizations of a positional power score and measure for hierarchies

The extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the authority structure. This is based upon the bare positions of actors and ignores the existence of decision-making mechanisms. The few studies, which also take into account decision-making mechanisms, are ‘membership-based’. In an earlier paper we demonstrated that such an approach is, in general, inappropriate. As a solution we suggested an ‘action-based’ approach and developed a power score and measure ascribing positional power to actors in hierarchies. In this paper we axiomatize this power score and measure and illustrate their applicability.