Government Regulation of Religious Minorities [DRAFT]

Government Regulation of Religious Minorities

[DRAFT – DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR]

Brett S. HeindlAssistant Professor

Dept. of Political Science10 Schumacher Hall

State University of New YorkCollege at Oneonta

Oneonta, NY 13820 [email protected]

AbstractMuch has been made recently about a shift in understandings of secularism and the so-called resurgence of religion. Less attention has been paid to the shifts in public policy that attend these changes, such as recent public bans over headscarves, minaret construction, funding for religious education, and the recognition of religious holidays. For example, several Western European governments (notably France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) have moved to more sharply delineate the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable religious expression, with Muslims often bearing the brunt of these changes. Under what circumstances do governments extend or withdraw protections for religious minorities, whether indigenousor immigrant? Multivariate regression analysis demonstrates that regulations on religious minorities are influenced by official restrictions governments place on religion in general, favoritismshown toward particular religions, the role civil society leaders

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play in promoting one religion over others, mass immigration over50 years, and the level of democracy in each country. It also yields the surprising finding that states with high levels of economic development are more likely to discriminate against religious minorities, while those receiving a high volume of immigration within the last decade are less likely to discriminate.

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Introduction

Much has been made in recent years about the philosophical

and empirical failings of secularism and the universal

secularization it presumes, but this work has been primarily

theoretical. Relatively little work has gone into exploring the

ways that a renegotiated, reconceptualized secularism plays out

in public policy. Comparative politics provides a useful lens for

describing and evaluating the many forms that these rebalanced

church-state relations take. Of particular interest is the

disjuncture between the ways that governments are treat religion

in general and how they treat specific religious groups,

particularly religious minorities.

Religious restrictions of course raise serious humanitarian

and rights concerns, as well as more pragmatic challenges for

bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. However, as noted elsewhere

(Grim and Finke 2007; Grim and Finke 2011; Finke and Harris

2012), restrictions on religion can sharply intensify social

conflict and religiously motivated violence within and between

states. This is particularly true among religious minorities,

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where persecution may encourage the development of underground

movements, messianic ideologies, and transnational militancy by

co-religionists abroad (Jenkins 2004; Heindl 2013a). This creates

clear obstacles for nation-building and a sense of national

unity. While these restrictions affect believers of all religious

persuasions, they are particularly worrisome for members of

religious minorities, who by virtue of their smaller numbers, are

often subject to inegalitarian, majoritarian public policies,

popular misunderstanding, and at the extreme, social hostility

and persecution.

As Fox, James, and Li (2009:203) note, while the long-term

global trend is toward fewer new instances of religious

discrimination, there is a countervailing trend in full and

hybrid democracies toward further tightening existing

restrictions on minority religions, particularly against

immigrants and noncitizens. Under what circumstances do

governments extend or withdraw protections for religious

minorities, whether indigenous or immigrant? This paper sets out

the groundwork for exploring this question with some preliminary

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hypothesis-testing using basic quantitative tools to leverage

future qualitative work.

Regulating Religious Minorities

Recent debates in Western Europe and North America over

Muslim immigration and immigrants have drawn attention to broader

questions about how governments regulate religious expression.

Politicians as diverse as Nicolas Sarkozy, Geert Wilders, Marine

Le Pen, and the late Pim Fortuyn have called for restrictions on

Muslims’ public religious expression. They justify these

proposals as being in the interest of protecting national unity,

national sovereignty, women’s rights, the wall of separation

between church and state, and European cultural identity (Heindl

2013b). The policies they have proposed would regulate what forms

of dress women can wear in public, what kinds of buildings

religious groups may construct, what kinds of foods school

children and prisoners may eat, what kinds of religious worship

may be observed collectively, and what preachers may say in their

sermons.

These proposals to regulate Muslim immigrants’ religious

expression emerged across Western Europe. In Spring 2010, the

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lower house of Belgium’s parliament passed legislation banning

the niqab and the burqa, two forms of the veil or headscarf that

cover the face, in public places. At almost the same time, French

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his party supported

similar legislation. This came six years after France banned most

forms of the veil in public schools. Seven of the sixteen states

in Germany forbid public school teachers from wearing any kind of

veil. A Swiss referendum in November 2009 passed a nationwide ban

on the construction of minarets. German Chancellor Angela Merkel

declared in October 2010 that multiculturalism in Germany had

failed; UK Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated Merkel’s words

four month later and took it a step further blaming “passive

tolerance” for Muslim radicalization and terrorism (Cameron

2011).

These efforts sparked heated debate regarding the proper

balancing of church and state. Liberalism and republicanism

challenged the notion of state religions, and the French and

American revolutions made forceful assertions about the need for

a clear separation of church and state. However, they understood

the shared principle quite differently. The American

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understanding of secularism stressed the importance of protecting

religious practice from state interference, while French laïcité

emphasized the protection of the state from religious

interference (Hervieu-Leger 2007). In Europe, secularism was also

increasingly construed as freedom from religion (Casanova

2011:59-60). Casanova (ibid.) argues that Europeans to view

religion as a throwback to a premodern era. In this

understanding, to accept religious faith is therefore to ignore

or reject modernity. He attributes Europe’s long-term process of

secularization and its restrictive attitudes to minority

religions, particularly Islam, to this understanding.

Secularism therefore cannot be regarded as one singular

entity with the same values throughout the world. Rather, it

should be understood as a conglomerate of multiple unique

ideologies with differing definitions, each varying by a state’s

institutional make up and notion of national identity (Stepan

2011). Kuru (2007) argues that each state’s ideological

understanding of secularism, either as a passive or assertive

force, shapes how it regulates dominant and minority religions.

