Religious Polarization Research Articles

The Two Faces of Diversity: The Relationships between Religious Polarization, Religious Fractionalization, and Self-rated Health.

A dominant discourse in the social sciences theorizes that religious diversity puts individuals' health at risk via interreligious hostility. However, this discourse overlooks the different subtypes of religious diversity and the moderation of political institutions. To better understand the issue of diversity and health, in this study, we distinguish between two subtypes of religious diversity-polarization and fractionalization-and argue that their impacts on health are heterogeneous. Using a sample of 67,399 individuals from 51 societies drawn from the 2010-2014 wave of the World Values Survey, our multilevel analyses show that religious polarization is negatively associated with individual health, whereas the health effects of religious fractionalization are positive. Moreover, the associations between religious polarization/fractionalization and individual health are found to depend on the democratic level of the state. In more democratic countries, the negative effects of polarization on health are mitigated, and the positive effects of fractionalization are stronger.

Occupy Wall Street’s Civil Religion of the Nones: A Theology of Consensus

ABSTRACTOver the last thirty years religious and political polarization has not only created the Religious Right, but a Secular Left. These changes have had a profound and underappreciated influence upon civil religious life in the United States. This article lays out the case for distinguishing between two forms of civil religion: the traditional, pro-status quo (drawing on Puritan thought) and a critical, anti-establishment variant (which draws upon the Quaker tradition). After detailing historical and theoretical reasons behind such a distinction, I posit that the contemporary expression of the anti-establishment civil religion exists in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Far from purely secular, OWS epitomizes the Quaker civil religion: its ideals of radical democracy and individuality, as well as practices like the Quaker’s own consensus-based decision made through the People’s Mic. Ultimately, I argue that as American religiosity changes, so too does its expression through the nation’s civil religious traditions.

POLITISASI HIJAB KONTESTASI PEMILIHAN KEPALA DAERAH

<p><em>This research about the transformation of </em><em>h</em><em>ijab women candidates in the political stage direct election of the regional head (Pilkada). In Indonesia hijab experienced a transformative instrument motif. This is related to the dynamics of democratization in Indonesia, the factor of political identity and religious polarization is very strong. The focus of this study is the motive </em><em>of wearing a hijab on women's candidates influenced various aspects including religion, fashion trend, even political interests to gain power. The theoretical study uses the </em><em>rational action</em><em> theory approach is the front stage and backstage. The object of this research is women candidates who suddenly use the hijab before the election of the regional head. </em><em>The purpose of this study to determine the motives behind the use of hijab, the objective of political parties to bring women candidates wearing hijab to gain sympathy and captivate the voice of Muslim voters.</em><em> The research method is a textual analysis on the use of Hijab. The results are expected with the emergence of women candidates who have hijab in direct local elections (Pilkada) bringing blessings and benefits, not just playing masks on the political stage as a means of winning</em><em> </em><em>and power for personal and group interests. </em></p>

Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox: Competitive Elections amidst Rising Illiberalism

Indonesia’s 2019 elections confirmed both the country’s status as a competitive electoral democracy and the trend of decreasing democratic quality. In this article, we investigate this seemingly paradoxical pattern by highlighting four political arenas directly associated with the elections. First, the incumbent government’s failure to secure a larger margin of victory for President Jokowi highlights the continued competitiveness of the electoral system, despite attempts to use state agencies for the president’s re-election campaign. Second, although efforts to mobilise state resources for Jokowi were largely unsuccessful, they added to an already significant illiberal shift. Third, the elections further accelerated the weakening of political parties, with the personalisation of legislative polls achieving new heights. Finally, the election campaign and results led to a level of religious polarisation in voting behaviour that was last seen in the 1950s. In analysing these themes, we argue that while the co-existence of Indonesia’s competitive elections with illiberal trends appears contradictory, the two are in fact interrelated.

The mosque as juristic person: law, public order and inter-religious disputes in India

ABSTRACTThe dispute between Muslims and Sikhs over the Shahidganj mosque in Lahore in the early 1930s served as the prelude to the Punjabi Muslims’ decisive shift in favour of the Pakistan movement. The competing political campaigns, religious polarization and intermittent spells of violence that it triggered has attracted the attention of historians interested in the development of communitarian mass politics and partition. However, the dispute also played out in the colonial courts and became the site on which some of the knottiest questions of colonial jurisprudence were debated. The present essay looks at this ignored aspect of the Shahidganj conflict. Could the mosque, like a Hindu deity, be designated a juristic person? What laws would apply in an inter-religious dispute of this nature? And whether in such matters, the state law enjoyed pre-eminence over religious laws. Despite the unanimity over the building’s antecedents as a mosque, the courts – all the way from the Sikh tribunal, to the High Court to the Privy Council – ruled in favour of the Sikhs. The essay seeks to understand how these competing claims were adjudicated and what were the imperatives of the colonial government that resulted in such a judicial outcome. It then proceeds to examine the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case in order to understand the continuities as well as departures in the exigencies of the post-colonial state, and the resolutions it offered thereof in such disputes.

