Browsing by Subject "Religion and Politics"

In this dissertation, I develop a political liberal ethics of citizenship that reconciles conflicting religious and civic obligations concerning political participation and deliberation--a liberal-democratic ethics of citizenship that is compatible with religious integrity. I begin by canvassing the current state of the debate between political liberals and their religious critics, engaging Rawls's Political Liberalism and the various religious objections Nicholas Wolterstorff, Christopher Eberle, Robert George, John Finnis, Paul Weithman, Jeffrey Stout, and Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier develop (Chapter One). I then critically evaluate political liberalism's requirements of citizens in light of the religious objections and the religious objections in light of political liberal norms of reciprocity, concluding that some religious citizens have legitimate complaints against citizenship requirements that forbid citizens from offering religious arguments alone in public political discussions (Chapter Two). Next, I propose an alternative set of guidelines for public political discussions in constitutional democracies, the phased account of democratic decision-making, that, I argue, addresses the religious citizens' legitimate complaints without undermining a constitutional democracy's legitimacy or commitment to public justification (Chapter Three). Then, I argue that a religious practice of political engagement I call prophetic witnessing is compatible with the phased account, can serve as a canonical model to guide religious citizens' political participation, and can help religious citizens navigate the substantive conflicts between their religious and civic obligations that remain possible even in a society that follows the phased account (Chapter Four). Finally, I conclude by imagining three different democracies, each adhering to a different set of guidelines for public political discussions, in order to argue for the benefit of adopting norms that balance citizens' obligations to govern themselves legitimately with citizens' ability to integrate their deepest moral and religious commitments and their public, political argument and advocacy.

This dissertation project argues that high levels of religious commitment within a population-that is, high levels of importance attached to religious identities and ideas-can increase a state's propensity for initiating conflict. Following a three-article framework, the project contains three interlocking empirical studies, each speaking to religion's role in conditioning interstate conflict and connections between domestic culture and global politics.

Article 1, "Religiosity and Bellicosity: The Impact of Religious Commitment on Patterns of Interstate Conflict," explores whether states with religiously committed citizens are more likely to initiate conflict than states with less committed populations. The article builds upon findings within the literature on American politics that link individuals' levels of religious commitment to their attitudes about foreign policy, and tests whether the implications of these findings have cross-national applicability and explanatory power for interstate conflict. Using a novel, robust measure of the proportion of a state's population that is religiously committed, as well as monadic and dyadic statistical models, the analysis finds widespread connections between religious commitment and bellicose state behaviors. The results show that states with more religiously committed populations demonstrate higher propensities for initiating conflict with other states. This relationship is most severe when both states in a dyad have high levels of religious commitment, while it does not appear to be conditioned by whether majorities within the populations of each state ascribe to different religious traditions.

Article 2, "Sacred Bonds? Leaders, Religious Constituents, and Foreign Policy in Turkey," outlines a theory to more deeply analyze the empirical phenomenon identified in the first article, explaining why countries with religiously committed populations are likely to be prone to international conflict. The article builds the theory and then tests it on a case study of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's tenure as prime minister and president of Turkey. The theory posits that in highly religious societies such as Turkey, leaders have incentives to compete for and maintain the support of their religious citizens when they perceive credible threats from domestic challengers. To effectively compete, leaders use religious signals to "outbid" their opponents and establish themselves as trustworthy champions of the faithful. As part of this process, leaders are incentivized to religiously outbid into the realm of foreign policy in pursuit of "rally-round-the-sacred-symbol" effects, and so will "spiritualize" foreign threats with religious framing. In framing foreign affairs as having implications beyond the material world, however, leaders find the domestic costs of backing down from addressing the threats particularly high and their audiences especially unforgiving of inaction. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that leaders will follow through on combative rhetoric and results in higher overall likelihoods that they will initiate conflict. The case study leverages original field interviews and both Turkish and English-language resources to test and refine the mechanisms of the general theory.

Finally, Article 3, "Choose Your Words Faithfully: Religious Commitment, Elite Rhetoric, and the Formation of Individual Foreign Policy Opinion," takes a micro-level approach to the relationship between religious commitment and state foreign policy behaviors. The project focuses on why and how religious signals, like those identified in the macro theory of Article 2, may influence the foreign policy opinions of religiously committed people and elicit their support for a particular issue. Existing public opinion research in the United States has shown a connection between individuals' levels of religious commitment and their opinions about foreign affairs. However, relatively little is known about what drives this association, particularly when foreign policies do not have clear partisan stakeholders. The article posits that the relationship is at least partially attributable to how religiously committed people process elite cues about foreign policy issues, as they will most privilege the opinions of elites who use religious signaling. The results of an original survey experiment administered to a national sample of American adults tentatively support this argument, though the analysis suggests that not all religious signals are created equal. Religiously committed respondents show the greatest support for a foreign policy recommendation when it has been made using religious rhetoric, while a recommendation made by elites simply identified as being religious receives no more support-and often less-than one made by a non-religious group. The study contributes to our understanding of how members of the public develop foreign policy preferences in relation to their religious convictions and also helps to identify the audience for whom religious rhetoric may be an effective framing tool. The empirical evidence presented by the article contains a great deal of uncertainty, so these conclusions are ultimately preliminary, however, one final result about which there is no ambiguity-only consistent statistical significance-is that individual religious commitment matters for shaping foreign policy opinion, even in the absence of elite religious framing. Future research must therefore continue to grapple with explaining the significance of religious commitment to how individuals develop views on foreign policy.

It is a fundamental assertion in political science that political parties in government allocate resources disproportionately to benefit the people who have voted for them and for projects that push forward their political agenda. However, this literature ignores the structural (network) limitations of policy making. By creating a new network model which depicts the structure and growth of loosely coupled religious organizations, I create a taxonomy of religious denominations and examine how their network structure affects their likelihood of receiving government support. I test this relationship empirically in the United States and Israel. In the United States, I examine President Bush’s Faith Based Initiative, which was expected to channel government funding mostly to conservative, white, southern churches. In Israel, I research the education systems of the different religious sectors and how much government support they receive, the common belief being that the ultra-orthodox receive the most. Using network modeling, formal modeling and instrumental variable analysis, I show that despite expectations, in the United States conservative congregations did not receive more funding and in Israel not all ultra-orthodox networks receive high levels of support. The significant predictor, in both cases, for receiving funding is the network structure of the denominations, where more hierarchical denominations are more likely to receive funding than those organized in a dispersed network structure.