States animated by assertive secularism (e.g. France and Turkey)

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are more likely to restrict public religion expression in

general, while passive secularist states (e.g. the United States)

tend to take a laissez-faire approach to public religious

expression. Further, assertive secularism may intend to

subordinate church to state, particularly in Kemalist Turkey

(Kuru 2007; Azak 2010: 13-14). Individual church-state

configurations are therefore localized and specific to the point

where we might more accurately speak of degrees of secularism and

forms of secularism.

Echoes of these understandings often appear in the public

debate around the headscarf or hijab. President Jacques Chirac

claimed in 2003 that the hijab undermines secularism, which stands

as “one of the greatest successes of the [French] Republic …

[Secularism] is a crucial element of social peace and national

cohesion. We cannot let it weaken” (“France’s Hijab Ban” 2004).

Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn argued more broadly against

providing special accommodations toward Muslims, suggesting that

values like tolerance and open-mindedness were at stake. Others,

like former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

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suggest that the veil, as a “marker of separation,” undermines

societal and national unity (Cowell 2006).

Without delving into effectiveness, morality, or legality of

these restrictions, the regulation of religious expression has

become a salient political issue in recent years, as some groups

strive either to reassert cultural dominance or to drive religion

out of the public sphere. Regulation of religion touches on core

aspects of public life, like the freedom of association, and

reaches into the most intimate aspects of daily life, such as

individual conscience, family law, and childrearing. Government

regulation of religion touches on questions of if and how people

may perform their religious obligations in public spaces, what

codes their houses of worship must meet, what rules govern how

religious organizations operate, the extent to which the state

may monitor groups it deems threatening, what limits are placed

on religious proselytizing and conversion, and whether members of

one religious community can be compelled to observe the religious

rituals of another community. As noted above, these regulations

are often felt most acutely by religious minorities, who may find

their otherness exacerbated by majoritarian public policies.

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Factors Influencing Government Regulation of Religious Minorities

An extensive literature exists related to church-state

relations in general and the politics of religious minorities

specifically. It offers a series of explanations for the various

configurations of church-state relations. Among them are the

historical legacies of religious conflict and accommodation;

formal establishment of or governmental favoritism toward

particular religions; the balance of power between religious and

ideological groups within governmental coalitions; the

distribution of power between different branches of government

and the ethnoreligious composition of government agencies; larger

processes of democratization or autocratization; levels of

economic development; political mobilization by religious groups

within society; demographic changes within the society due to

immigration or birthrates; and exogenous influences, either in

the form of political or diplomatic pressure or regional

“contagion” effects in neighboring states. Of these explanations,

this review will focus on the more dynamic influences, that is,

on the ones most likely to change over the course of years,

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rather than decades, as many of these possible influences are

stronger explanations for continuity than for change.

Historical legacies of religious conflict and accommodation

A wide variety of explanations of religious freedom and

church-state relations emphasize the importance of path

dependence and historical legacies of past conflict or

accommodation between religious groups. Madeley (2003) attributes

the current state of affairs in Europe to the long-term patterns

of religious observance in individual countries. Here, the key

factor is whether each country has been traditionally

monoconfessional, that is, historically dominated by Roman

Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Orthodoxy, or if it is part of

pluralistic “multiconfessional belts” that exist between

“monoconfessional blocs” of similar states. Similarly, Kuru

(2007) finds that the presence or absence of religious diversity

with the state and the existence of an ancien regime, a linkage

between the traditional elite and the dominant religion, at the

time of state-building have a marked effect in the content and

character of that state’s version of secularism.

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Formal establishment of or governmental favoritism toward

particular religions

Other authors (Madeley 2003; Bader 2003) argue that formal

establishment of religion or informal “state religious

exclusivity” (Fox, James, and Li 2009) have the effect of

squeezing out or suppressing minority religions. Fox, James, and

Li (ibid:206) note a strong correlation between state religious

exclusivity and nondemocratic political systems. Establishment or

favoritism therefore sharpens the de facto and de jure

differentiation within societies and polities between native-born

citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrant noncitizens, and

between religious majorities and religious minorities (Morris

2003). The effects of official establishment or unofficial

favoritism may negatively affect religious minorities even when

multicultural policies attempt to proactively incorporate

minority groups (Stepan 2011; Heindl 2013b). Stepan (2011:117)

notes that all of the EU-27 provide governmental funding for

religious schools or educational programs, while 67 percent have

official governmental departments for religious affairs. While

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this arrangement seems to work fairly well for historical

religious minorities in these states, Muslim immigrants have had

a particularly difficult time tapping into existing resources,

often for simple logistical reasons (Stepan 2011:124-125).

“[M]inority religions … are more likely to find that existing

legal, political, and social structures are not designed to

accommodate their beliefs and practices… [T]he tenets of the

majority’s religion, along with impediments to minority

religions, sometimes creep into laws and government policy,”

Emerson, Mirola, and Monahan note (2011: 130). In most European

states, Christian religious groups have adapted to the

hierarchical forms governmental bureaucracies prefer for

distributing support, while Muslim groups, due to differences of

theology, jurisprudence, and ethnicity and national origin, have

instead created loose, personalistic, and largely horizontal

confederations of mosques with few widely accepted figures

empowered to act as spokespersons or figureheads. Citing the

German case, Stepan (2011: 125) observes that “from the German

state’s perspective, Muslims do not yet qualify as a public

corporation, mainly for reasons of their internal diversity,

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which makes them difficult to fit into long-standing German law.”

As Stepan summarizes, “these legal formulas acquired a certain

path-dependency … [S]uch requirements often made new non-

Christian religions non-recipients [of public funds], not as a

matter of principle but as a matter of practice” (Stepan

2011:125). The consequences, whether intended or unintended, of

the institutional arrangement of church-state relations can have

profound implications for religious minorities.

