Religion and Democracy

Abstract
This study is viewing religion as a cultural artifact and tests for the direct influences of some exogenous religious
variables on democracy and human development. The main argumentation line is that religion - as a mental
collective structure with the function to generate meanings, values and purposes and to compensate for the
insecurity of human existence - could shape the believes, behaviors, ethic structures and institutional frameworks
and, thus, influence directly the democratic and human development status. Based on the World Values Surveys
2005 data, measures of different aspects of religion are constructed and tested against various measures of
democracy on a cross-national level for a set of 41 countries. The analyses reveal that there are some significant
inter-linkages between the involved variables; however, the religious variables act in a non-uniform manner on
the explanatory ones. We conclude that both conceptual and empirical arguments support the idea of democracy
viewed as a religious dependent variable.

Key Words: Cultural paradigm, democracy, human development, religion, WVS

JEL: Z12; A13

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,

Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.
Medieval distich
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
No change has come over the purpose.
I Ching- The Book of Changes

1. Introduction
The choices we made in regard to this papers motto are designed to reflect the complexity of religion
as societal process. Firstly, the Dominican medieval distich presented above represents a pledge for a
polysemic interpretation of the revelation; whereas The Letter to Hebrews views the function of faith
as a guarantee for the believer. On the other hand, the I Ching approaches the ethic imperative of the
sincerity that it is perfect in itself and of itself.
So, we view religion as dealing with a variety of individual and social life related aspects: the position
of an individual in the web of social interaction networks, or in relation with the universe and the
Divinity; the formal structures and the content of the dominant ethics; the ultimate goals of personal
and social evolutions as these could derive from the assessment of a set of existence meanings. Thus,
religion could influence a wide range of beliefs and social behaviors and outcomes. It could affect the
societal architecture, institutions and mechanisms through a multitude of economic, politic and
attitudinal variables. In particular, religion could affect the social preference for a democratic societal
framework. There can be identified two major channels for such an influence: one based on the impact
exercised by religion on economic development and, consequently, on the infrastructure of democratic
institutions and mechanisms of human development; the other is via the shape of beliefs, attitudes and
behaviors reverberating into the social dynamics. As Eilinghoff (2003:2) notes: A religious concept
in total can lead an individual to infer a certain course of action towards one or several specific goals
that are usually regarded as the meaning of life.
In regard to the first transmission channel, the research was initiated by Smith ([1776] 1965), Weber
([1905] 1958, 1988, 2002), Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975). Currently, there is an emerging body of
literature studying the connections between religion and economy. Iannaccone (1998:1466) identifies
three major analytical directions in this body of literature: 1) the interpretation of religion from an
economic perspective, seeking to explain patterns of religious behavior among groups and cultures; 2)
the study of religions economic consequences; 3) the use of the religious doctrinal corpuscle to
promote or criticize different economic policies - religious economics. These studies view religion
both as independent and dependent variable and conclude that religious activity could affect economic
performance on various levels.

The research field corresponding to the second transmission channel is an interdisciplinary one with
various approaches inspired by sociology, psychology, anthropology or institutional economics. This
research direction was initiated by de Tocqueville ([1835; 1840] 2001) who suggested that as the
American experience shows religion is compatible with democracy (if the public and religious spheres
are kept separately). Moreover, Durkheim ([1912] 2001) focuses on religion as a factor able to
contribute to social cohesion. Currently, this field is dealing with issues like secularization and post
modernization and their impact on social and politic status.
The present paper is an attempt to empirically analyze the direct impact of religion on democracy, by
recognizing that religion could shape believes, behaviors, ethic structures and institutional frameworks
with consequences on social preference for a democratic status. The first step of our research consists
in defining religion and democracy in order to provide an operational framework. A particular
emphasis is placed on the view of religion as a cultural artifact and as a generator of meanings, values
and purposes of human existence. Democracy is understood as a consequence of the dominant
collective position regarding the fundamental social equalities and freedoms and hence as a complex
system of entitlements and their borderlines. The second section is searching for the linkages between
these variables. Both direct and indirect transmission channels of religion influence on democracy via
the social ethics and economic development are briefly discussed.
Furthermore, we test our hypothesis by constructing some measures of different religious variables
based on World Values Surveys data; variables dealing with aspects such as religious concentration,
de facto religious behavior, the perception of the social role of religion and of its involvement in
political life, the approach toward the spiritual life of the societys members, and the religious
denomination, and by taking into account various measures of democracy (and some specific aspects
such as electoral processes and political participation, the functioning of the government, political
culture and civil liberties) - all these analyzed on cross-national level for a set of 41 countries.
To preview the output of the analysis, it appears that religion matters for democracy, but the impact
exercised by the individual religious variables is non-uniform. Empirically, the religious variables are
correlated with the dependent measures of democracy, but the robustness of these correlations varies
according to the involved methodologies of estimating the democratic status. Still, overall there is a
significant predictive power of religion in respect to democratic status.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 seeks to define the key concepts. Section
3 is searching for possible linkages between the involved variables. Section 4 tests for empirical
evidences, while Section 5 comments on results. The findings are summarized and some research
limits are revealed in the final section. Therefore, we believe that an analysis concerning the influence
of religion on social choices is a critic condition for a more accurate view of societal evolution. In
addition, by carrying out this study we learned that beliefs have a tremendous capacity to modulate the
societal construction.

2. Defining the key concepts

2.1. Religion as a functional generator of meanings, values and purposes

Our starting point in defining religion is the observation that the human spirit needs several filtering
mechanisms for the apparent chaos of the existence. More exactly, it needs systematic answers to
questions like: Why are we living? What is our main purpose? How can be explained what is
happening to us? Why do we suffer? Is there a justice in the worlds mechanisms? Is there a superior
sense of life? Is dead the end or there is another level of existence?
In providing answers to such questions, there were generated various consistent and auto-coherent
collective mental structures, represented by myths and symbols and by means to communicate, adjust
and preserve these in an inter-generational framework. The ensemble of these structures and means
constitutes the cultural paradigm as a societal product, a provider of meaning, which guides the
collective and individual actions and as a tool used by members of a collectivity to place themselves in
a system of relationships among them, with the Others and with the world. In such a perspective, it
can be argued that culture is not only an environment, but also an active source of social life by
determining the societal actions and stimulating / inhibiting their results.
If such approach is seen as viable, then a definition of religion as a cultural artifact could derive.
There is a certain tradition in seeing religion as a social and cultural artifact since mile Durkheims
functionalist approach (and going beyond and sometimes divergent from this): Religion is a unified
system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded
by prohibitions- beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community called a
church- Durkheim ([1912] 2001:46). Lets consider for instance the Clifford Geertz view of religion
as one of the cultural systems of a society. He defined religion as a system of symbols which acts to
establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence. These conceptions are presented as factual ones in such a manner that the
explanations appear to be realistic - for a presentation and comments on Geertz arguments and other
similar ideas, see Kunin (2003:153).
According to such approaches, it seams that religion is a collective mental structure providing and
communicating explanations about the meaning and purpose of life, by referring to an exogenousfrom the world and mankind referential - cause of existence (the Divinity). And in this process of
explaining, religion provides a set of fundamental values which are component of the cultural
paradigm. Thus, the role of religion is to explain the universe and the human existence and by doing so
to produce a set of meanings and values in accordance with these. Subsequently, it generates an ethics

in accordance with these explanations (i.e. a set of prescriptions for human actions perceived as being
the right ones).
Such a definition of religion is not necessary contradictory to other approaches. As an example, it
could be argued that if the output of such a generator of meanings is sufficiently consistent and
persistent, it could act as a system of "compensators" like in the rational choice theory; compensators
which represent languages and practices compensating for a number of physical needs or frustrations,
in particular, and for the frustration induced by the apparent lack of existence purpose in general.
Still, our view is that the primary function of religion is not to compensate for frustration on one or
another aspect of human life, but for almost all of them. In other words, religion provides a large set of
supernatural credence commodities (from explanations and meanings for the human condition to
afterlife rewards). Moreover, this function is carried out by providing inter-correlated sets of
explanations. In other words, we accept that religion is compensating, but we emphasis that this is
done by providing explanations and these explanations are acting as an ultimate compensator for the
global feeling of life insecurity.
Thus, religion is not primary about our perception of Divinity, good and evil, sins and redemption,
rituals or dogmas. It is about the purpose of life, our ultimate objectives, our fear, hopes and
expectations, our position in respect to others and to the universe. And mostly, religion is about a
meaning greater than ourselves, a justification of our existence; not so much how, but mainly why.
Hence, this constitutes the main reason for seeing religion as a cultural element. If culture is the
assembly of the collective mythic structures, then there is a special dialectic of (pi'stis) creation
from mythos and logos.
With this framework, our operational definition of religion will be:
Religion is a particular system of culture since it has the same function of providing meanings, but
differs from other cultural systems by that it relates its explanations to Divinity. Its institutions
(communities of believers, dogmas, ethical structures, norms, behaviors and practices) are functioning
as compensatory structures for the uncertainty in individual and social life and are offering a set of
rewards and penalties which shape the religious ethics. In the mean time, these support specific
individuals relationships according to the structure of a particular ethics and, by doing so, are acting
as social integration structures.
This definition incorporates the grassroots definition of Stark and Bainbridge (1985:5): Religion is
any shared set of beliefs, activities and institutions premised upon a faith in supernatural forces but
adds the role of religious institutions as compensator and societal integrator structures.
Being a culture component, religion is an organized effort to fill the emptiness of a universe which
otherwise appears to be stripped by signification.