Manufacturing Polarisation in Contemporary India: The Case of Identity Politics in Post-Left Bengal

This article explores ethnographically the manufacturing of religious polarisation and violence in West Bengal, India. Since 2014, India has experienced a rise in religion-based identity conflict. Although West Bengal experienced riots during the partition of India, it remained unaffected during the subsequent three decades of Left rule. More recently, however, secular democratic forces have been marginalised and riot-like conflicts have emerged. We argue that identity consolidation in West Bengal is part of an increasing trend of religious polarisation in the country. To bridge the gap between scholarly discussions on the concepts of secularism and communalisation, the paper presents micro-narratives illuminating the background of religious polarisation and violence. We provide ethnographic details of the mechanisms by which religious identities are consolidated. With a case-based approach, this article unearths the mechanisms of identity-based polarisation, and its politicisation in a region which has not experienced this level of violence for several decades.

Geopolitics of International Relations, Ethnic Polarization and Internal Conflict

Geostrategic position of a country not just creates opportunities in form of bilateral and multilateral collaborations, it may also pose stern long term concerns and spillover effects in terms of insecurity and conflict. Pakistan, if not a classic example, is a typical case of continually high geopolitics of international relations: its geostrategic location had been praised by international players during the cold war regime through financial assistance; it was encouraged to take part during the Russian invasion in Afghanistan in late 70’s; and was compelled to play the role of ‘front line state’ in the war against terrorism, in the aftermath of the 9/ 11 incidence, in 2001. Early attempts of establishing rebel groups based upon ethnic identity to fight in Afghanistan, while launching of ruthless military operations after 9/11 incidence, against same rebel groups who fought in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, causing either undue leverage to specific ethnic minorities at one point in time or extreme repression at later stage of history. In order to pretest impact of geopolitics of International Relations upon conflict, and if the interplay of geopolitics with ‘ethnic polarization’ affected ‘internal conflict’, several econometric models have been estimated. Along with testing the impact of geopolitical importance and its interplay with ethnic polarization in distressing peace, other important propositions in estimated models include, how ‘external conflict’, ‘institutional efficacies’, and the ‘role of military in politics’, caused adversity of ‘Internal conflict’, in Pakistan. In order to ensure concurrent validity of econometric models, alternative regressands namely ratings of ‘Civil War’ and ‘Internal Conflict’ have been used. Keeping in view ordinal scaling of regressands, cautions in dealing with heteroscedasticity and potentially lagged impact of regressors, Ordered-probit, Ordered Logit, Quantile regression, Robust Regression, and Prais-Winsten models are estimated. Estimated models strongly approved the notion that ‘geopolitics of international relations’ and ‘geopolitics of International Relations’ in interaction with ‘Ethnic polarization’, have had a considerable and statistically significant temporal impact upon ‘internal conflict’ and rating of ‘civil war’, in context of Pakistan. Other significant factors that contributed to adversity of peace are ‘external conflict’, ‘role of military in politics’, ‘illegitimacy of the state actions’/ ‘institutional inefficacies’ and ‘religious polarization’. Keywords: geopolitics of international relations, war against terrorism, internal conflict, ethnic polarization, ordered-probit model, robust regression, Prais-Winsten regression.

Polarization Without Poles: Machiavellian Conflicts and the Philippines’ Lost Decade of Democracy, 2000–2010

The Philippines’ long democratic experience has been remarkably free of deeply politicized cleavages. Roman Catholicism as a hegemonic religion prevents religious polarization, ethnic identity fragmentation limits ethnic polarization, and weak parties forestall ideological or class polarization. Nevertheless, the country suffered a crisis of polarization during the short-lived Estrada presidency (1998–2001) and that of his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–2010). The severe conflict was a product of power maneuvers by anti-Estrada forces, followed by anti-Arroyo actors returning the favor, given her gross abuses of power. Echoing Machiavelli’s famous distinction, the conflict pitted Estrada’s popoli (the many) against Arroyo’s oligarchic grandi (the few). This Machiavellian conflict ended with an oligarchic reassertion of Madisonian democratic rule through the electoral victory of Benigno Simeon Aquino III in 2010. We conclude the article by considering whether the populist challenge of current president Rodrigo Duterte (2016– ) might spark a similarly destabilizing conflict in the years to come.