Larger processes of regime type and democratization or

autocratization

The extension or retraction of religious freedoms is often

part and parcel of larger transitions to democracy or autocracy.

Kuru (2007:591), Buckley (2011:8), and Fox, James, and Li

(2009:203) find that democratization or autocratization often

result in new rights or restrictions for religious and ethnic

minorities. Sorens (2010) supports this, finding that states that

provide access to free, frequent, and fair elections rarely

impose new restrictions on ethnic minorities. In a related vein,

Azak (2010:19) attributes increased official recognition of

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religious pluralism in Turkey to the rise of multiparty

democracy.

In transitional and hybrid democracies, the uneven

application of civil liberties creates a unique set of challenges

for religious minorities. The legal equality of individual

members of religious minority communities is jeopardized if anti-

religious laws are selectively enforced and new restrictions are

targeted at these groups. This differentiation is often amplified

in hybrid democracies, where instability and uncertainty lower

politicians’ inhibitions toward and perhaps even construct

incentives for majoritarianism or scapegoating (Sorens 2010).

The balance of power within government

Other authors attribute changes in how governments regulate

religious minorities to changes in the balance of power between

religious and ideological groups within ruling coalitions. A

related group of explanations suggests that in some cases,

certain ethnic or religious groups manage to penetrate or

“ethnicize” the governmental bureaucracy itself through

clientelism, institution capture, or other means (Sorens

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2010:538). The machinery of government could therefore be used to

the benefit of some groups or the detriment of others. Stepan

(2011) notes that significant religiopolitical changes may also

be unintended consequences of broader governmental or

bureaucratic restructuring. Ram (2009) considers the effects of

redefinitions of national identity from secular nationalism to

religiously-based nationalism. Here, crises of legitimacy in

either the sitting government or in the dominant religion may

stimulate political changes. This is particularly true if these

crises call into question the effectiveness or relevance of

existing corporatist, consociational, or religious establishment

arrangements (Buckley 2011; Casanova 2011:71). Bader (2003:61)

and Buckley (2011) attach additional significance to ideational

changes within governing coalitions, state institutions, or

religious bodies regarding state neutrality vis-à-vis religion.

Sorens (2010) emphasizes the institutional limitations on

executive branch authority, the mechanisms for selecting the

executive, and the independence of judiciaries. Still, the

strength of path dependence should not be underestimated, Kuru

(2007:585-586) warns, suggesting that these “crises” would have

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to be very serious indeed to cause significant reevaluation of

church-state relations.

Political mobilization by religious groups within society

Drawing from writings on social movements, several authors

have highlighted the importance of political mobilization for

effecting religiopolitical change. Here, groups within society

may be organizing for or against minority religions, and of

course, minority organizations are likely to play a central role

themselves. Religious movements, in response to opportunities or

threats, may organize to make demands of government, while

majoritarian, nationalist, or statist groups may countermobilize

(Brouard and Tiberj 2008). Among the factors that may influence

the success or failure of these mobilized groups are resources

like social capital and organizational capacity which allow

organizations to overcome collective action problems (Putnam and

Feldstein 2003, Beyerlein and Hipp 2005), past historical

experiences of protest or separatism (Fox, James, and Li 2009),

and how religious minority groups conceive of their relationship

with government, what Philpott (2007) calls political theology.

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Levels of economic development

A prominent strain in the literature argues that as

societies reach higher levels of economic development, there is a

concomitant process of secularization that takes place, whereby

religious express is progressively relegated to the private

sphere (Berger 1967; Norris and Inglehart 2004). However, this

perspective is increasingly being called into question by an

apparent global resurgence of religion that does not directly

correlate with levels of economic development (Berger 1999;

Casanova 1994; Thomas 2005; Fox, James, and Li 2009).

Demographic changes within the society due to immigration

Another body of literature connects changes in church-state

relations to larger sociocultural and demographic changes in

society, typically brought on by mass immigration. Here the

influx of members of religious minority groups (notably Muslims

to Western Europe) can induce serious reevaluations of

secularism, as well as wrenching debate over religious expression

in the public sphere (Heindl 2013a; Banchoff 2008; Casanova

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2007). This is particularly salient when the flow of new

religious groups becomes a larger proportion of the state’s

overall population and when these groups begin to press for

greater public voice (Fox, James, and Li 2009:203-204). The

political consequences of immigration are mediated by the

existing citizenship regime in each receiving state, most notably

whether citizenship is conferred on the basis of location (jus

soli) or parentage (jus sanguinis) (Brubaker 1992). Similarly

important are the informal barriers sometimes erected to formal

citizenship and full civic participation for noncitizens, which

can range from restricted language rights to systematic

disenfranchisement (Morris 2003). Finally, the relative political

influence of ethnoreligious minority groups may also be

influenced by their geographic distribution within their states

of residence. Minority groups may be clustered together in urban

enclaves (Portes and Rumbaut 1996) or in autonomous regions

(Sorens 2010) or conversely dispersed within the larger society

without an identifiable geographic or territorial center.

Concentration seems to encourage greater minority activism, while

dispersion creates formidable collective action problems.

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Exogenous influences

A final set of influences comes from outside of the state.

