State religion and discrimination against ethnic minorities

Nationalism and Ethnic Politics

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 189-210

  Fox, Jonathan ^a   James, Patrick ^b   Li, Yitan ^c  

^a BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^c SEATTLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNIC CONFLICT; ETHNIC MINORITY; POLITICAL REPRESSION; RACIAL DISPARITY; RACIAL SEGREGATION; RELIGION;

EID: 70449448174     PISSN: 13537113     EISSN: 15572986     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13537110902921230     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 896/00), the Sara and Simha Lainer Chair in Democracy and Civility, and the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
2. A number of studies influence much of the review presented here as well as other elements of this study. We list them in this note and not elsewhere in order to avoid repetitive notes. For a thorough theoretical discussion and quantitative analysis of the various religious and civilizational causes and con-tributions to ethnic as well as other types of domestic conflict
3. Jonathan Fox, Ethnoreligious Conflict in the Late 20th Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002)
4. Jonathan Fox, Religion, Civilization and Civil War: 1945 Through the New Millennium (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). For previous quantitative studies on the causes of discrimination
5. Jonathan Fox, Religious Causes of Ethnic Discrimination, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2000), pp. 423-50
6. Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler, Regime Types and Discrimination against Ethno-Religious Minorities: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Autocracy-Democracy Continuum, Political Studies, Vol. 51, No. 3 (2003), pp. 469-89
7. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke, Religious Persecution on Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulating Reli-gious Economies, American Sociological Review, Vol. 72 (2007), pp. 633-58. For a thorough discussion of SRE, the RAS dataset, and other projects that collect religion variables, as well as an analysis of the dataset and a country by country survey of the extent to which all states in this study are religiously exclusive
8. Jonathan Fox, World Separation of Religion and State into the 21st Century, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 39, No. 5 (2006), pp. 537-69
9. Jonathan Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). This final reference is also the source of most country-specific examples used in this study.
10. As noted below, this is not true of qualitative studies.
11. See the discussion of this assertion in the next section.
12. Fox, A World Survey, p. 353.
13. R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
14. Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15. John T. S. Madeley, A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Church-State Relations in Europe, West European Politics, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2003), pp. 23-50.
16. Appleby; Gopin. For similar ideas of exclusivity such as group entitlement and ranked vs. unranked groups
17. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 21-35, 185-227.
18. For a more thorough discussion of this literature and many of the studies to which this discussion refers see note 2.
19. Gabriel Ben-Dor and Ami Pedahzur, The Uniqueness of Islamic Fundamentalism and the Fourth Wave of International Terrorism, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2003), pp. 71-90.
20. Isak Svensson, Fighting with Faith: Religion and Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 6 (2007), pp. 930-49
21. Andrej Tusicisny, Civilizational Conflicts: More Frequent, Longer, and Bloodier?, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2004), pp. 485-98.
22. Leonard B. Weinberg and William L. Eubank, Terrorism and Democracy: What Recent Events Disclose, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1998), pp. 108-18
23. Leonard Weinberg, William Eubank, and Ami Pedahzur, Characteristics of Terrorist Organizations 1910-2000, Presented at the 25th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology in Berlin, Germany, July, 2002.
24. Robert A. Pape, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (2003), pp. 343-61.
25. Errol A. Henderson, Culture or Contiguity: Ethnic Conflict, the Similarity of States, and the Onset of War, 1820-1989, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 41, No. 5 (1997), pp. 649-68
26. Errol A. Henderson, The Democratic Peace Through the Lens of Culture, 1820-1989, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1998), pp. 461-84.
27. Susanna Pearce, The Double Edged Sword: The Impact of Religion on the intensity of Political Conflict, (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2004.)
28. Susanna Pearce, Religious Rage: A Quantitative Analysis of the Intensity of Religious Conflicts, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2005), pp. 333-52.
29. For example, Paul Collier and Anne Hoeffler, On the Incidence of Civil War in Africa, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2002), pp. 13-28.
30. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (1993), pp. 22-49
31. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
32. S. N. Eisenstadt, The Reconstruction of Religious Arenas in the Framework of 'Multiple Modernities,' Millennium, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2000), pp. 591-611
33. Anthony D. Smith, The Sacred Dimension of Nationalism, Millennium, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2000), pp. 791-814.
34. Tanja Ellingsen, Colorful Community or Ethnic Witches' Brew? Multiethnicity and Domestic Conflict During and After the Cold War, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2000), pp. 228-49
35. Bruce Russett, John R. Oneal, and Michalene Cox, Clash of Civilizations, or Realism and Liberalism Deja Vu? Some Evidence, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 5 (2000), pp. 583-608
36. Tusicisny; Philip G. Roeder, Clash of Civilizations and Escalation of Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflicts, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 36, No. 5 (2003), pp. 509-40.
37. Svenson; Monica Duffy Toft, Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2007), pp. 97-131.
38. Susanna Pearce, Religious Rage, pp. 333-52.