2.2. Democracy as a status of collective mental

is one of the most polymorphic concepts from the political field. Democracy is a politic
term, since it implies a form of social governance the power (rule) of the people. Still, there is no
unanimously accepted definition and not a single type of social design. There are two key concepts
required by a minimalist definition of democracy: equality and freedom.
By equality it could be understood at least that all citizens are equal before the law and they have
equal access to exercise the social power - in other words, there is a social isonomy. Such isonomy is
both positive and negative. The positive aspect implies that, in the societal decision-making process,
all citizens have equal capacity to influence the outcome and that any act against the social rules is
judged and punished according to the same principles. In a negative sense, equality means that there
is no discrimination for the members of a certain group in taking part to the collective decisions and
that there are no variations in the legislative systems interpretation and application according to the
social status. The existence of such negative interpretation of equality is controversial since there
could be cases of societies in which there is certain discrimination for some particular social groups,
but the equality is applied in a positive sense for the members of the society allowed to participate at
the political life. In our view, such a politic system could not be defined as fully democracy, being
rather hybrid. Also, a cautious approach is required in regard to what is understood by the use of
negative and positive interpretation of equality to all citizens. For instance, the positive interpretation
should not be connected with the consequences of binary majority rule, but rather with all
expressed votes are equals (everyone could exercise the same influence on the final decisional output
and there is nothing like a super vote); since it does not concern the implementation of a particular
decisional rule, but the equal access to the decisional processes. Similar, the negative sense should not
be associated with any kind of positive discrimination (some groups should benefit from a special
treatment as a compensation for past injustices) since such discrimination is in fact a functional
inequality in respect to the social groups which do not benefit from the special treatment.
Thus, the definition of equality could be formulated based on the next set of assertions:
1. For any two individual social subjects A and B there is a isomorphic capacity to influence the
outcome of collective decision-making processes;
2. For any two individual social subjects A and B there is a isomorphic penalty for breaking the
same social rule in similar conditions;
3. Any of the two A and B could not impose to the other a limitation of the natural rights;
4. For any two individual social subjects A and B there is no positive discrimination in any
element of the social life;

5. No matter how we choose A and B, they can impose one another a de facto limitation of the
achieved rights, especially the economic ones. However, such a limitation should not exceed a
certain level;
6. There is no constraint for the social subjects A and B to have an equivalent social status but
they should have equal opportunities to reach for it.
Freedom is the capacity of all members of the society to fully exercise their various types of
natural and achieved rights. The fundamental premise is that the social subjects are roughly
endowed with undifferentiated natural rights (or equivalently they should be treated as ends, in
Kantian setting), but they have abilities of non-uniform use of these, because of their various native
abilities, as well as of the circumstances in which they practice these abilities.
If the term freedom is applicable to all citizens, then the full capacity to exercise rights should not be
understood in a genuine sense: there must be a borderline of this capacity defined by the points up to
which exercising an individual social subjects rights harms the capacity of the others to benefit from
their own rights. In other words, it is convenient to claim that a total freedom is only a potential state.
The argument for this claim relies on requirement that the individuals interactions should not set nonnecessary limitations while they pursue a particular right. Thus, freedom is a system of entitlements.
Such an approach is close (up to some similarity degree) to Nozicks (1974:238) thesis, i.e. The
major objection to speaking of everyone's having a right to various things such as equality of
opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these 'rights' require a substructure of
things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. No
one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other
people have rights and entitlements over.
However, our view goes in another direction since we focus mainly not on owning but on doing; in the
sense that the social subjects are constraint to appoint actions from a single subclass of social actions
in order to derive an economic good. Still there is a large variety of subclasses of social actions with a
common characteristic consisting in that complex set of interactions rise from such actions. Freedom
emerges as one possible mechanism to carry out such interactions. One can make a distinction
between two main types of rights (from the above mentioned perspective): 1) autonomous and,
respectively, 2) subordinate (see, for instance, a discussion of the views on the relationships between
these two types of rights, Coleman, 1996). An autonomous right is exercised by an individual
without any interaction to others and the outcome of such exercise will solely depend of the intrinsic
capacity of the owner to fully benefit from his/her actions. Au contraire, a subordinate right cannot
be carried out in an isolate manner and it requires the interaction with a least one other social subject.
Thus, our definition of freedom relies on the next assertions:

1. There is an isomorphism between any two sets of individuals autonomous rights;

2. No matter how we choose two social individuals A and B there is no chance to find an
isomorphism between their sets of subordinate rights;
3. There is no need to impose a borderline of practicing a large amount of autonomous rights that
are mutually independent, for any two social subjects A and B;
4. There is a need to set up an upper bound for the amount of inter-correlated subordinate rights of
any two social subjects A and B, in the sense that their actions should not reach a level that
harms the capacity of others to exercise their own rights of the above type.
If these assertions are considered, then the Nozicks argumentation refers only to the subordinate
rights and the limitation of freedom in order to preserve the freedom should not be extended beyond
the sphere of such rights.
One peculiar aspect of this definition is that it is built on a set of conditions that reflects an intrinsic
equality and a certain degree of extrinsic inequality. In other words, the degree of freedom appears as a
consequence of the degree of social recognition of different types of (in) equalities. Still, it accounts
for the fact that the liberty of one should not be exercised in a vacuum, but in given social space which
requires interactions with the others. It can also be regarded as a ground to reject positions such as:
democracy and liberalism are concerned with two entirely different problems. The former is
concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while the latter deals with
the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government (Kuehnelt-Leddihn,
1952:9). In other words, we are sympathetic with the idea that democracy should not be carried out in
the context of a significant lack of freedom. In a weak form of this thesis, there could be a certain
trade-off between equality and freedom, but this is not a central element of the democratic core,
but rather a functional compromise. In a stronger sense, equality is necessary but not sufficient for
freedom as the latter is necessary for the social recognition of the fundamental equality between
all humans, and both are required to be based on a democratic system. Supplementary, such an
approach allows the understanding of democracy by referring to several crucial aspects for any social
system, connected to the mechanisms through which the political power is generated, legitimated,
distributed, exercised and controlled.
Resuming, democracy is not about majority rule, governance by elected representatives, open political
life and so one. All these are consequences of the respect paid to two fundamental ideas: that we are
all equal as humans despite that we could be socially unequal and that we are free to act for self-fulfill
in material and spiritual dimensions as long as our actions do not harm somebody else.
Democracy is a social system based on a combination of equality and freedom together with their
borderlines; based on the general recognition of an identical set of autonomous rights and more
non-identical sets of subordinate rights. This combination provides all the positive and
negative prerequisites for the existence of a democratic society.