Religious politics within one country may have “contagion

effects” on religious politics in nearby countries, influencing

the form and content of religious demands and mobilization

through demonstration effects (Fox, James, and Li 2009; Fox

2000). In other instances, religious minorities may be influenced

by transnational co-religionist or co-ethnic groups (Voll 2008;

Juergensmeyer 2008; Heindl 2013a), human rights and religious

freedom activists (Shapiro 2012), or political, diplomatic,

economic, or military intervention by foreign governments

(Prodromou 2008). Recent history is rife with examples of these

exogenous influences, ranging from the strong regional influence

of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic revolution in

Iran (Voll 2008) to the Arab Spring, from the growth of

liberation theology and Pentecostalism in Latin America (Sigmund

1999) to American evangelical Christians’ support for Christian

minorities in Subsaharan Africa (Ranger 2006). These external

influences are often seen as encouraging religious claims-making,

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encouraging the growth of nascent movements, and conversely as

sometimes encouraging preemptive action on the part of the state

to forestall social disruption (Laurence 2008).

Research Design

The above literature contains a rich array of possible

explanations for why states tighten or loosen regulations on

religious minorities, but unfortunately, there is neither time

nor space to give them all full consideration here. Therefore, I

have chosen a handful of explanations for hypothesis testing.

This testing is not intended to be the final word in research on

government regulation of religious minorities. Rather, it is

intended to illuminate some possible causal relationships that

might be fruitfully explored in future research. Due to

limitations of readily available data, this paper has set aside

consideration of the possible effect of domestic political

mobilization and of exogeneous influences like foreign

intervention or transnational advocacy. The quantitative aspect

of this paper draws extensively from ready-made and widely

available datasets, which provide useful proxies for the

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influences discussed above. It uses simple statistical techniques

(i.e. OLS regression) to identify relationships between

variables.

This paper focuses on one dependent variable and several

independent variables derived from the literature review above.

The dependent variable is religious discrimination against

minority religions. The independent variables are as follows:

variations on official church-state separation: the presence of

formal establishment of religion, the degree to which the state

is willing to impose official restrictions on religion, and the

extent to which government informally favors one religion over

others; the extent of democracy within a state and transitions

along a democratic-autocratic continuum; the proportion of a

state’s population made up by immigrants and the rate at which

people are immigrating into or out of that state; and finally,

levels of wealth and economic development within each particular

country.

The dependent variable is the restrictions governments put

into place for religious practice by religious minority

communities. Efforts to describe and explain government treatment

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of religious minorities must take into consideration the myriad

direct and indirect ways that the state may assert influence over

religious groups (Bader 2003). States have at their disposal a

dizzying number of de jure and de facto tools for encouraging or

discouraging religious practice (see Bader 2003: 55-72), not

least of which are the passage of new laws, (un)evenness in

enacting and enforcing said laws, changes in taxation and

regulatory policy, and the granting of special rights and

privileges to favored groups. As discussed above restrictive

measures can limit everything from religious education,

construction of places of worship, and dress codes to observance

of religious obligations, proselytizing, forcible conversion, and

associational autonomy. The Religion and the State Round 2

dataset (RAS2) includes 30 variables that measure distinct types

of religious discrimination specifically targeted at religious

minorities. To measure restrictions on minority religions, this

paper uses a composite variable, labeled MX in the RAS2 dataset,

which aggregates these 30 variables into an overall score of 0-90

for each state, where zero indicates a complete absence of

restrictions on minority religious practice and religious

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institutions and 90 indicates the highest and broadest possible

level of restrictions on religious minorities.

I use four conceptualizations of church-state separation to

identify how particular institutionalized relationships between

religion and government affect how that state treats its

religious minorities: formal establishment of religion, official

restrictions on religion, restrictions on the majority religion,

and unofficial governmental favoritism toward one or more

dominant religions. While it is not particularly difficult to

think of examples of states with formally established religions

that are friendly to minority religions (England and Denmark come

to mind), this willingness to accommodate difference is clearly

not universal (e.g. Saudi Arabia or the Islamic Republic of

Iran). So, formal establishment of one or more religions, which

might be defined as a de jure, constitutionally-defined connection

between the state and one or more specific religious groups

either in a constitutional clause or a foundational law, could

seriously impede religious minorities’ abilities to extract

concessions from government.

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H1: Formal establishment of one or more religions will lead to more restrictive policies

toward minority religions.

Following a similar logic, the extent to which a state is

willing to restrict some or all religions using de facto means

might also be a reliable predictor of how government regulates

minority religious groups. If the government shows favoritism,

through explicit or implicit means, toward one religion to the

exclusion of others, or restrictions toward one religion that do

not apply to others, we might expect minority religions on the

whole to suffer, as the possibility of a minority religion

receiving equitable or preferential treatment seems remote. On

the other hand, however, a universally strict hand toward

religious groups could only be bad news for minority religions.

Therefore, a government that chooses not to impose restrictions

on religious groups regardless of their content or character

might be expected to issue few restrictions on minority

religions.

H2: States that have more official restrictions on religious practice in general will be

more likely to restrict minority religious participation.

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A government’s willingness to restrict religious expression

among believers of the dominant religion is a very strong

indicator of that government’s distrust for religion in general

(i.e. not just minority religions). Here, government distrust

spans everything from restrictions on religious political parties

and labor unions to publication to restrictions on religious

activities and religious education in public schools to

governmental legislation of the internal workings of religious

organizations or state ownership of religious property. One would

expect a state that puts heavy restrictions on the majority

religion to also restrict minorities religions as well.

Conversely, governments that give free reign to the majority

religion would probably also adopt a laissez-faire approach with

religious minorities. The middle ground could be considerably

more complicated.

H3: States that have more restrictions on majority religious practice will be more likely

to restrict minority religious participation.