39. The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) Terrorism Database contains information on whether terrorist organizations have religious ideologies. One hundred twenty-three of578groups that were active between1968and2005have religious ideologies. See http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp. [accessed 21 January 2009].
40. Ted R. Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993)
41. Ted R. Gurr, Peoples Versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2000).
42. For studies on the influence of separatism, irredentism and regime as well as other fac-tors, on ethnic conflict see the MAR Web site publications listing at http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/mar/resources.asp. [accessed 21 January 2009]. For studies if international conflict and intervention
43. Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, The Ethnic Dimension of International Crisis, in David Carment and Patrick James (eds.), Wars in the Midst of Peace (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), pp. 164-93
44. David R. Davis and Will H. Moore, Ethnicity Matters: Transnational Ethnic Alliances and Foreign Policy Behavior, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 (1997), pp. 171-84.
45. Gurr, Peoples Versus States, p. 106.
46. See note 2 for references including those that discuss other collections of state-level religion variables.
47. Marta Reynal-Querol, Ethnicity, Political Systems, and Civil Wars, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2002), pp. 29-54.
48. Gurr, Minorities at Risk; Gurr, Peoples Versus States.
49. Gurr, Minorities at Risk; Gurr, Peoples Versus States
50. See note 2 for details, frequencies, and reliability tests for all of the control variables as well as for the reasons for including them in this study.
51. For more on the RAS dataset including issues of collection, reliability, and frequencies of the variables see note 2 and the RAS Web site at www.biu.ac.il/soc/po/ras [accessed 21 January 2009]. The RAS Web site also has a copy of the dataset.
52. The MAR data was extracted using the Margene program. The data for each individual year was extracted separately using the program's extrapolation feature to fill in data for variables that were coded only periodically. Copies of the MAR and Polity datasets are available at www.cidcm.umd.edu.
53. Gurr, Minorities at Risk, p. 3
54. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 50.
55. For a discussion of all variables in this study and the reasoning for using the independent variables in this study see the references in note 2. These references also include discussion of all relevant MAR and Polity variables along with the relevant sources for additional discussion of these datasets. This includes listings of the variables components and the reasoning behind the methodology for building these variables.
56. The Cronbach's Alpha for the combined elements of this scale is.5820. The values for the other scales are as follows: repression (.8484), religious legislation (.8858), and cultural differences (.5388).
57. The data is available at www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/resources.asp [accessed 21 January 2009].
58. This includes cases where there is no particular Christian group that is in the majority but Christians in general are in the majority in the state.
59. The omitted category for both the majority and minority religion variables are all non-Christian, non-Muslim groups.
60. Refer to http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ for more information [accessed 21 January 2009].
61. See http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ [accessed 21 January 2009]. The figures used here are taken from 2003.
62. As both the dependent and independent variables all change over time this use of a case year as the unit of analysis is appropriate. The codings for political restrictions and repression changed for 171 and 146 minority groups respectively during the period of this study. At least one of the RAS variables changed in 116 countries during the period covered by this study.
63. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, A Cross-Sectional Study of Large-Scale Ethnic Violence in the Postwar Period, (Unpublished paper, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Sept. 30,1997).
64. Gurr, Peoples Versus States.
65. Beger also observes that, if anything, selection bias in MAR is likely to weaken coefficient estimates and inflate standard errors. This, in turn, will increase the likelihood of rejecting true hypotheses. See Andreas Beger, Simulating the Effects of Selection Bias in the Minorities at Risk Project (Tallahassee, FL: Department of Political Science, Florida State University, Unpublished manuscript, April 2008), p. 8.
66. The state in MAR with the smallest population is Djibouti, which has a population of 457,000.
67. Gurr, Minorities at Risk, pp. 5-6
68. See the CIA Factbook's listing of ethnic minorities by country at http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2075.html [accessed 21 January 2009], which shows that the only country included in the study that might not have minorities or tribal divisions that meet the MAR minimum population threshold of 100,000 or 1% of the country's population for states with populations of less than ten million is Lesotho.
69. Magnus Ö berg, Minorities Not At Risk: A Control Group for Use with Minorities At Risk Data, (Uppsala: Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, 2002).
70. Appendix A is available online at http://fac-staff.seattleu.edu/liy/web/research/obergappendixa.pdf [accessed 21 January 2009].
71. Due to a relatively high level of correlation (r = 0.72), the results for official support and religious legislation are reported separately.
72. The results from Tables 1 and 2 are very similar and thus the discussion that follows focuses on just the former of the two.
73. One anomaly should be pointed out from Table 1: An odd curvilinear relationship among polity, polity-squared, and repression. For religious minorities, the polity and polity-squared coefficients are -0.284 and 0.024, respectively. This produces a tipping effect where at a value of 12 the effect becomes positive again, but this value is not within the range of the data.
74. As in any study with a limited time span (in this case, 13 years), the results presented here apply only to this period. The time span presented here is the best that can be achieved given limitations on existing data on religion. Nevertheless, the robustness of the results indicate a strong likelihood that, were data available for a more expanded time span, the results would be similar.
75. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).