3. Searching for the inter-linkages

Currently, there is a growing literature analyzing the connections between religion and democracy. For
instance, Bruce (2006) argues that Protestantism has been implicated in the development of
democratic politics and civil liberties. Patterson (2005) provides detailed evidence on religion
influencing politics in Latin America. Driessen (2010:56) notes that: once the core autonomy
prerequisites [of democracy] have been fulfilled, there is a wide range of Church-state arrangements
which allow for religion to have a public role in political life and simultaneously maintain a high
quality of democratic rights and freedoms. Smith (2009) documents for European countries a link
between religion and trust in democratic institutions. Bader (2003) argues that there are mutual
relationships between society, culture, politics and state and (organized) religions and that a role of
organized religion in political processes can be legitimate.
This section discusses some arguments from this literature and to grasp from these arguments the basis
of our main research hypothesis. A central concept for our analysis is the salvific merit. As McCleary
and Barro (2006:51) are pointing out: Otherworldly compensators like salvation, damnation and
nirvana are great motivators of behavior in this world.
If the universe is guided by a conscious force (or forces) and if such directing conscience(s) has/have
an intrinsic objective, than it could be reasoned that any correct decision is in accordance with Gods
plan (which is revealed or unknown in a direct manner but suggested in an indirect one).
Correlatively, any wrong decision is a deviationist one, opposing a transcendent objective more
important than the individual goals. So that, there could be identified three sets of rewards / costs
associated with each individual decision. The first set is intrinsic deriving from the satisfaction /
discomfort in respect to the own decisions who could or not be sanctioned by a higher instance. The
second set is related to the judgments of other members of the social referential group in regard to the
correctitude of an individual action, being partially extrinsic. The last one is fully extrinsic and may
well be granted / imposed by the conscience which is governing the universe. From this perspective,
any religious action will seek to fulfill two inter-correlated objectives: 1) to complete the prescript acts
in order to achieve all the types of rewards; 2) to correct the incomplete, imperfect or wrong past
actions in order to minimize the subsequent costs of these. Even in the cases when religion does not
provide an absolute certainty (it could be if God decides but is not sure) about the fully extrinsic
rewards or costs (life after dead, salvation of soul or physical resurrection, heaven / damnation, hell,
the complete destruction of the inner), a believer will attempt to maximize the intrinsic or partially
extrinsic rewards, to reinsure her / him that will not support the costs of past or current mistakes and
to improve others perception over her / him.
Thus, several of the differences between religions emerge from the characteristics of the nature, level
and channels of rewarding / applying of the rewards / costs and from the mechanisms of their
confirmation as well. In order to be efficient, these systems of rewards and costs which form the

structure of the religious ethics should be: a) consistent; b) self-explanatory; c) appropriate for the
socio-economic current environment; d) able to provide answers and action guidelines for larger set of
problems and actions.
The religious acts influence the social and economic conditions through the associated ethics. If such
acts are fostering traits - like a pronounced work ethics, social and economic performances (as a sign
of being a community of chosen ones or part of such community), trust, thrift and decisional
prudence, charity, tolerance, openness and acceptance of the specific cultural, sexual or racial
differences and so on -, these could contribute to an increase in the degree of societal openness and
also could spur economic development in support in the adoption and evolution of the democratic
institutions.
In other words, religion can influence, via its specific ethics, the social framework by stimulating /
inhibiting different types of social behavior, in order to promote the corresponding values of
religiosity. It must be noticed that this line of argumentation does not mainly emphasize the impact of
religion on formation of networks, of social clubs, with their capacity to congregate and mobilize a
large number of citizens, but more on the influence on social beliefs and, hence, behaviors. As
McCleary and Barro (2006:51) explain: A key concept is salvific merit which connects the
perceived probability of salvation to a persons lifetime activities. In some religions, salvific merit can
be earned in this life to enhance the chances for a better outcome in the next life.
For religion to boost up the democratic evolution of a society, it ought to have the capacity to
influence both the positive and negative conditions of democracy. Minimally, it should: 1) agree that
there is a reason for taking individual and collective actions (to view this world as more than
transitory to a better condition which can not be achieved here by its believers) or, at least, not to
discourage such actions (by insisting that these are futile); 2) encourage the right actions through a
well articulated description of rewards and costs; 3) not promote the negative actions against the
non-chosen or non- believers - actions translated in anti-social acts, such as violence - in addition
recommending the avoidance of such actions; 4) stimulate the social mobility by not sustaining any
type of caste system on the argument that each individual social status is predetermined (this request
can be controversial in the initial stages of democracy emergence, when religious institutions take
position in favor of more rigid social structures; however, this could change in time due to the
emergence of more solid and fully functional democratic structures and social faith doctrine may be
lost in the process); 5) perceive some actions (charity, self-sacrifices for the good of others and so on)
as active instruments of salvation (assuming, of course, that, in a way or another, such salvation is
possible) and, correlatively, to not promote the idea that extremely spiritual of physical pain is a
correct instrument of salvation; 6) promote a doctrine from which it could be concluded that neither
autocracy nor anarchy are social systems in accordance with the Divine will; 7)

perceive the

democratic social order as a natural one (given by God) and so any attempt to change such order is
not according to the Divine objectives.
Summarizing, the transmission channels are more complex than the issue of religions position in
respect to the secular authority. Different religions are giving different answers to the issue of the
correct political ideas and consequently are placing their believers in a wide range of political
opinions.
Generally, the main idea is that: By spiritually rewarding networks of mutual aid and charitable acts,
religion lowers the uncertainties of daily life. That is, charity is a form of communal insurance, which
can be efficient if the society has a lot of uncertainty - Barro and Cleary (2007:193).
Summarizing:
H: In caeteris paribus conditions, religion could influence both the positive and negative conditions of
the democratic status of a society. Such influence may vary according to the particular conditions of
religious and democratic evolutions, the nature of religious institutions, the contents of its
fundamental dogma, the religious behavior of individuals as well as to the stance of the relationships
between political structures and mechanisms and civil society. Briefly, at a certain point in time, the
relative democratic performances of a country can be explained among a variety of factors by the
nature and relevance of its religious institutions.

4. Empirical evidences
The purpose of this section is to provide some empirical evidences about the inter-linkages between
the religious behavior characteristics in modern societies and their degree of democracy acceptance.
In order to provide such evidences, there is necessary to involve some operational measures of the
religion and democracy variables. For instance, it could be noticed that various aspects of religion
such as religion concentration, the religious practices and behaviors (including religious devotion), the
degree of acceptance of a certain social role of religion and of its involvement in political life, the
approach toward the spiritual life of the society members, and the predominant religious
denomination (and implicitly the predominant dogmatic structures), all these and others are
susceptible to induce different effects on societal status and on level of human development. So that a
first task of such a study should be the advance of some quantifiable measures of such variables. Also
for characterizing empirically the democratic status is necessary to decompose the democratic
architecture in some of its constituents (e.g. the nature and mechanisms of electoral processes and
political participation, the efficiency of government functioning, the global levels of political culture
and civil liberties) and to provide a synthetic measure.

4.1. International Data

Our starting point is the measurement of cross-country differences in religious practices, based on the
last wave of World Values Surveys (WVS) - carried out from 2005 to 2008. Since we are interested in
obtaining current comparative results for the assessment of religions impact on democracy, in
accordance with our research hypothesis, the dataset allows us to examine the present outcome of
historical religious and societal evolutions; however, it does not allow a dynamic view of these
evolutions mechanisms. Thus, this type of data fits the narrow purposes of our study. We selected
from the entire data base a set of 41 countries with complete religion-related information. Since
different questions are covering a wide range of religious behavior patterns we built a set of 4
synthetic indexes in order to capture the common areas of religious practices focusing especially on
the aspects connected to the religions social role. We use individual data which typically contain 1000
to 2000 participants in each national survey - and aggregate them according to the next topics: 1) the
religion concentration - the differences between the share of societys members with formal religious
beliefs which belong to the largest denomination and, respectively, the shares for the second and third
denomination; 2) the religious behavior - the degree of involvement in religious practices; 3)
religions social role - opinions on churchs capacity to answer to social problems and on the
interference of religion in public governance; 4) the spirituality - the frequency of the reflections on
the meaning and purpose of life.
These indexes are constructed according to our working definition of religion. They are designed to
reflect the societal behavior as is this influenced by the structure of religious dogmas and practices in
accordance with the position to the salvific merit and the possibility of redemption by a pro-active
social attitude. Thus, these indexes are not referring to the content itself of the religious beliefs, but
rather to the implications of such beliefs on the perceptions over the potential role of religious
institutions. While the religious concentration is not necessarily connected to the views about salvific
merit, the religious behavior and the positions about the social role of religious institutions are directed
derived from such views. If the believer has at her / his disposal, according to the core dogmas, a set of
redemption instruments - which consists both in following the structured religious prescriptions and
in positive social actions -, she / he will tend to increase, in certain specific conditions, her / his
participation to religious practices and rituals and to adopt a pro-active social role. In other words, if
the proposed indexes are adequately constructed, there should be observed a greater emphasis on the
religious institutions involvement in social and political life as their members seek to maximize the
perceived compensatory benefits from positive social actions.
The purpose of the first index is to capture the heterogeneity of the religious beliefs by comparing the
relative importance of the first three denominations. The index does not account for the existence of an

official state religion or for the state regulation of the religious sector. It simply considers the religious
choices of the respondents which are identifying themselves as belonging to a religious denomination.
These choices can be influenced by the existence of legal provisions, including statements about
religion in fundamental laws or by the de jure or de facto religious persecutions, but these aspects are
not directly addressed.
The construction of the index is based on an explicit question from the WVS questionnaire and the
index is computed based on the differences between the shares of the largest religious denominations
as:
2

Re ligionConcentration Index j =

i=1( sij si1 j )

2

(1)

Here s is the share of the denomination i for each individual country j.

