Government interference in religious institutions and terrorism

ABSTRACT

Many states have adopted policies that monitor or attempt to control religious institutions in various ways. This ranges from limiting foreign-born clerics to approving the sermons presented in these institutions. These policies are often justified as measures to limit religious strife or terrorism by minimising extremism in the country. Are they effective? Or are they counterproductive, and promote resentment and violence? Using data from the Religion and State dataset and the Global Terrorism Database, I find that intensified government interference in religious institutions can lead to an increase in terrorism in a country.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• religious freedom
• religion-state relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The author would like to thank Jonathan Fox and Mary Beth Altier for helpful comments, and Keile Kropf and Alex von Stange for their invaluable research assistance. All remaining errors are the fault of the author.

2. The Global Terrorism Database is available at https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/. (2018). Global Terrorism Database. N. C. f. t. S. o. T. a. R. t. T. (START).

3. More information on the Religion and State dataset is available at http://religionandstate.org/.

4. Data from the World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/.

5. Fractionalisation data is from Alesina et al, while Muslim population data is from the Religion and State (RAS) dataset. Alesina et al. (2003). ‘Fractionalization’, Journal of Economic Growth 8: 155–194.

6. I report robustness checks in the online appendix for the model using Change_Majority as this was the most consistently significant test.

7. Due to the large number of tests I run, I only include tables of results for the variables measuring change in government interference, and figures representing coefficients of the significant variables. All other tables and figures are in the online appendix.

8. Descriptive statistics and the results from robustness checks are available in the online appendix.

9. See the online appendix for the results of robustness checks.

10. A substantive change in Majority interference is moving from 6 to 25, which is approximately a move from one standard deviation below the mean to one standard deviation above the mean.

11. As Terrorism Deaths is a logged variable, the increase is not the same as the change in coefficient, but this is an approximate interpretation of the change in the logged variable.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Vermont.

Notes on contributors

Peter S. Henne

Peter S. Henne is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Global and Regional Studies Program at the University of Vermont. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University, and B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College. His first book, Islamic Politics, Muslim States and Counterterrorism Tensions, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press.