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Articles

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON THE INFLUENCE OF FREE SPEECH AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ON PUBLIC ORDER AND PUBLIC MORALITY

 

Notes

1. This research was supported by the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this study are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the John Templeton Foundation.

2. For more information on the RAS data set, see the project website at www.religionandstate.org as well as Fox (Citation2008; Citation2011).

3. The variable is a scale of 0–90 based on 30 different types of limitations a country might place on religious institutions or practices of religious minorities with each type of limitation measured on a scale of 0–3. For a full listing of the variable components as well as a discussion of the scale and how the variable was collected, see Fox (Citation2011)

4. The variable is a scale of 0–87 based on 29 different types of limitations a country might place on religious institutions or practices of the majority religion or all religions in a state, with each type of limitation measured on a scale of 0–3. For a full listing of the variable components as well as a discussion of the scale and how the variable was collected see Fox (Citation2011).

5. Other data collections on religion which include measures of religious freedom include Barret, Kurian, and Johnson (Citation2001) and Grim and Finke (Citation2006; Citation2010).

6. For more on this database, see the database website at http://www.humanrightsdata.com/.

7. For more on the PITF data set, see the project home page at http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/political-instability-task-force-home.

8. For more on the PRIO-Uppsala Armed Conflict data set, see the project webpage at http://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/.

9. Measurements and definitions of violent conflict vary across data sets. Rather than have a more detailed variable for level of violence, I chose to check multiple sources for the presence of violent conflict to build a more all-encompassing measure of whether a violent conflict took place in a country. In doing so, I had to sacrifice the ability to measure the level of violence in detail. However, the presence of a violent conflict, I argue, is more important to measuring a disruption of public order than the extent of the violence present in that conflict.

10. For more on this project, see http://www.transparency.org/.

11. I measure democracy here using the Polity index which measures regimes from −10, the most autocratic, to 10, the most democratic. It is based on the regulation, openness, and competitiveness of executive recruitment, constraints on the executive, and the regulation and competitiveness of political participation. Essentially, it measures institutional democracy. For more details, see Jaggers and Gurr (Citation1995) and the Polity project webpage at http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm (retrieved October 17, 2013).

12. I measure this using the number of years since the last change in the Polity index described in the previous note.

13. I measure this with the log of per-capita GDP taken from the UN Statistical Division at http://www.unstats.org/unsd/default.htm. I use the log because the difference between a per-capita GDP increase from $1000 to $2000, for example, is much more significant than an increase from $30,000 to $31,000.

14. I measure these two factors using the CIRI database. Each factor is measured independently on a scale of 0–2, with 2 being full respect of the designated right. My measures add these factors into a single measure. See the CIRI website for more details http://www.humanrightsdata.com/ (retrieved July 1, 2014).

15. This indicates that the result showing free speech having a negative influence on transparency was likely an interaction effect. This means that when two similar variables are used in a regression, one may be strongly positive while the other is weakly negative but the overall influence of the two combined is positive. When the stronger influence is removed the weaker influence either becomes insignificant or becomes positive.

16. I define high as a score of 7 or higher for each index.

Additional information

Jonathan Fox (Ph.D. University of Maryland, 1997) is a Professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan Israel and director of the Religion and State project (www.religionandstate.org). His research focuses on the intersection between religion and politics including issues in international relations, violent conflict, and government religion policy. His most recent books include Political Secularism, Religion, and the State (Cambridge 2015), Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities (Routledge, 2013), and An Introduction to Religion and Politics: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2012).

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