Religious polarization, religious conflicts and individual financial satisfaction: Evidence from India

AbstractThe extant literature finds religion to be a major determinant of life satisfaction. However, in contexts characterized by religious tensions, the outcome may be very different. In particular, the literature shows that religious polarization has a major influence on some economic outcomes. The analysis presented in the paper tries to identify the impact of religious polarization on a major component of life satisfaction: financial satisfaction. The paper inquires how belonging to a minority religion and living in areas with different levels of religious polarization affect the individual satisfaction with the financial situation of the household. The results show that the members of minority religious groups are less satisfied than the members of the dominant group, and that the financial satisfaction decreases—for a given income—as the religious polarization increases.

Canadian religious trends: Secularization, polarization, or free-rider exclusion?

Religiously unaffiliated Canadians have been persistently more likely to reside in the western provinces. In parallel, the degree of religiosity of the affiliates has been generally higher in the low affiliation provinces of the west. This pattern has led some scholars to characterize Canada as religiously polarized. However, in the literature, a quantitative measure of polarization is lacking. Moreover, religious polarization, a rather vividly debated characterization, is not by itself an explanation for the patterns. The present article, using the Canadian General Social Surveys of 1985 to 2011, contributes to the debate in three ways. First, this article establishes the robustness of the geographic discrepancies in unaffiliation rates and the degree of religiosity in Canada. Second, this study proposes and computes a quantitative measure of polarization. Finally the article explores the role of free-rider exclusion as an explanation for the patterns.

Polarization, foreign military intervention, and civil conflict

This paper tests whether foreign military intervention helps explain conflict by intensifying polarization. Building on the seminal papers of Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) and Esteban and Ray (2011) and using a panel for 138 countries from 1960 to 2005, we confirm that ethnic polarization is a robust predictor of civil war. However, we also find that religious polarization is positively and significantly associated with civil conflict in the presence of foreign military intervention of non-humanitarian and non-neutral nature in the Middle East and North Africa, but not in the rest of the world. This type of intervention intensifies religious polarization through its effect on alienation, increasing the risk of high intensity conflict. The results provide an explanation for the high incidence of civil conflict in the Middle East and North Africa despite moderate polarization levels, obtained using the Reynal-Querol (2002) index, which is time-invariant and factors in only identity concerns.

Religious polarization: contesting religion in secularized Western European countries

In light of recent claims about increasing religious polarization in secularized countries, we study the extent to which the non-religious contest religion in Western European countries and whether and how the Protestant and Catholic heritage of these countries plays a role in this. Analyzing data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP 1998 and 2008) data by means of multilevel analysis, we demonstrate that religious polarization is stronger in the most secularized countries and in countries with a Catholic religious heritage. Moreover, in secular countries, polarization stems from religious fervency, whereas in countries with a Catholic heritage, it stems from anti-religious fervency.

The impact of social heterogeneity and commodity price shocks on civil conflicts

Do exogenous economic shocks promote civil conflicts directly? Do they affect all the societies alike? The current approach presents a large sample panel data evidence not only on the effect of commodity export price shocks on conflict incidence, rather than onsets, but also on the joint impact of both ethnic and religious polarization and fractionalization on political instability. In this regard, we find out that in ethnically polarized societies, the commodity export price shocks increase violence. Nonetheless, in ethnically and religiously fractionalized societies (as well as religiously polarized), the effect of commodity export price shocks on civil conflicts depends on the type of income shocks and category of commodity. These findings contribute to the existing literature by illuminating the compound effect of both income shocks and social diversity on intrastate conflicts.

The Diverging Beliefs and Practices of the Religiously Affiliated and Unaffiliated in the United States

Since 1990, the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown substantially. Prior work has shown that between 1990 and 2000, the religiously unaffiliated population also became more religious in belief and practices, both in absolute terms and relative to the affiliated population. This curious empirical finding is believed to be driven by a dilution effect in which moderate believers disaffiliated from organized religion without giving up religious beliefs and practices. In the current article, I use data from the General Social Survey to show that this convergence of beliefs and practices of the religiously affiliated and unaffiliated ended around 2000. Since 2000, the religiously unaffiliated have decreased their belief in God and the afterlife and have not increased their prayer frequency. The trends for the affiliated have been either increasing or unchanging, and thus, the religious practices and beliefs of the religiously affiliated and unaffiliated have diverged since 2000. The change in trend for the religiously unaffiliated after 2000 cannot fully be explained by generational succession or the growing percentage of Americans raised without religion. Although the unaffiliated remain very heterogeneous in their beliefs and practices, these results point to a growing religious polarization in the United States.

Collective Action and Representation in Autocracies: Evidence from Russia’s Great Reforms

We explore the relationship between capacity for collective action and representation in autocracies with data from Imperial Russia. Our primary empirical exercise relates peasant representation in new institutions of local self-government to the frequency of peasant unrest in the decade prior to reform. To correct for measurement error in the unrest data and other sources of endogeneity, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in two determinants of peasant unrest: the historical incidence of serfdom and religious polarization. We find that peasants were granted less representation in districts with more frequent unrest in preceding years—a relationship consistent with the Acemoglu-Robinson model of political transitions and inconsistent with numerous other theories of institutional change. At the same time, we observe patterns of redistribution in subsequent years that are inconsistent with the commitment mechanism central to the Acemoglu-Robinson model. Building on these results, we discuss possible directions for future theoretical work.