It should be noticed that the index does not account for the intra-religion concentration, but only for
the absolute inter-religions one; so that if there are two or more denominations in a country for a
certain religion the shares are summed up. Of course, this is not a perfectly accurate measure of
concentration since it is not based on census data but it could provide a global picture of
denominations shares among the members of a society.
The second index reflects the de facto religious behavior, going further then the formal adherence to a
certain denomination. It is based on the idea that the self-perception as a religious person is not
necessarily associated with the frequency of ones involvement in religious practices but a certain
consistency of beliefs and actions should be observed. So, the index is the equally-weighted
aggregation of the frequencies of regular religious services attendance and the self identification as
a religious person:

fm1 j + f1 j
Indexof Re ligious Behaviorj =

2
2

+ rp j

( 2)

Hence fm1, f1, rp stands for the shares of respondents attending religious services more than once a
week, once a week and, respectively, describing themselves as religious people - with equal weights
of these variables. Since the shares fm1, f1 are equally weighted, it is supposed that there is no de facto
difference between a regular daily and, respectively, a weekly attendance. However, the weekly
frequency could be seen as an arbitrary one, since, for instance, the religious rituals are different for
each individual denomination; so that these may require the believers presence to religious practices
with different timetables. Still, this time span is short enough to reflect a higher intensity of

participation to religious services. Also, the participation at religious practices and the selfidentification as a religious person are considered equally important in describing the religious
behavior. It should be noticed that this index only describes the formal institutional religious practices
and not the individual and informal actions of praying / meditation; so that it does not capture all the
aspects of religious behavior.
The third index addresses the issue of the perception of churches capacity to provide adequate
answers to the social problems and the level until where the involvement of the religious institutions in
the political life is perceived as acceptable (and necessary). The index is defined as the average of five
variables from WVS reflecting the dominant views in a society in relation to the role that can be
attributed to religion in political life:

Indexof Re ligion Social Role j =

1 5
sr ( 3)
5 i=1 ij

The shares sr denote the proportion of the respondents which a) are believing that the religious
institutions are able to provide adequate answer to the social problems and b) which agree to the
involvement of these institutions in political life by c) rejecting the politicians who dont believe in
God, d) accepting the influence of the religious leaders on vote and public governance processes and
e) requiring more people with strong religious beliefs in public offices. These variables are chosen in
order to focus as much as possible on the construction of the index toward the space that religious
institutions can have in public life. There is no specific question concerning the implication of the
respondent themselves in active politics and, thus, these variables are reflecting the overall attitude of
society in respect to the political activism of believers.
The index places an equal weight to each component so that the views about religions capacity to
provide answers to the social issues are considered equally important as the involvement of religious
institutions in the public decisions processes. This implies that the index should reflect both the
legitimacy of the religiously motivated social actions as well as connections between religious and
political spheres.
In order to complete the picture, a fourth index is computed to describe the spiritual life. This index
reflects the shares of the respondents frequently meditating at the meaning and purpose of life:

In d e x o f S p ir itu a lity

1 = 0 .7 , 2 = 0 .3

= 1m oj + 2 m sj

(4 )

The mo, ms variables denote the shares of respondents thinking often and, respectively, sometimes,
to the sense of life. The weights 1,2 are arbitrarily chosen to discriminate between different levels of
intensity for such meditations.
In order to reflect more synthetically the religious state, an aggregate index could be constructed
based on the four indexes:

G lo b a l R e lig io n In d ex j =

4
i =1 ij In d ex ij ( 5 )

Since we are not ex-ante imposing any condition about the relative importance of individual indexes,
the ij weights are not predetermined. Several solutions are possible in order to set the values of the
weights. We are considering two of them. The first is to simply compute an equiponderate version of
the global index (ij = 0.25). The second consists in a factor analysis and in the use of score
coefficients as weights. Such an analysis is reported in Table 1.
Exploratory factor analysis is a method for explaining the covariance relationships amongst a number
of observed variables in terms of a much smaller number of unobserved variables called factors. For
our dataset, a single factor is selected based on Standard-error scree procedure (Zoski and Jurs, 1996).
This procedure is an attempt to formalize the visual comparisons of slopes used in the visual scree test.
It is based on the standard errors of sets of regression lines fit to later eigenvalues; when the standard
error of the regression through the later eigenvalues falls below the specified threshold, the remaining
factors are assumed to be negligible. For the estimation, we are using maximum likelihood method
which is scale invariant so that rescaling of the original data matrix or the dispersion matrix does not
alter the basic results.
[Insert Table 1 about here]
The levels of the un-rotated loads suggest that the factor F1 could be reasonable seen as a measure
of the religious state. It could be noticed the lower level for the Index of Religion Concentration load
which could be explained by the fact that the dominance of a certain religious denomination does not
automatically determine a certain homogenous behavior.
To the right of the loadings are communality and uniqueness estimates which apportion the diagonals
of the correlation matrix into common (explained) and individual (unexplained) components. The
communalities are obtained by computing the row norms of the loadings matrix, while the
uniquenesses are obtained directly from the Standard-error scree estimation algorithm. From this it
could be considered that 6.75 % of the correlation for the concentration index is accounted for by the
common factor while for the rest of the indexes this varies between 37.25% and 66.77%.

The bottom portion of the output shows basic goodness-of-fit information for the estimated
specification with the chi-square test values. Two distinct versions of this test are performed. The first
set compares the fit of the estimated model against a saturated model; the second set of tests examines
the fit of the independence model. The first column displays the discrepancy function, number of
parameters, and degrees-of-freedom (against the saturated model) for the estimated specification. Both
versions of the chi-square test have p-values of over 0.87, indicating that the factor adequately
explains the variation in the data.
The properties of the resulted global indexes are displayed in the first columns of Table 2. It could be
observed that the variations in the levels of the second version are larger than the corresponding ones
from the first computation; suggesting that this version could provides a more sensitive perspective.
The highest values of the two global indexes are obtained in Jordans case while the lowest is
corresponding to the values observed in Japans case.
[Insert Table 2 about here]
Furthermore, we grouped adherence in seven categories: Protestant (including Lutheran, Anglican,
Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Evangelical, and others); Catholic; Orthodox; Muslim (this could
be roughly breakdown into Sunni, Shiite, and other types but such delimitation is not taken into
account); Buddhist (including Shinto and Taoist); Hindu (including Jains and Sikhs) and other
religions (including Jew, Jehovah witnesses, Native, as well as other denominations). From the total
sample representative for the countries selected in the analysis data set, 17.33% of the respondents had
identified themselves as Protestant, 23.59% as Catholic, 14.30% as Orthodox, 17.20% as Muslim,
4.44% as Buddhist, 3.26% as Hindu and 4.85% as other religions. The sample represents 69.23% of
the total 2005-2008 World Values Survey sample.
For assessing the direct impact of religion on democracy we are using as dependent variable the
Democracy Index which captures various formal aspects of the democratic status. The Democracy
Index is an index compiled by The Economist. It examines the democratic status of 167 countries,
focusing on five general categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of
government, political participation and political culture. The countries are categorized into "Full
Democracies", "Flawed Democracies", "Hybrid Regimes" (all considered democracies), and
"Authoritarian Regimes" (considered dictatorial). The Democracy Index is a kind of weighted average
based on the answers of 60 questions, all distributed into the five mentioned categories. Each answer is
translated to a mark, either 0 or 1, or for the three answer alternative questions, 0.5. The five category
indices, which are listed in the report, are then averaged to find the Democracy Index for a given
country. Its level determines the country classification, as quoted: 1) Full democracies - scores of 8 to

10; 2) Flawed democracies - scores of 6 to 7.9; 3) Hybrid regimes - scores of 4 to 5.9; 4).
Authoritarian regimes - scores below 4.
In our sample, 27% of the countries could be classified as "Full Democracies" and 15% as "Hybrid
Regimes" while only 10% are "Authoritarian Regimes" and the most consistent part is represented by
"Flawed Democracies" (41%).
This index includes several elements relevant to the adopted definition of democracy, since it seeks to
reflect not only the stance of formal architecture of democratic mechanisms, but also the effectiveness
of political arrangements susceptible to ensure the autonomy of civil society from political inference
and the equality of participation to political processes.
However, the index does not provide enough details on social recognition of various types of
individual rights and, thus, it cannot account for the relationships between these rights playing an
important role in our approach to the definition of democracy. Thus, the results can count, only at a
very general level, for a completely concordant way to measure the democratic status in a particular
society. Thus, from the point of view of our analysis, this index provides rather a black box
assessment of democratic performances, since it allows us to evaluate if a country has achieved the
necessary mix of entitlements for free political actions, but does not say much on the exact contents of
such mix.