The fourth dimension of church-state relations considered

here is de facto government favoritism toward one or more

religions. This favoritism might include granting special

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privileges to religious organizations or providing subsidies or

public funding for religious institutions, religious education,

the construction of religious buildings, religious media,

performing religious activities or missionary work, or providing

salary or benefits for members of the clergy. Here, it might be

expected that governments that show heavy favoritism toward one

religion would be inclined to restrict the activities of minority

religions.

H4: States that show strong favoritism toward a dominant religion will be more likely to

restrict minority religious participation.

To measure these variables, we must consider four measures

of church-state separation. Three of these conceptualizations of

church-state relations can be measured using the Religion and the

State Round 2 dataset. RAS2 assigns one indicator for each of the

three above-mentioned variables. Formal establishment of one or

more specific religions uses a scale of zero (no official

establishment), one (multiple officially established religions),

or two (one officially established religion). Because this is an

ordinal qualitative variable, I use a dummy variable based on

this one, where “0” indicates no official establishment and “1”

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represents establishment of one or more religions. RAS2 also

contains a variable for official restrictions, which shows the

state’s willingness to restrict religions in practice. Cases are

coded on a scale from zero to five, where zero is absence of

restrictions and five is a blanket ban on all religions. NX

measures the state’s restrictions on the majority religion. Like

MX, used to measure the dependent variable, NX is a composite

indicator that aggregates 29 separate measures of restrictions on

the majority religion’s practices. The resulting measure of

religious regulation ranges from 0 to 87, with zero being an

absence of restrictions and 87 being the highest possible form of

restrictiveness. The fourth dimension of church-state relations

considered here, de facto government favoritism toward one or

more religions, is included in the International Religious

Freedom Data Aggregate File (2003-2008), which content-analyzed

the US Department of State’s International Religious Freedom

Reports from 2003, 2005, and 2008. Several individual indicators

of government favoritism are then aggregated into a composite

variable on a 10-point scale with the three years averaged in

order to smooth over year-to-year differences in reporting. These

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indicators include public financing of construction, religious

organizations, clerical salaries, and news media. Low numbers

indicate low levels of government favoritism, while high numbers

indicate high levels.

Two other variables emphasize the possible effects of the

society of a particular country on the government’s treatment of

religious minorities. Two key considerations are majoritarianism

and the extent to which members of that society act as informal

regulators of religion by actively encouraging or discouraging

certain religious perspectives. To simplify Madeley’s (2003)

typology of religious homogeneity and heterogeneity, we would

expect that the religious groups that make up a larger percentage

of the country’s population to be more inclined toward

majoritarian policies and consequently to impose policies that

either deliberately or inadvertently discriminate against

religious minorities. This numerical dominance might also be

expected to translate into cultural and political hegemony.

H5: Countries numerically dominated by one religious community will be more inclined

to discriminate against religious minorities.

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A society’s sociocultural leaders, who are sometimes but not

always its political elite, may also play a role in encouraging

governmental discrimination against religious minorities. Here,

members of the clerical establishment or civil society may

express intolerant attitudes toward and discriminate against

members of nontraditional faiths, attempt to “shut out” other

religions, or interfere with proselytizing by minority religious

groups. In these cases, we would expect governmental policies to

mirror the level of social regulation practiced by the dominant

group.

H6: Countries with high levels of social regulation of religion will discriminate more

strongly against minority religious groups.

To measure these variables, this paper draws from the World

Christian Database 2010 and the IRFD Aggregate File (2003-2008).

The numerical dominance of each country’s largest religious group

was derived by calculating the percentage of each country’s

population made up by members of 18 distinct religious faiths, as

estimated by the WCD. The group with the largest religion was

determined to be the plurality religion. That percentage was then

used in the regression models below. Social regulation of

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religion is determined by the IRFD’s Modified Social Regulation

of Religion indicator, a composite variable taking into account

the relative tolerance or hostility of social attitudes toward

minority or new religions; attitudes and actions of the clerical

establishment and the citizenry toward proselytizing, public

preaching, or conversion by minority religions; and whether

established religions actively seek to shut out other religions.

Social regulation of religion is then aggregated on a 10-point

scale, where low numbers indicate low levels of social regulation

and high numbers indicate high levels.

A fourth set of independent variables considers each

government’s location on a democracy-autocracy continuum. Because

of the high value liberal democracy places on individual rights

and freedoms, we would expect more democratic countries to place

fewer restrictions on religious minorities. Conversely, more

autocratic governments might be expected to restrict minority

religions more heavily.

H7: Countries with higher levels of democracy will be less likely to restrict religious

minorities.

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This relationship between democracy/autocracy and minority

restrictions would also change as governments undergo processes

of democratization or autocratization. As noted above, Sorens

(2010) suggests that transitional governments may see strong

incentives in scapegoating religious or ethnic minorities as a

way of maintaining a broader sense of national cohesiveness. As

governments move along this continuum, we would expect them to

re-evaluate restrictions on religious minorities.

H8: States experiencing a significant transition between democracy and autocracy in

the last decade will be more likely to impose restrictions on religious minorities.

To examine the influence of these two democracy/autocracy

variables, this paper uses two indicators from the Polity IV

dataset, which examines political regime characteristics and

transitions over two hundred years. Each state’s Polity score,

ranging from -11 to 11, is based on series of determinations

about the institutional constraints on executive branch power and

how heavily regulated and competitive political competition is

within that state. Negative lower numbers indicate autocratic

regimes, while higher positive numbers indicate full-fledged

democracies. This paper used each state’s Polity score from 2008

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as an indicator of the level of democracy or autocracy within

that state. It also uses a related Polity IV indicator that

examines the amount of time that has passed between 2008 and the

most recent significant shift on the democracy/autocracy

spectrum. This paper uses a dummy variable where “0” indicates a

stable regime, where more than 10 years have passed since the

last major transition and “1” indicates a transitional regime,

where a transition has occurred in the last decade. This serves

as a proxy for transitions to or from democracy.