ETHNICITY AND ELECTORAL VIOLENCE IN AFRICA: AN ELITE THEORY PERSPECTIVE

The linkage between ethnicity, religious polarization and electoral violence in Africa has become one of the most recurring theme in the literature on democracy and elections in the continent. The electoral process in these emergent democracies have been observed to be marred by electoral violence which many have blamed on the diversity that characterize the socio-political configuration of these states which were inherited from European colonial powers at independence. In an attempt to explain the electoral violence phenomenon, existing works have limited the depths of their enquiry just below the surface by attributing the phenomenon to ethno-religious diversity which is prompted by competition for power and resource control. This paper makes an invitation for a deeper analysis by making a proposition based on the elite theory- which will serve as a framework for future studies on the subject matter. It proposes that the elite in Africa derive their support from their ethno-religious enclave and therefore have ethnic-based support structures. Since every society is shaped by the values and preferences of the elite, the demand of an ethno-religious enclave is therefore a reflection of the interest of the elite class in dominance of such enclave. As a result of this, ethnic competition and by extension electoral violence in African democratic experiments are a result of the clash of interest between these ethnic-based elite classes and their failure to harmonize their interest. To this end, we therefore suggest that electoral violence in Africa occurs mainly as ‘proxy wars’ between ethnic-based elite classes. Based on this assumption we propose that electoral violence is a function of the failure of the elite class from competing ethno-religious enclaves to harmonize their interest in an electoral process, and when harmonization of interest do occur there tends to be a peaceful election as was experienced in the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria which was peaceful despite the volatility of the political system at the time. This proposition sustains a new dimension in the debate and therefore provides itself as an analytical framework for future studies to build on.

Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics

Although Americans generally hold science in high regard and respect its findings, for some contested issues, such as the existence of anthropogenic climate change, public opinion is polarized along religious and political lines. We ask whether individuals with more general education and greater science knowledge, measured in terms of science education and science literacy, display more (or less) polarized beliefs on several such issues. We report secondary analyses of a nationally representative dataset (the General Social Survey), examining the predictors of beliefs regarding six potentially controversial issues. We find that beliefs are correlated with both political and religious identity for stem cell research, the Big Bang, and human evolution, and with political identity alone on climate change. Individuals with greater education, science education, and science literacy display more polarized beliefs on these issues. We find little evidence of political or religious polarization regarding nanotechnology and genetically modified foods. On all six topics, people who trust the scientific enterprise more are also more likely to accept its findings. We discuss the causal mechanisms that might underlie the correlation between education and identity-based polarization.

Religious diversity and regional development in China

This paper investigates possible impacts of religious diversity on regional development in China. We developed the religious fragmentation and polarization indices as measurements for the religious diversity by using the religious site data from the 2004 economic Census data in China. The results from the panel data regressions within national coverage suggest that the religious diversity has positive and significant impacts on regional development in general. The results from the panel data regressions within regional coverage also suggest that religious fragmentation has a positive and significant association with the economic development in the eastern region of China while religious polarization has a positive and significant association with the economic development in the central and western regions of China.

Conservative Protestants and Religious Polarization in Canada

Reginald Bibby has recently argued that polarization is the best way to describe the religious reality in Canada. There is, in his view, a stable religiously active pole, a shrinking nominally religious middle, and a growing non-religious pole. Others have documented a similar trend in other Western countries. This paper examines evidence for religious polarization in Canada using data from Bibby’s Project Canada Surveys and other sources, with special attention paid to a prominent subset of the religiously committed: conservative Protestants. Evidence of polarization is weak for Canada as a whole. Instead, the data trends are consistent with religious decline. Even the conservative Protestants are not growing, nor showing evidence of increased conservativism.

Religious–Secular Polarization Compared

For many decades now, there has been a general decline of traditional indicators of religiosity in both Quebec and British Columbia. New generations are being born and raised in much more secular social contexts than in years past. However, this general trend of decline masks many differences between the two Canadian provinces, and does not imply a complete disappearance of religion from society. Certain groups of believers have been able to maintain their numbers and levels of practice. Since the 2000s, these two worlds of the secular and the religious seem to have been confronting one another more and more, evident in public debates and individual representations. The emerging framework of religious polarization offers conceptual tools to better grasp this dynamic in advanced Modernity. By analyzing recent statistical data on individual religious practices, we examine the extent to which this cleavage between the religious and non-religious is developing among younger generations in two distinct religious and social contexts: those of Quebec and British Columbia.