4.2. The Impact of Religion on Democracy

We are testing our hypothesis on a set of 41 developed and developing countries with a large variety
of political institutions and mechanisms. Our dependent variables are the countrys ranks in our
dataset for the Democracy Index as well as for its components. As explanatory variables, we are
considering our four descriptors of the relevant aspects of religion and two versions of the Global
Religion Index. We use as control variable the per capita real GDP based on prior evidences in the
literature for its association with democracy (Acemoglu et al., 2005, Barro, 1996, Shen, 2002).
The regressions involve instrumental variables in order to allow for a potential endogeneity of per
capital GDP with respect to democracy. The set of the instrumental variables is composed by (shares
in GDP formation): the general government final consumption expenditure as a proxy for the public
sector importance in the economic system; gross capital formation which is designed to capture the
technological base of the economic system and the internal propensity to invest; total value added by
services sector as a proxy for the structure of economy; and the Index of Economic Freedom scores for
2007 to describe the legal and institutional economic environment. We argue that differences in these
variables can explain the differences in economic performances, but they are unlikely to directly be
relevant for cross-section non-uniformity of democracy levels.
The estimations replace the log of per capita GDP (average values for a 1990-2007 time span) ranks
with the fitted values from a first-stage regression. This first-stage equation has the log of per capita
GDP as the dependent variable and has as independent variables the four instruments. The idea of this

instrumental-variable procedure is to isolate the effects of economic development on democracy,

rather than the reverse. The estimations give equal weight to each country.
We also use White robust covariances estimators assuming that the errors are contemporaneously
(cross-sectionally) correlated (period clustered). The method treats the regression as a multivariate
one, and computes robust standard errors for the system of equations. The estimator is designed to
accommodate arbitrary heteroskedasticity and it is particular relevant for our estimations due to the
large heterogeneity of data. The results are reported in Table 3.
[Insert Table 3 about here]
The first relevant result consists in that religion has a negative impact on democracy. Both global
indexes of religion are negatively and significantly correlated with democracy indexes, but positively
with all the other variables. This finding supports approaches as the life-cycle religious participation
profile in a rational-choice perspective based on Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975). Since we do not use timevarying data we cannot conclude directly that this is an effect of a secularization process. However, we
tend in a certain extend to agree with McCleary and Barro (2006:62) that secularization can be seen
as a gradual tendency.
Particularly, it could be noticed that the religion concentration affects statistically significant all the
dependent variables with the exception of the political participation and civil liberties. One possible
explanation is that the absence of religious pluralism does affect the religious beliefs and behaviors
and their translations in political practices. However, religion concentration is negatively correlated
with the global democratic status, the functioning of government and the political culture. In other
words, a monopolistic supply of religious products contributes to a decrease in the relative social
preference for politic pluralism and politic competition: the rejection of religious / cultural
heterogeneity is associated with a rejection of political diversity.
Not surprisingly, a greater level of the Index of Religious Behavior is positively and significant
associated with a higher level of democracy rank in the sample. Assimilation of religious ethics in the
framework of social behaviors could support a democratic culture and enhance the pluralist
functioning of the political mechanisms.
The interference between religion and democracy could harm the democratic mechanisms and limit
the electoral processes and civil liberties. In the mean time, a religious motivated bureaucracy could be
relatively more efficient since its members will take into account not only a politically motivated
system of rewards and costs for their actions, but also a religious one. There does not emerge a
significant connection between Index of Religion Social Role and the political participation or political
culture. One possible explanation for these findings is that the religious institutions are frequently

developing parallel non-political networks for their social actions through them mobilizing the
believers and substituting the political involvement. Such argument could partially be connected to
Verba et al. (1995) who posit that variation in political participation could be explained by the
differences in the acquisition of civic skills through different civil society institutions and, in
particular, the religious ones. But this process varies according with the internal functional and
dogmatic structure of religious institutions and does not imply a uniform impact of religion on the
involvement in political life. Hence, our dataset includes several countries with high levels of political
participation (Germany, Australia, Canada, Finland or Bulgaria) and lower social role of religious
institutions as well as countries with low level of participation and religions social importance (Spain,
Sweden, Norway or Ukraine and Vietnam). The Index of Spirituality is negatively correlated with the
global level of democracy and civil liberties and positively correlated with political participation. For
the other dependent variables, there is no statistically significant association with this index. Such a
result could be linked to the impact of a greater focus on meanings and values search on social
relationship, the development of the communities and hierarchy of human needs.
The shift from Protestantism to other religious denominations is correlated to a decrease in the global
level of democracy and political participation; the others dependent variables are not significantly
influenced by the denomination.
Overall, it appears that religion matters for democracy, but various aspects of religion exercise a nonuniform impact on the dependent variables. There can be formulated a concern about the robustness of
this result in respect to the manner in which the degree of democracy is estimated. In other words, a
more narrow or broader institutional or functional emphasis in democratic measures could be
sensitive to the stability of the evaluated association between religion and societal status.

4.3. An Indirect Robustness Check with Other Measures of Democracy

In order to provide at least an indirect robustness check of our results, we evaluate the effects of
choosing other measures of democratic status. Table 4 reports estimations of the connections between
the religion indexes and various measures of the global democratic stance for the countries included in
the dataset.
[Insert Table 4 about here]
All the regression have been carried out by adding to the instrumental variable already used a dummy
for the ex-communist countries in order to control for the heterogeneity of the methodologies involved
in the estimation of democracy. While the communist period had affected all the components of the
religious life, this effect appears to be only a temporary one, since there could be found a considerable
rebound in religion in the ex-communist countries. However, from the institutional point of view, the

impact of the communist regime could be more persistent due to the necessity of institutional
reconstruction of religion as well as of democratic infrastructure. It could be argued that for the excommunist countries the framework of the interrelations between religion and democracy was
substantially modified and so the consistency of the use of different democracy measurement
methodologies could be altered.
The results are quite puzzling. For instance, there could be find a negative and statistical significant
association between the religious global indexes and Polity IV project measures but a positive and yet
significant one between these indexes and Vanhanen's Index of Democracy and respectively Political
Rights and Civil Liberties indexes provided by Freedom House. Several explanations could be
advanced for such output. A short list of them could include:

The Vanhanen's Index of Democracy is focused on political participation and electoral processes
so that it appears that country with medium to high level of religiosity such as Italy or Turkey but
also others like the ex-communist Bulgaria, Poland, Romania or Moldova displays more or almost
the same degree of democracy that United States, Canada or Japan;

Despite their more complex methodology, with an important emphasis on institutional elements of
democracy, the Political Rights and Civil Liberties displays more or less similar features with
almost the same outliers for countries like Italy, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovenia, Ukraine or Ghana and
Trinidad and Tobago which are reported to have close values of democratic characteristics close to
the mature Western democracies;

From such observations, it could be argued that the mentioned measures of democracy are able to
capture the institutional aspects of political architecture and the electoral processes but is still an
open question about how much these measure are reflecting the de facto functional infrastructure
of a democratic society.

Secondly, it appears that there is a strong and stable negative correlation between the Index of Religion
Social Role and the various measures of democracy: the more able is religion considered to supply
answers to the social problems in a country, the less this country democratic appears to be regardless
the methodology used to estimate the level of democracy. Through, it could be presumed that the
religion monopole on societal life acts like an inhibitor for the development of the democratic
institutions and mechanisms. Of course, this result could not be use for answering to the question if
such loss in representative democracy quality is not counterbalanced in religious countries by the
adoption of some alternative forms of civil society participation to social and political issues.
Thirdly, a correlative positive and robust relationship is the one manifested between the Index of
Religious Behavior and the involvement measurements for the level of democracy: the more the
citizens of a country are involving themselves in organized religious practices, the more are they are
willing to accept the specific institutional arrangements of an representative democracy. Such an
output should be correlated with the less clear finding that the extent of religious concentration is
negative correlated with the democracy indexes (except for the Vanhanen's Index of Democracy and