The fifth set of independent variables discussed in this

paper deal with the possible social turmoil associated with

immigration and new immigrants. Here, the most important

consideration is the extent to which mass immigration may disrupt

hard-won consociational or intersectarian arrangements. We might

expect that states that have experienced a high volume of recent

immigration, relative to historic levels, would be more likely to

impose new religious restrictions or to tighten existing ones in

the name of protecting social cohesion or cultural identity. The

historical element to this can be important. The effects of this

large volume may be offset to some extent by a country’s longer

33

experience of religious pluralism and incorporating immigrants.

Pluralistic states that have more experience accommodating

religious difference and that had a longer period of time to

integrate immigrants into society might be expected to take more

hands-off approaches to religious minority practices, whereas

states with little prior experience with diversity that are

swamped by a sudden wave of immigration may respond by

restricting religious minorities.

H9: States experiencing high levels of immigration will be more likely to tighten

regulations for religious minorities.

H10: States experiencing high levels of immigration relative to historic levels will be

more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.

H11: States experiencing high levels of immigration within the last decade will be more

likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.

So, two key components of immigration are the percentage of

foreign-born residents in a country and the recency of their

arrival. This paper derives immigration data from the World Bank:

the percentage of each country’s population that is foreign-born

in 2010 and a percentage change of the proportion of a country's

34

population made up by immigrants in 2010 relative to that in 1960

and 2000. This percentage is determined by subtracting the

percentage of immigrants in 1960 from the percentage in 2010,

then dividing the result by the statistic for 1960. For example,

the proportion of Belgium’s population made up by migrants in

2010 was 85.5% higher than in 1960 (8.9% vs 4.8%), but just 4.3%

higher than in 2000. Here, we might infer a significant wave of

immigration to Belgium after the 1960s that had largely ended by

2000. Israel’s foreign born percentage in 2010, not including the

occupied territories, was 31.2% lower than in 1960, but 7.5%

higher than in 2000, suggesting that the postwar wave of

immigration had faded but was being followed by a recent wave.

The indicators use data from country-year 2010 as their basis

because this is the most recent data available from the World

Bank and the closest available year to match the 2008 data used

in the Polity and RAS2 indicators in cross-sectional analysis

below.

A sixth set of variables examines the effects of economic

development on the treatment of religious minorities, drawing on

the expectations put forward by the secularization literature.

35

This body of scholarship holds that as states modernize, religion

becomes an increasingly private matter until those societies can

be described as secularized. Under these circumstances, we would

expect states with higher levels of economic development and

industrialization to provide a wider range of safety nets to

protect residents from threats to human security, one of the

driving forces for religiousity (Norris and Inglehart 2004). The

effects of this predicted secularization on religious minorities

are somewhat unclear. We would expect states where privatized

religion is the norm to be more hands off toward religious

minorities, because religion is increasingly taken off the public

agenda and because of increased privacy concerns among the

general public (Durham 2008:pg#?).

H10: States with higher levels of economic development and human security will be

more tolerant toward religious minorities.

To evaluate the influence of economic development on the

treatment of religious minorities, I use each country’s Human

Development Index score in 2010, as drawn from the United Nations

Development Program. The HDI measure is widely used in studies of

secularization (CITE). The HDI provides a broader measure of

36

human security by considering wealth, life expectancy, education,

and the broader standard of living.

Using these indicators, I performed a series of simple

cross-sectional OLS regressions to examine the influence of the

independent variables. The results are depicted in Table 1. These

indicators, particularly the four aspects of church-state

relations, risk multicollinearity, which would likely skew the

regression results. However, the regression models below used the

variance inflation factors (VIF) diagnostic to test for

multicollinearity. In each of the models below, the VIF scores

were less that 3.0. Each successive model in Table 1 removes one

variable from the previous model that proved to be statistically

insignificant. This technique is used to identify possible

relationships and interactions among the independent variables.

Also, the second set of models presented below (Table 2) group

the independent variables (governmental, social, democratic,

demographic, and economic) and test each group separately. This

is intended to identify which groups of variables seem to have

the most influence over how governments treat religious

minorities. Model 6 includes only those variables that had been

37

significant to the 0.05 level in the previous iterations. Also,

Model 7 excludes the Migration since 1960 measure, because

missing data for 27 LDCs and post-Soviet states kept then number

of possible cases to 127 in the first six models. The fact that

historically significant countries with complex ethnic and

religious dynamics like Russia, Ukraine, a unified Germany, and

the successors to the former Yugoslavia were left out threatened

to skew the results. Excluding the 1960 migration variable raises

the number of cases to 149, and the findings for the larger-n

model parallel the previous findings.

[Tables 1, 2, and 3 about here]

Results

The above findings confirm some existing ideas about

influences on how governments regulate religious minorities, but

challenge others and suggest that greater complexity exists in

this relationship that merits further exploration.

No meaningful relationship between formal establishment and

treatment of religious minorities can be identified above. The

challenge of doing so is perhaps best exemplified by the earlier

38

example of the treatment of religious minorities under UK and

Denmark compared to that of Iran. This leads us to reject the

first hypothesis that predicted that formally established

religions would lead governments to more restrictive policies

toward religious minority practice.

The second and third hypotheses, that governments that restrict

all or just the majority religion will also restrict religious

minorities, receive strong support, as is the hypothesis about de

facto governmental favoritism. The beta coefficients for both

official restrictions and regulation of the majority religion are

strong and statistically significant across all of the variations

of the model hypothesis holds up somewhat better. Simply put,

governments that intervene in majority religion are similarly

inclined to intervene in minority religions. Furthermore, the

majority religion variable consistently has the highest

coefficient value, suggesting that it is the single strongest

explanation of governmental regulation of religious minorities.

