![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article explores how religion and the public legal domains of modern societies in the EU-member states are institutionally interconnected. We focus our analysis on how religion, religiosity and religious organisations are integrated and regulated in European constitutions. Our analysis is guided by two sociological theories concerning the development of modern institutional arrangements: (a) neo-institutionalism, emphasising the influence of world culture which leads to institutional isomorphism as the adaption of worldwide shared scripts; (b) path dependency, emphasising the emergence of institutional arrangements as path depending on particular power relations and historical events. From neo-institutionalism, we expect to find similarities in more recent constitutions while theories of path dependency indicate similarities only in cases of similar historical events or power relations. In applying an explorative, quantitative document analysis of a unique data set of constitutions, we detect similarities and differences concerning religion in the constitutional texts. Our analysis establishes religion as a multi-dimensional issue that is regulated in quite different ways in different states. We demonstrate that neo-institutionalism is valid only on the mere formal level of the composition of the constitutions of the EU-member states.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Annette Schnabel is a professor for sociology and social theory at the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. Her research interests cover, among others, religious and national identities, welfare state research, gender and social movements.
Kathrin Behrens is a PhD student and research assistant at the Institute of Social Science, Department of Sociology, Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf. Her research interests focus on social theory and methods of empirical social research, sociology of religion and sociology of national identity.
Florian Grötsch works in the field of European research funding and resources management. His current scientific interests are focusing on the influence of Religion in Europe, the dynamics in the religious field and the European (dis-) integration process.
Notes
1 We thereby tie in with the commonly used multi-dimensional-multi-level perspective on religion. This takes into account not only functional or substantial characteristics but focuses as well on all acts, devices and institutions, making the inconceivable communicable (Pollack and Rosta Citation2015: 71). It enables understanding laws and legal regulations as part of the ‘religious.’
2 This idea was firstly drafted in The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut in 1638 (Blaustein Citation1994: v).
3 There are alternative theoretical approaches to modernity like functionalist theory, Marxist or evolutionary theories that we do not consider here due to the limited space of the article.
4 In these approaches, world culture is defined as the UN-system and a Western understanding of modernity.
5 The manual Framing the Modern Constitution: A Checklist by Blaustein (Citation1994) is one example of the influence of world culture: this manual gives detailed information on how to build a ‘modern constitution’ and is applied in several constitution-building processes worldwide.
6 The existence of a constitution does not necessarily imply that it is implemented. Meyer et al. (Citation1997: 3) refer to institutions that are existing ‘on paper’ only but not put into effect as loose coupling.
7 Kääriäinen (Citation2009) could show such path dependencies particularly for Finland and Russia where different historical developments since the beginning of the twentieth-century led to different social and political constellations of religion and religiosity.
8 The analysis of such documents would need the extensive incorporation of additional documentations and juristic interpretations for comparison.
9 We do not assume that there is a causal relationship because there are too many unobserved intervening influences in order to make strong statements about effects and their direction.
10 We decided against calculating the Herfindahl-Index for regions, for example, for East and West Germany. Although the degree of individual religiousness differs particularly between these two regions there are other regional dissimilarities in Europe as well that we cannot control due to a lack of data. These concern for example differences between rural and urban regions and regional particularities such as regional protestant majorities in catholic countries such as Alsace in France or Lombardy in Italy or the denominational differences between Wallonia and Flanders in Belgium. Besides this more technical argument, we are interested in the relationship between the legal framework that does apply for all regions within a nation-state and religious homogeneity measured by the Herfindahl-Index.
11 All context data are reported in of the Appendix. Additionally, we tested for associations to GDP, unemployment-rate, percentage of social spending and percentage of foreign born in a country in order to check if modernisation indicators prior to the last modification may have any association to characteristics of the actual constitutional texts. It turned out that they do not. We therefore do not report or comment on them any further.
12 Empirical studies have shown that particularly the proportion of non-religious persons increased over the last 30 years and that the balances between the combinational groups are quite stable (Pollack and Pickel Citation2003).
13 Constitutional texts were collected from Constitution Finder, a web site of the University of Richmond that provides all constitutions worldwide in English and the original language. UK is left out because there is no legal document that counts as ‘constitution’. Constitutional texts were verified by the texts provided by the Comparative Constitutions Project (http://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org – 01.03.2016). No differences were found.
14 This procedure was already used and proved helpful for analysing gender regimes within constitutional texts (Heintz and Schnabel Citation2006). The method is inspired by Legewie (Citation1994).
15 In both cases, ‘religion/religious’ refers to individual rights of religious freedom and freedoms of belief. In the case of Denmark, religion is mentioned additionally to point to the regulation of the state-church-relationship in the so-called Church Act.
16 Because we analysed all constitutions of the EU-member states as a complete inventory count, we decided to accept associations on a significance level of p<.1 as stable.
17 Direction of effect cannot be established on the basis of the constitutional text.
18 Direction of effect cannot be established on the basis of the constitutional text.
19 By state-church-relationship we refer to churches as organisations. Such religious organisations can comprise non-church organisations and congregations as well.
20 In Article 1 of its constitution, France claims to be a secular but not a laicistic state.
21 England and Wales still have a state-church but because they do not have a constitution this relationship is not included into our data.
22 Other areas would be health and social care or work and employment.
23 This does not prevent religious organisations from competing for influencing parents in their interest.
24 Although Fox (Citation2007) employed different measurements applying them to a different research question the results point in the same direction: democratic European states are highly engaged in regulating religion including a high degree of government involvement.
25 Most recently such mechanism can be observed in the case of the US regulating legally the relationship between the state and the immigration of Muslims, a topic unquestioned until now.