Zur Messung von Staat-Kirche-Beziehungen: Eine vergleichende Analyse neuerer Indizes

Zusammenfassung: Im Zuge der erhöhten Aufmerksamkeit, welche dem Faktor Religion in der Politik zuteil wird, ist das spannungsreiche Verhältnis von Staat und Kirche wieder vermehrt in den Blick geraten. Gleichwohl werden bisherige Forschungsbemühungen der quantitativ-vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft oftmals durch einen Mangel an geeigneten Messkonzepten gehemmt. Erst in allerjüngster Zeit sind verschiedene Vorschläge zur Messung von Staat-Kirche-Beziehungen hervorgebracht worden. Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrags ist es, diese neuen Messvorschläge vorzustellen und in einem kritischen Vergleich ihre jeweiligen methodischen Stärken und Schwächen herauszuarbeiten. Genauer gesprochen wird der Versuch unternommen, den von Munck und Verkuilen (Comparative Political Studies 35:5-24, 2002) im Rahmen der Demokratiemessung vorgeschlagenen und von Müller und Pickel (Politische Vierteljahresschrift 48:511-539, 2007) präzisierten Kriterienkatalog zur methodologischen Bewertung von Messkonzepten auf insgesamt fünf verschiedene Indizes zur Messung von Staat-Kirche-Verflechtungen anzuwenden. Konkret wird dabei anhand spezifischer Beurteilungskriterien untersucht, inwieweit die methodischen Herausforderungen der Konzeptualisierung, der Messung sowie der Aggregation bei der Konstruktion der betrachteten Indizes überzeugend bewältigt wurden. Neben der vergleichenden Analyse und Bewertung von neuen Messinstrumenten wird damit gleichzeitig die Brauchbarkeit dieses Evaluationsschemas, sowie seine Übertragbarkeit in alternative Anwendungskontexte erprob

Religion als Ressource sozialen Zusammenhalts?: Eine empirische Analyse der religiösen Grundlagen sozialen Kapitals in Deutschland

This paper examines the role of religion as a source of social capital in Germany. In addition to networks of civic engagement and informal social connections with family and friends, I also consider the identity- and statusbridging nature of these networks. Results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) suggest that, both, subjective religiosity and public religious practice have a positive impact on social integration in Germany. But religious traditions differ in this regard. While attending religious services leads to larger friendship networks and increased sociability in all religions, civic engagement is only fostered by Christian religiosity and in particular Protestantism. However, none of the religious traditions encourages identity- or status-bridging social capital. Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der systematischen empirischen Analyse des Einflusses von Religion auf Sozialkapital in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Als abhängige Variablen werden neben der Einbindung in formelle Netzwerke zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagements und informelle Freundschafts- und Verwandtschaftsnetzwerke auch deren identitäts- und statusüberbrückenden Potentiale berücksichtigt. Die auf der Datengrundlage des Sozio-ökonomischen Panel (SOEP) ermittelten Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass sowohl subjektive Religiosität als auch öffentliche religiöse Praxis einen positiven Einfluss auf strukturelle Aspekte der Sozialintegration in Deutschland ausüben. Dabei lassen sich jedoch zum Teil deutliche Unterschiede zwischen den religiösen Traditionen ausmachen. Während etwa regelmäßiger Gottesdienstbesuch für alle Religionen mit einem größeren Freundschaftsnetzwerk einhergeht und zu häufigerem Treffen mit Freunden und Nachbarn führt, wird die Einbindung in formelle Netzwerke zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagements vornehmlich in christlichen Konfessionen und hier insbesondere im Protestantismus gefördert. Allerdings zeichnet sich keine der betrachteten religiösen Traditionen durch besondere identitäts- oder statusüberbrückende Wirkungen aus.Religion, Religiosität, Sozialkapital, Soziale Netzwerke

What is Islamophobia? Disentangling Citizens’ Feelings Toward Ethnicity, Religion and Religiosity Using a Survey Experiment