This is not surprising, as it is difficult to imagine a scenario

where a religious minority is less restricted than the majority.

Only in religious-minority-ruled states is this imaginable, and

39

instances of this can probably be counted on one hand. The beta

value for government favoritism is neither as strong nor as

consistently significant as the other two governmental variables.

Still, relationship can be teased out of these findings, as the

p-values range between 0.005 (Model 7) and 0.063 (Model 1). A

fairly clear positive relationship exists, whereby greater

favoritism shown by government toward one religious group leads

to higher restrictions on religious minorities.

The hypotheses about the social and democracy variables do

not hold up quite as well. The hypothesis about the simple

numerical dominance of one plurality religion over minority

religions finds little support with no meaningful relationship

evident. The hypothesis on the social regulation of religion does

find strong support, suggesting that where members of civil

society act to promote one religion at the expense of others,

minority religions will face more restrictions. There is an

observable relationship between the democratic or autocratic

nature of the governmental regime and the dependent variable,

where more democratic governments are less likely to discriminate

against minority religions. This relationship is statistically

40

significant in all of the regression models. There is no clear

relationship between the duration of the current governmental

regime and the dependent variable, although the coefficient is

positive in all four models where it is included, and in each

case, the p-value is between 0.205 and 0.224. While this clearly

not strong enough to suggest support for the eighth hypothesis,

it is just compelling enough to consider alternative ways of

exploring the relationship. The duration/transition variable

might be tested using different indicators suggested by the

extensive literature on transitions to democracy.

Examination of the three immigration variables yields some

surprising conclusions. The ninth hypothesis, that countries with

larger volumes of immigration would be more likely to restrict

religious minorities, is clearly rejected, as the data reveals no

apparent relationship. The two hypotheses related to the timing

of immigration generate some interesting results. Countries that

had experienced large increases in immigration since 1960 were

more likely to restrict religious minorities, confirming the

tenth hypothesis. While this relationship is not particularly

strong (coefficient values of 0.100 to 0.129 for the first six

41

models), it is statistically significant in each model. However,

those states that saw an increase in immigration since 2000 were

less likely to discriminate against religious minorities,

requiring us to reject the eleventh hypothesis. This is the

inverse of the expected relationship. Even though these results

approach statistically insignificance (p-test values of 0.056 to

0.062 in Models 1-6) and the relationships are somewhat weak, the

counterintuitive result merits further consideration. One

possible explanation could be that the political backlash against

mass immigration and its legislative response are either

cumulative or lagged by several years. The immigration variables

might require further modification. On further reflection, the

percent of immigrants indicator does not consider the origins and

more importantly the religious background of the immigrants each

state is receiving. This variable might be made more relevant to

the research design by taking national origins into account.

Finally, the hypothesis about the relationship between human

security and economic development and religious minority

restrictions is rejected because the observed relationship is the

opposite of what was predicted. Countries with higher levels of

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human development were more, not less, likely to discriminate

against religious minorities. This flies in the face of the

secularization literature’s expectation that religion will become

increasingly privatized as levels of development and human

security rise. Governmental intervention to restrict the rights

of religious minorities clearly publicizes religion. This also

warrants further consideration in future research. This dynamic

appears to be somewhat complex, as indicated by the fluctuations

in the beta coefficients of the HDI indicator in Models 3-6

(0.163, 0.182, 0.140, and 0.113 respectively) as other variables

are removed. The jump between Models 3 and 4 occurs with the

removal of the Foreign Born Percentage indicator, while the

subsequent drop in Models 5 and 6 occurs when the Transition and

Migration Change since 2000 variables are dropped. This suggests

an interaction between the democracy and immigration variables,

which could shed light on the counterintuitive finding for HDI’s

effect on religious minorities. This possibility is bolstered by

the absence of a relationship between HDI and discrimination

against religious minorities in Model 12, which takes HDI by

itself. If mass migration occurs predominantly from countries

43

with low HDI to those with higher HDI, one would expect higher

HDI countries to be more inclined to discriminate against

religious minorities, as many of those migrants are likely to

also be religious minorities. The possible relationship with the

democracy variables is more difficult to decipher, although one

would expect a correlation between a country’s HDI and its Polity

score.

Models 8-12 group the variables to determine each group’s

relative explanatory power. Model 7’s adjusted R-squared value,

0.690, indicates that governmental variables explain the most

variation on the dependent variable. Somewhat surprising is the

fact that despite the theoretically interesting findings for the

immigration and HDI variables, their low adjusted R-squared

values in Models 11 and 12suggest that they have little

explanatory power in and of themselves. Similarly puzzling is the

combination of the high beta coefficient for Social Regulation of

Religion, the overall adjusted R-squared for the social

variables, and the statistically insignificant value for the

constant. The constant value calls into question the validity of

the Social Regulation coefficient.

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Conclusion

This research design leaves a number of important and

interesting variables unexplored. It does not consider the

importance of exogenous factors on how governments regulate

religious minorities, factors like political pressures from

transnational religious groups (e.g. the Vatican, evangelical

Protestants, the Gülen movement, jihadist groups), human rights

groups, diasporic organizations and co-ethnics abroad, or

regional and international organizations like the UN, NATO, or

the EU. It also doesn’t consider the political mobilization of

religious minority communities themselves, the political

theologies that animate them, or the organizational capacities

and social capital that they bring to bear on political claims-

making. It also largely leaves untouched questions about the

domestic political dynamics, changing coalitions within

government and/or religiously motivated political parties, and

political contestation surrounds religious minorities. It also

does not consider the possible effects of widening economic

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insecurity due to privatization, economic stagnation or

contraction, or, conversely, of prosperity and economic growth.