Freedom House Civil Liberties ones). Thus, is there is achieved a certain degree of religious
competition in the conditions of a sufficient demand for religious products it is less possible that a
single denomination with possible non-democratic doctrines to influence a large number of civic
behaviors. Of course, one crucial aspect concerns the nature of the doctrinal corpuscle and practices of
a significant or dominant religious denomination. For instance, a country like Norway with a 62.6%
share of Protestant denomination subsequently displays a high level of democratic status regardless the
methodology used to describe this status. The religious concentration as a single variable has only a
limited capacity to explain to relative preference for democratic systems without a more detailed
description of the religious demand and supply.
Fourthly, there is a certain negative interrelationship between the Index of Spirituality and democracy
indexes (again with the exception of Vanhanen's Index of Democracy): the more spiritual issues are
included in the cultural paradigm, the less a society prefers the representative democracy. This
statement does not imply that democracy is only a pragmatic social arrangement rejected by more
spiritual societies. There could not be a democracy without a social acceptance of its fundamental
values directly incorporated in paradigm up to a certain threshold and as a consequence without a
conscientious effort to provide senses for personal and social existence . Such result could be more
related to a shift toward individualistic points of view and more fragmentation of the societal
coagulation processes with the increase in the focus in here and now approaches of life. Again, such
a thesis should not be considered in an absolute sense. On one hand, peoples could be stimulated to
reflect more on the meaning of life in conditions of a short life expectation, a low level of rational
education and in situations when they feel that there are few opportunities for personal fulfillment. On
the other hand, is religion itself which could provide answers on this topic so that if there is a high
level of religiosity it compensates for the personal efforts in attributing sense to our lives. However,
this last argument is less supported by data since almost all countries with high level of religiosity
have also at least medium to high levels for Index of Spirituality (maybe with the exception of Mali).
Fifthly, one of the most striking results insensitive to the changes in the methodology of measuring the
democracy is that Protestantism is a clear ground for both representative and direct types of
democratic regimes and that the relative preference for democracy diminish in non-Christian
denominations countries. Of course, such outcome should be corrected with the unequal weight of
different religions in the data sample but still there seems to be a certain evidence for the Weberian
argument.
In the context of these results, there appears that there are two other particular issues. The first issue is
related to the fact that all mentioned indexes are measuring, in a way or other, the representative type
of democracy. Or it is interesting to see if the direct democratic forms are also interrelated with
religion. Column 6 of Table 4 reports the linkages between the religion indexes and a direct
democracy index build on data concerning the legal provisions about referendums, citizen initiatives
and recalls at different levels, the topics which could be subject of such referendums and the usage of

referendum mechanisms since 1980 provided by Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. By
direct democracy we understood a system in which the social decisional sovereignty is lodged to the
civil societies in all the relevant matters for the social processes. The associated mechanisms are: (a)
referendums, which are votes on a specific single issue or piece of legislation (; (b) citizen initiatives,
whereby citizens can propose new legislation or constitutional amendments; and (c) recall, under
which citizens can force a vote on whether to oust an incumbent elected official. The common
characteristic of these mechanisms is that they all place more power directly in the hands of voters, as
opposed to elected representatives. But it should be noticed that in practices this pure type of
democracy is in the best case intent but not realized as a fully operational societal framework. Rather
the societies which emphasis such democratic design are deliberative democracy which incorporates
elements of both direct democracy and representative democracy. So that, the Direct Democracy
Index should be seen as a measure of the degree in which a society accepts to incorporate direct
democracy elements into its political mechanisms.
The output of the system suggests that there could be found a negative interaction between economic
development and the relative preference for direct democracy and, correlatively, a positive one with
the religiosity. The first finding could be partially explained by some historical factors specific for
mature economies and societies. More exactly, it could be argued that the traditional democracies
has been evolving like representative democracy projects and the outcome was stable enough over
time in order to be preserved (with various adjustments). In the mean time, we could presume that the
emergent societies and / or the not fully consolidate democracies could find in the direct democracy
mechanisms a way to compensate and / or to reduce the costs of the institutional construction for the
infrastructure of a representative democracy but we do not have data to support this idea.
The second finding could be enlighten by the observation that, since that Switzerland is not included
in the dataset, countries with high Direct Democracy Index are represented by Orthodox and Catholic
dominant denomination ones (like Peru, Serbia, Guatemala, Italy or Poland and Slovenia). A possible
explanation could subsist in the emphasis that both Orthodoxy and Catholicism are placing on
communion a an especially close relationship of Christians, as individuals or as a Church, with God
and with other Christians, relationship which could be translated into a strong communitarian sense
which serve as ground to the preference for direct form of the community consultation in a larger
spectrum of social and political issues. Of course, this argument is not complete since a medium to
high level of index could be found for non-Christian Buddhist dominant countries like Thailand or
Korea. However, such line of argumentation could be supported by the observation that according to
our results a higher level of religious concentration stimulates the adoption of direct democracy
elements. Thus is could be argue that this concentration is a stimulus for the communitarian spirit and
for a larger autonomy of local structures. Supplementary, the Index of Religious Behavior and the
Index of Religion Social Role appear to be negative correlated with the Direct Democracy Index which
could be explained by the importance of individual actions in more social secularized societies. In

other words, there is a certain consistency in assuming that factors as destiny or predetermination
are less important in explaining the output of personal acts and also that religion could not provide
answers to the social problems and simultaneous to give up only with limitations the control over the
social decisions to representatives eventually perceived to form a political aristocracy (or a
benevolent technocracy or a omniscient bureaucracy or a similar term designed to referrer to an
exogenous specialized structure).
Overall, it seems that a religious ethic which emphasis systematic correct interactions between
individuals and thus shorter societal interspaces is a strong support for the emergence of direct
democracy mechanisms. But the analysis is only partial since it not includes a balanced comparative
approach of the relative efficiency of religious and non-religious networks through which the citizens
gain and exchange information and engage themselves in social actions.
A second particular issue is one about the effectiveness of the democratic mechanisms, effectiveness
which in a narrow sense could be synthesized by the degree of participation to the political processes.
Column 7 of Table 4 shows the correlations between the religious indexes and the average political
participation rate based on the data provided by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
It results that an increase in the religiosity is associated with a higher participation to the electoral
processes. Of course, this outcome should be more clearly explained. For instance, Djupe and Grant
(2001: 311) are arguing that to the extent that religion is positively associated with political
participation is much more related to the role of churches in recruit[ing] parishioners to participate in
politics and in creating the perception among members of a common set of political norms and
expectations that would encourage participation. Indeed, churches are civil (i.e. non-political)
structures and there could be through their specific channels a mobilization for the political life
together with other non-religious organizations of the civil society. And some churches have
significant potential for social mobilization. Supplementary, it could be argued that if there are some
monopolistic characteristic of the religious supply (i.e. a high denominational concentration) it is
much easier for a particular denomination to mobilize a large share of the citizens and to support their
involvement in politic life (of course, if the utility of such denomination is increased by the
maximization of the degree of participation for its believers). Our data does not support such an
argumentation since there appears to be a negative (and not yet consistent) relationship between the
Index of Religious Concentration and the participation. But there is only a point. Another one is the
extent to which a certain set of religious beliefs and practices are encouraging the individuals for selfengagement in the political processes. As Patterson (2005:149) finds in the examination of political
life in Latin America: the primary cleavage in political participation was not between Catholics and
Protestants but between the devout and the not devout. Still, in our data appears a manifestation of
both type of cleavages since the denomination variable is positively and statistical significant
correlated with the political participation. In highly developed countries which largely are Protestants
or Catholics (or a combination between these two denominations), the electoral apathy is (up to a

certain level) a wide phenomena. Au contraire, in the new emergent democracies (which have a lower
share of Christian denominations) the electoral processes are still attracting the citizens. Since in our
opinion the electoral absenteeism is the output of a multi-periodic process, a cross-section analysis of
religion and democracy could not explain why the attractiveness of democracy fades out in the mature
societies. We could only status that: 1) there is such a process and 2) this affects especially the
historical democracies (based in Protestants or Catholics countries).
It is interesting to note that there was found a positive and relevant connection between the religious
behavior and the tendency to vote: the more somebody acts in a religious formal way the more is
likely to participate in electoral processes. This result is somehow different from other findings in
literature. For instance, Thornton and Kent (2009:9) conclude for a set of Latin America countries
that: Church attendance was not a predictor of the other forms of participation (voting, contacting, or
campaigning). Such a difference could be explained by both the facts that our dataset incorporate also
non-Christian countries with a different pattern of religious behavior (more exactly, with a different
content of what it means a religious life) and also that there are significant differences among the
countries in the content of political participation beyond the existence of eventually formal similar
electoral mechanisms.
Relatively surprising, the participation decrease with the increase of Index of Religion Social Role:
despite the fact that citizens believe that religion could provide answers to social problems and that
they are requiring more members of public authorities with religious beliefs, they are involving
themselves less in politic occasions. But such a paradox could be only a partial one since it could be
recalls that a higher level of the belief in the social role of religion could have an adverse effect on
democracy and thus could reduce the opportunities to exercise the right to vote.
The Index of Spirituality seems to act on the same way on political participation as on direct
democracy: an increase in the concerns about the meaning of life stimulates a higher involvement in
the political life as a result of a proactive attitude toward the social problems.