What citizens think about Muslim immigrants has important implications for some of the most pressing challenges facing Western democracies. To advance contemporary understanding of what 'Islamophobia' really is - for example, whether it is a dislike based on immigrants’ ethnic background, religious identity or specific religious behaviors - this study fielded a representative online survey experiment in the UK in summer 2015. The results suggest that Muslim immigrants are not per se viewed more negatively than Christian immigrants. Instead, the study finds evidence that citizens’ uneasiness with Muslim immigration is first and foremost the result of a rejection of fundamentalist forms of religiosity. This suggests that common explanations, which are based on simple dichotomies between liberal supporters and conservative critics of immigration, need to be re-evaluated. While the politically left and culturally liberal have more positive attitudes toward immigrants than right-leaning individuals and conservatives, they are also far more critical of religious groups. The study concludes that a large part of the current political controversy over Muslim immigration is related to this double opposition: it is less about immigrants versus natives or even Muslim versus Christians than about political liberalism versus religious fundamentalism

How state support of religion shapes attitudes toward Muslim immigrants: New evidence from a sub-national comparison

This article argues that governments play a considerable role in shaping citizens’ attitudes toward Muslim immigrants through the way they regulate religion. European democracies are far from secular, and matters of religious regulation cannot be reduced to abstract values or constitutional clauses. Under conditions of high state support of religion, accommodating new religious minorities involves not only the changing of existing rules but also giving up on long-standing traditions and everyday habits. As a result, citizens see religious newcomers as a threat to their way of life and react with animosity to their practices and demands. We support our argument by combining newly designed survey items with original data on religious regulation in 26 Swiss cantons. Our findings contradict the extant literature and have important implications for the democratic challenges in Europe, the quality of modern immigration societies, and the role of religion in democracy more generally

Subjective freedom of speech: Why do citizens think they cannot speak freely?

We provide the first systematic research into the origins of subjective freedom of speech in Germany. Relying on the GLES 2021 Cross-Section Pre-Election Survey, which includes a newly designed survey item on subjective freedom of speech, we evaluate a whole range of plausible candidate hypotheses. First, we contribute to cumulative research by testing the explanatory factors in Gibson (1993)—citizens’ social class, their political involvement and political preferences, and their personality dispositions—for the German case. Second, we move beyond the state of the art and test three new hypotheses that reflect more recent political developments and arguments in the free speech debate: the role of social media, increasing political and social polarization, and the rise of populism. Importantly, all hypothesis tests reported in this paper have been preregistered prior to data collection. Our results reveal that three explanatory factors are significantly, consistently, and substantively related to subjective free speech in Germany: political preferences, populist attitudes, and identification with the Alternative for Germany party. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11615-022-00414-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Computing quantities of interest and their uncertainty using Bayesian simulation

When analyzing data, researchers are often less interested in the parameters of statistical models than in functions of these parameters such as predicted values. Here we show that Bayesian simulation with Markov-chain Monte Carlo tools makes it easy to compute these quantities of interest with their uncertainty. We illustrate how to produce customary and relatively new quantities of interest such as variable importance ranking, posterior predictive data, difficult marginal effects, and model comparison statistics to allow researchers to report more informative results

Moral Politics: The Religious Factor in Referenda Voting

This article combines the research strands of moral politics and political behavior by focusing on the effect of individual and contextual religiosity on individual vote decisions in popular initiatives and public referenda concerning morally charged issues. We rely on a total of 13 surveys with 1,000 respondents each conducted after every referendum on moral policies in Switzerland between 1992 and 2012. Results based on cross-classified multilevel models show that religious behaving instead of nominal religious belonging plays a crucial role in decision making on moral issues. This supports the idea that the traditional confessional cleavage is replaced by a new religious cleavage that divides the religious from the secular. This newer cleavage is characterized by party alignments that extend from electoral to direct democratic voting behavior. Overall, our study lends support to previous findings drawn from American research on moral politics, direct democracies, and the public role of religio