Religion and politics: examining the impact of faith on political participation

ABSTRACT

This study examines the relationship between religion and political activity. It theorises religious influences on political activity and tests the impact of various religious factors on political participation in a large cross-national sample (1981–2014). This study integrates longitudinal data from the aggregated World Values Survey with country-level data in the hierarchical multilevel analysis that allows teasing out the individual-level religious influences, including membership in religious organisations, religiosity and self-identification with various religious denominations, and the country-level impacts. The temporal and spatial coverage of the data used in the study includes more than 65% of the world’s population. The seven types of political participation examined in the study include signing petitions, joining in boycotts, participating in demonstrations, taking part in unofficial strikes, occupying buildings and factories, voting and membership in political parties. We find that religion matters but not always in the expected ways. Religiosity, by itself, often serves as a deterrent rather than mobilising force for political engagement, regardless the denominational differences. It is the membership in religious organisations and other voluntary associations of a secular nature that make individuals more likely to engage in political activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Political participation
• religiosity
• religious denomination
• World Values Survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. World Values Survey 1981–2014 Longitudinal Aggregate v.20150418. World Values Survey Association (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). Aggregate File Producer: JD Systems, Madrid, Spain.

2. An original scale contains six items. We adopted a limited scale to increase the number of observations in the model since questions about respondents’ beliefs in life after death, hell and heaven were not included in several survey waves.

3. The WVS questionnaire adopts an approach to religious classification based on a commonly used denominational affiliation. This approach has been criticised for concealing important variation within religious denominations that precludes meaningful interpretation of religious impacts (see, for example, Steensland et al. 2000). To circumvent this problem, the WVS adapts its questionnaire to the country’s religious milieu by including into the pre-defined religious categories the main religious denominations that characterise the state, but also offering an option of ‘Other’ for each country included in the survey. The respondents may choose to self-identify with one of the pre-defined religious denominations, or write in their own religious denomination. In preparation of the dummy variables, we used the main religious categories – Buddhist, Christian, Evangelical, Hindu, Jew, Orthodox, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Muslim – as they appear on the survey. This means that the frequencies used in the analyses correspond to the total number of those respondents who self-identified with those categories. We only collapsed Shia and Sunni into the category of ‘Muslim’. The variations within Christianity (e.g. Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, etc.), all of which were chosen by a few dozens, but no more than 250 respondents, were included into the ‘Other’ category along with the less known and minor religions. This was a necessary decision for carrying out a large comparative analysis. We would have been unable to determine the impact of religions with a small number of observations due to the nature of our sample and the multilevel research design methodology.

4. We also added the random coefficient (slope) to the models. A likelihood-ratio test showed that the models with the random coefficient were not significantly better than the models with just the random intercept.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mariya Y. Omelicheva

Mariya Y. Omelicheva is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas. She holds PhD (2007) in Political Science from Purdue University and JD in International Law (2000) from Moscow National Law Academy. Her primary research interests are human rights and counterterrorism, Russia’s foreign policy, regionalism and geopolitics in Eurasia, securitisation of Islam and democracy promotion in post-Soviet space. She is the author of Counterterrorism Policies in Central Asia (Routledge 2011) and Democracy in Central Asia: Competing Perspectives and Alternate Strategies (University Press of Kentucky 2015), and editor of Nationalism and Identity Construction in Central Asia (Lexington 2015).

Ranya Ahmed

Ranya Ahmed is currently a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and an Information Officer for the SAMS Foundation. In January 2016, Ranya completed the University of Kansas Political Science doctoral program, specialising in methods, international relations and policy. She previously earned a Master’s degree in International Studies, and an MPA, with an emphasis in nonprofit management.