5. Concluding Observations, Limits and Further Research

We have focused in this analysis on the impact exercised by different aspects of institutional religious
life on democracy. The empirical research relied on surveys data, and on four analytical indexes based
on this data, indexes describing the processes of religion concentration, religious behaviors, and
perception about the social role of religion, the importance of spiritual issues in the society, together
with the dominant religious denomination, as well on two global indexes of religious status. The
dependent variables are designed to reflect various aspects of democracy such as electoral process,
functioning of government, political participation and culture or civil liberties.
The main findings could be resumed as follows:

 The level of economic development is positively connected with higher levels of all the
representative democracy measures but negatively with the relative societal preference for the
adoption of some direct democracy mechanisms;
There is a significant impact of religion on the global democratic status for all the measures of
democracy involved in analysis, but this impact appears to be more ambiguous that it could be
deduced from the theoretical framework. It could be found that for both overall religion indexes a
higher level is associated with lower levels of The Economist Democracy Index and Polity IV
project measures but also there is a positive and yet significant relationship between these indexes
and Vanhanen's Index of Democracy and respectively Political Rights and Civil Liberties indexes
provided by Freedom House. Such differences could be attributed to the non-uniform aspects
reflected by each measure of democracy but also to the existence of some outliers in the dataset.
The religious variables constructed based on the World Values Surveys questions exercise a nonuniform influence on democracy dependent measures:
First, the religious concentration tends to limit the various components of democracy: a
monopolistic supply of the religious products is translated into a decrease of the relative social
preference for politic pluralism and politic competition;
Second, the Index of Religious Behavior is positively associated with a higher level of democracy:
the religious ethic could support a democratic culture but does not appears correlated with
efficiency of the public authorities nor with political participation as it is this measured by The
Economist. However, a more consistent religious behavior seems to increase the Turnout variable
from the IDEA data so that there is some room for the idea that a higher religion concentration
could in certain conditions support the political mobilization;
Third, there is a certain negative relationship between our Index of Spirituality and democracy but
this is less clear and stable among the various measures of the democratic aspects;
Fourth, there is a certain cleavage between the societies with a dominant Protestant (and for
certain aspects Catholic) denomination and the others in respect of democratic achievements;
Several questions could be raised regarding these results. A brief list of them includes:
1. Our view is that religion is a cultural variable. Even more, we believe that in initial stages culture
was religion in the sense that the construction of cultural paradigms was based on the magic
hypothesis and only lately there was a development of non-religious cultural components. But
even if the above fact was true, does the cultural generation of culture still holds in the rational
age or there is a separation between the spheres of these variables? If there is such a separation,
then religion is an autonomous factor (eventually generated by private revelation and accepted for
various reasons by a group of individuals) which interact with culture. As Hofstede (1997, 16;

emphasis in the original) argued: Religious affiliation by itself is less culturally relevant than is
often assumed if we trace the religious histories of countries, then the religion a population has
embraced along with the version of that religion seem to have been a result of previously existing
cultural value patterns as much as a cause of cultural differences. In respect to this quote, we are
arguing that this critical challenge how to sort out the pattern of religion and culture and how to
establish the causality between them- can be approached by carefully defining the concepts. Our
line of constructing these definitions is based on the thesis that both religion and culture are
structural providers of meanings and goals for individual lives. Of course, our view is not that as
mammals, the cat and the dog are in a certain sense alike but that there are organic connections
between religion and culture with the last as a generator for the first. It could be noticed that this
issue could be address in an empirical framework by checking for a regular pattern of the religious
and cultural variables. Since we are not testing directly this we could only hypothesis about the
existence of such pattern. More generally speaking, our definition of religion is a not enough
structured one. This is the result of the fact that our view of religion is basically derived from the
cognitivism framework (a la Weber / Tocqueville) as a major strand of religion sociology but we
also intend to incorporate some elements of the structural functionalism (in the line of Durkheim)
in order to account for the capacity of religious institutions to act like social integration structures.
In the absence of an organic synthesis, this attempt remains somehow vague and in fact at the
operational level the proposed measures of religion are rather focused on institutional and
behavioral level that on beliefs and attitudes. Also, it remains to be defended the selection of the
religion variables considered susceptible to influence the dependent ones since there is no explicit
methodology and theoretical support for their selection.
2. How much does our understanding of democracy (regarded as a combination of equality and
freedoms, together with their borderlines) fits in the empirical configurations of the today
democratic societies? It can be noticed that maybe one of the striking evidence is that these
societies are characterized by significant differences as it concern both freedoms and equalities.
Thus, the borderlines of entitlements could vary over the time or also along contemporaneous
societies for a variety of reasons but this does not invalidate both these and the corresponding
freedoms as critical condition for qualifying a society as democratic.
3. How reliable are our measures of religious variables? And what are they really reflecting? These
variables are constructed based on World Values Surveys with the countries selected on the
principle of all data required by the computation of variable being complete. There are some issue
concerning both the data and the methodology. First of all, there is a rather intuitively
methodology of classification. The prevalent criterion used was the doctrinal teaching about the
salvific merit as the main dogmatic element considered in our explications and supplementary for
Christian denominations the sola scriptura position. But such an approach is less systematic for
non-Christian denominations and generally interpretable even for the distinction between

Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox groups and other Christian religious structures. Second, these are
not census data and their accuracy heavily depends on the representative tail of the included
population. Third, it is not clear to which extent the methodology is able to generate unbiased
measures of the corresponding variables. For instance, it could be considered that the weights used
for discriminate between different scale components are rather arbitrary and can induce some
distortions. In the mean time, the content of the features incorporated in the construction of the
variables can be seen as debatable. Just to give an example, why thinking about the meaning and
purpose of life is a spiritual act and not a component of the current religious practice? We
could argue that such a meditation could be done inside or outside of an institutional religious
framework but however the interpretation of the survey questions depends on respondents cultural
referential. The World Values Surveys have the advantage comparative with other cultural data
(e.g. Hofstede ones) that their formulation is more general and less Western culture based on but
still there could be variations in the meaning attributed to different terms. Despite the involved
argumentation, it could appear that our indexes are at the limit of some ad hoc constructions. Still,
the factor analysis suggests that, at least partially, there is some internal coherence of these
religious composites. Fourth, the data used are corresponding to a single wave of surveys so that
there is not possible to have time-varying analysis. We could say that the religious variables are
adjusted in long cycles so that these are stable enough but in conditions of cultural and
societal openness this is rather a pious wish than a de facto situation.
4.

How could be explained the fact that overall global religious indexes (and the economic
development measure) exercise an impact on democracy variables in a manner consistent with the
theoretical framework while this impact is more hieratic for the analytical ones? In general terms,
these variables discriminate in a non-uniform manner between the countries with higher levels of
democracy and the ones with medium and lower levels. One of the most plausible explanations is
that the caeteris paribus conditions are not hold between different groups and subgroups of
countries according to their economic development.

5. What about the caeteris paribus conditions? There appears to be some outliers for which one or
other of the results is less conclusive and / or contrary to the theoretical prediction. Despite the
usage of some instrumental variables, it could be argued that the list of control variables is too
short and other possible determinants should be utilized in order to control for the variations in the
particular situations of the countries included in the dataset. Of course, the composition of the
sample is a heterogeneous one and there could be a complex set of influence factors from
historical conditions, quality of institutional designs geography, technological infrastructure or
resources to economic structures, mechanisms and performances. Thus the analytical framework
should be improved by the inclusion of such factors.
And these are only some limitations of the proposed analysis which can be subject of even further
criticism.

However, beyond all questionable points, our point is that there is a case for substantial inter-linkages
between religion and democracy.

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Appendix
Table 1: Factor Analysis of the Religion Indexes
Loadings
F1

Communality

Uniqueness

Index of Religious Concentration

0.082

0.007

0.980

Index of Religious Behavior

0.736

0.541

0.455

Index of Religion Social Role

0.817

0.668

0.331

Index of Spirituality

0.610

0.373

0.623

Model

Independence

Saturated

Discrepancy

0.006

0.308

0.000

Chi-square statistic

0.266

12.645

---

Chi-square prob.

0.875

0.049

---

Bartlett chi-square

0.248

11.976

---

Bartlett probability

0.883

0.063

---

Parameters

10

Degrees-of-freedom

---

Table 2: Data statistic characteristics

(Cells show un-weighted averages across countries)
A) Explanatory variables
Global

Global

Index of

Index of

Index of

Index of

Dominant

Religion

Religion

Religious

Religious

Religion

Spirituality

religious

Index I

Index II

Concentration

Behavior

Social Role

Mean

38.01

90.36

28.44

51.84

29.44

42.31

2.63

Median

39.04

91.77

30.30

51.75

27.16

42.15

2.00

Maximum

59.97

141.96

49.40

94.80

54.22

64.30

7.00

Minimum

16.29

35.00

1.42

12.25

5.54

25.43

1.00

Std. Dev.