These variables may be accessible quantitatively, but

several of them are probably more appropriately measured

qualitatively. It is difficult to imagine a satisfying way to

measure, for example, the political theologies espoused by

mobilized religious minorities or these groups’ organizational

capacity. Here, quantitative data may be used to help assist in

case selection to help control for the influence of some

variables while shedding light on relationships between others.

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Table 1: Government Discrimination against Religious Minorities

Model 1Coefficient

Sig.

Model 2Coefficient

Sig.

Model 3Coefficient

Sig.

Model 4Coefficient

Sig.

Model 5Coefficient

Sig.

Model 6Coefficient

Sig.

Model 7Coefficient

Sig.

Formal Establishment

-0.024 0.708 -0.024 0.692 -0.029 0.609

Official Restrictions

0.226*** 0.000 0.226*** 0.000 0.229*** 0.000 0.232*** 0.000 0.236*** 0.000 0.245*** 0.000 0.238***

0.000

Regulation of Majority Religion

0.365*** 0.000 0.366*** 0.000 0.366*** 0.000 0.359*** 0.000 0.355*** 0.000 0.347*** 0.000 0.305***

0.000

Government Favoritism Index

0.129† 0.063 0.128† 0.060 0.117† 0.057 0.120* 0.050 0.130* 0.032 0.137* 0.025 0.187** 0.003

Social Regulation of Religion

0.199** 0.002 0.199** 0.002 0.198** 0.002 0.196** 0.002 0.201** 0.002 0.212*** 0.001 0.227***

0.000

Dominance of Plurality Religion

-0.002 0.972 -0.030 0.534

Polity IV -0.171* 0.011 -0.171* 0.011 -0.165* 0.012 -0.181** 0.002 -0.169** 0.004 -0.176** 0.003 -0.190**

0.005

Transition in last decade

0.072 0.207 0.072 0.205 0.068 0.223 0.067 0.224 0.060 0.245

Foreign Born percentage

0.038 0.521 0.038 0.653 0.034 0.550 0.037 0.503

Migration Changesince 1960

0.127* 0.016 0.127* 0.015 0.126* 0.015 0.129* 0.012 0.128* 0.013 0.100* 0.044


-0.100† 0.062 -0.100† 0.059 -0.099† 0.062 -0.100† 0.056 -0.099† 0.060 -0.031 0.517

Human 0.168* 0.025 0.168* 0.024 0.163* 0.062 0.182** 0.007 0.140* 0.014 0.113* 0.043 0.156** 0.020

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Development IndexConstant 0.006 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.007Number of Observations

127 127 127 127 127 127 149

Adjusted R-squared

0.729*** 0.000 0.732*** 0.000 0.734*** 0.000 0.735*** 0.000 0.734*** 0.000 0.728*** 0.000 0.712***

0.000

Note: † p<0.1; * p<0.05; ** p<0.01; *** p<0.001.

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Table 2: Government Discrimination against Religious Minorities, by grouped variables

Model 8Coefficient

Sig.

Model 9Coefficient

Sig.

Model 10Coefficient

Sig.

Model 11Coefficient

Sig.

Model 12Coefficient

Sig.


0.031 0.532


0.359***

0.000


0.463***

0.000

Government Favoritism

0.233***

0.000


0.604*** 0.000


-0.052 0.394

Polity IV -0.530***

0.000

Transition in Last Decade

0.016 0.816

Foreign Born percentage

0.123 0.130


0.208* 0.017

Migration Change -0.222** 0.010

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since 2000Human Development Index

0.079 0.314

Constant 0.000 0.763 0.000 0.000 0.059Number of Observations

176 175 158 150 165

Adjusted R-squared

0.690***

0.000 0.354*** 0.000 0.272***

0.000 0.061** 0.007 0.000 0.314

Note: † p<0.1; * p<0.05; ** p<0.01; *** p<0.001.

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Table 3: Hypotheses and Findings

Hypothesis Relevant Indicator(s)

Observed Relationship

H1: Formal establishment of one or more religions will lead to more restrictive policies toward minority religions.


Hypothesis rejected;no observable relationship

H2: States that have more official restrictions on religious practice in general will be morelikely to restrict minority religious participation.


Hypothesis supported

H3: States that have more restrictions on majority religious practice will be more likely to restrict minority religious participation.



H4: States that show strong favoritism toward a dominant religion will be more likely to restrict minority religious participation.

Government Favoritism Index

Hypothesis tentatively supported

H5: Countries numerically dominated by one religious community will be more inclined to discriminate against religious minorities.



H6: Countries with high levels of social regulation of religion will discriminate morestrongly against minority religious groups.



H7: Countries with higher levels of democracy will be less likely to restrict religious minorities.

Polity Hypothesis supported

H8: States experiencing a significant transition Transition in Hypothesis

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between democracy and autocracy in the last decade will be more likely to impose restrictions on religious minorities.

Last Decade tentatively supported

H9: States experiencing high levels of immigration will be more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.

Foreign Born Percentage


H10: States experiencing high levels of immigration relative to historic levels will be more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.

Migration Change since 1960


H11: States experiencing high levels of immigration within the last decade will be more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.

Migration Change since 2000

Hypothesis rejected;observed relationship is opposite of prediction

H12: States with higher levels of economic development and human security will be more tolerant toward religious minorities.

Human Development Index

Hypothesis rejected;observed relationship is opposite of prediction

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Government Regulation of Religious Minorities [DRAFT]

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