10.53

28.51

13.93

20.87

13.14

8.90

1.50

41

41

41

41

41

41

41

Cross

denomination

sections

B) Dependent variables
Democracy

Electoral

Functioning of

Political

Political

Civil

Index

process

government

participation

Culture

liberties

Mean

6.91

8.11

6.49

6.47

5.68

7.81

Median

7.06

9.17

6.79

6.25

5.56

8.53

Maximum

9.88

10.00

10.00

9.38

10.00

10.00

Minimum

2.53

0.83

0.79

4.38

1.67

1.47

Std. Dev.

1.77

2.47

2.15

1.55

1.82

2.12

41

41

41

41

41

41

Cross
sections

Table 3: Religious determinants of democracy and human development (ranks regressions)

Cells show estimated coefficients with standard errors in ()
Explanatory

Democracy

Electoral

Functioning of

Political

Political

Civil

variable

Index

Process

Government

Participation

Culture

Liberties

Log of per

1.099

0.894

0.952

0.622

1.140

0.904

capita GDP

(0.017)*

(0.020)*

(0.086)*

(0.064)*

(0.043)*

(0.044)*

Index of

-0.063

0.069

-0.085

0.052

-0.112

0.001

Religious

(0.022)***

(0.021)***

(0.056)

(0.056)

(0.037)*

(0.029)

Index of

0.213

0.224

-0.034

0.265

0.171

0.211

Religious

(0.044)*

(0.020)*

(0.116)

(0.174)

(0.093)***

(0.054)**

Index of Religion

-0.105

-0.207

0.169

0.149

-0.006

-0.153

Social Role

(0.024)*

(0.032)*

(0.035)**

(0.107)

(0.071)

(0.032)**

Index of

-0.061

-0.030

0.007

0.187

-0.073

-0.035

Spirituality

(0.028)***

(0.023)

(0.043)

(0.066)**

(0.0836)

(0.020)**

Dominant

-0.719

0.286

-0.046

-1.676

-0.783

0.609

religious

(0.193)**

(0.230)

(0.756)

(0.690)**

(0.609)

(0.422)

Global Religion

-0.044

0.058

0.073

0.409

0.013

0.007

Index I

(0.015)*

(0.003)*

(0.010)*

(0.001)*

(0.001)***

(0.003)***

Global Religion

-0.026

0.053

0.082

0.409

0.009

0.01

Index II

(0.015)*

(0.000)*

(0.004)*

(0.001)*

(0.005)***

(0.005)***

Concentration

Behavior

denomination

R - for each equation (explanatory variables: : log of per capita GDP, the four religious indexes and
denomination): ): 0.72; 0.40;0.51;-0.11;0.45;0.58. R2- for each equation (explanatory variables: : log of per
capita GDP, Global Religion Index I and Global Religious Index II- in []):0.73 [0.73]; 0.35 [0.34];0.51 [0.52];0.07 [0.08];0.50 [0.50];0.53[0.53].*p<0.01, ** p<0.05, ***p<0.1 (two-tailed tests).
Notes: a. The Democracy, Electoral Process, Functioning of Government, Political Participation, Political
Culture and Civil Liberties indexes as dependent variables in Columns 1 through 6 figures are the ones reported
by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2008 Report (http://www.eiu.com). The Economist Intelligence Units
index of democracy, on a 0 to 10 scale, is based on the ratings for 60 indicators grouped in five categories:
electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and
political culture. Each category has a rating on a 0 to 10 scale, and the overall index of democracy is the simple
average of the five category indexes. The category indexes are based on the sum of the indicator scores in the
category, converted to a 0 to 10 scale. Adjustments to the category scores are made if countries do not score a 1
in the following critical areas for democracy: 1. whether national elections are free and fair; 2. the security of

voters; 3.the influence of foreign powers on government; 4. the capability of the civil service to implement
policies. If the scores for the first three questions are 0 (or 0.5), one point (0.5 point) is deducted from the index
in the relevant category (either the electoral process and pluralism or the functioning of government). If the score
for 4 is 0, one point is deducted from the functioning of government category index. The index values are used to
place countries within one of four types of regimes: 1. Full democracies scores of 8-10; 2. Flawed
democraciesscore of 6 to 7.9 3. Hybrid regimesscores of 4 to 5.9; 4 Authoritarian regimesscores below 4.
The values are obtained from experts (not clearly identified), public opinion surveysmainly the World Values
Survey, Eurobarometer surveys, Gallup polls, Latin American Barometer, and national surveys.
b. The religious indexes are computed according to the methodology described by the relations (1) to (5). For all
the variables, the figures represent the corresponding ranks (1 for the highest value and 41 for the lowest).
Each system treats the log of per capita GDP ranks as endogenous and uses as instruments: the general
government final consumption expenditure; gross capital formation; total value added by services sector; the
Index of Economic Freedom scores for 2007 and the other explanatory variables.
c. The economic variables are from UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics 2008: http://stats.unctad.org/handbook/
ReportFolders/ReportFolders.aspx?IF_ActivepathName=P/VIII.%20Development%20indicators
d. The Index of Economic Freedom s built upon analysis of 10 specific components (Business Freedom ;Trade
Freedom; Fiscal Freedom; Government Size; Monetary Freedom; Investment Freedom; Financial Freedom;
Property rights; Freedom from Corruption; Labor Freedom) of economic freedom, some of which are themselves
composites of additional quantifiable measures by assigning a grade in each using a scale from 0 to 100, where
100 represents the maximum freedom. The 10 component scores are equally weighted and averaged to get an
overall economic freedom score for each country. The index is provided by Heritage Foundationhttp://www.heritage.org/Index/.

Table 4: Religious determinants of democracy miscellaneous measures of the democracy status

(ranks regressions)
Cells show estimated coefficients with standard errors in ()
Explanatory

Polity IV

Polity IV

Vanhanen's

Political

Civil

Direct

Turnout

variable

Institutionalized

Revised

Index of

Rights

Liberties

Democracy

(IDEA)

Democracy

Combined

Democracy

(Freedom

(Freedom

(IDEA)

House)

House)

Polity
Score
Log of per

0.121

0.133

0.748

0.111

0.110

-0.077

0.44

capita GDP

(0.004)*

(0.000)*

(0.103)*

(0.012)*

(0.004)**

(0.018)*

(0.046)*

Index of

-0.003

-0.009

0.248

-0.011

0.0001

0.283

-0.047

Religious

(0.002)

(0.001)*

(0.075)*

(0.004)*

(0.001)

(0.028)***

(0.031)

Index of

0.062

0.078

0.006

0.065

0.041

-0.044

0.177

Religious

(0.005)*

(0.004)*

(0.125)

(0.007)*

(0.003)**

(0.016)*

(0.070)***

-0.018

-0.024

-0.399

-0.006

-0.006

-0.164

-0.233

Concentration

Behaviour
Index of

(0.002)*

(0.006)*

(0.050)*

(0.003)*

(0.003)**

(0.049)*

(0.082)***

Index of

-0.060

-0.072

0.189

-0.052

-0.034

0.126

0.400

Spirituality

(0.002)*

(0.007)*

(0.045)*

(0.006)*

(0.003)**

(0.032)*

(0.072)*

Dominant

0.240

0.280

1.443

0.046

0.014

2.682

1.878

religious

(0.015)*

(0.014)*

(0.879)***

(0.094)

(0.028)

(0.271)*

(0.413)*

Global

-0.003

-0.006

0.024

0.004

0.007

0.227

0.341

Religion

(0.000)**

(0.000)**

(0.002)***

(0.001)***

(0.003)**

(0.018)*

(0.004)*

Global

-0.004

-0.002

0.003

0.007

0.010

0.206

0.350

Religion

(0.000)**

(0.001)**

(0.000)***

(0.001)***

(0.005)**

(0.003)*

(0.011)*

Religion
Social Role

denomination

Index I

Index II
Number of countries for each equation: 41; R2- for each equation (explanatory variables: log of per capita GDP
the four religious indexes and denomination):0.62;0.61;0.73;0.59;0.65;-0.03;0.17; R2- for each equation
(explanatory variables: log of per capita GDP, Global Religion Index I and Global Religious Index II- in []): 0.48
[0.48];0.42 [0.42]; 0.57 [0.57]; 0.43 [0.44]; 0.53 [0.53];-0.18 [-0.22];0.01 [0.04]; *p<0.01, ** p<0.05, ***p<0.1
(two-tailed tests).

Notes:
a.

Polity IV Institutionalized Democracy is an index provided by the Center for Systemic Peace-Polity IV
Project (http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm). The institutionalized democracy elements
considered are concerning: 1) the presence of institutions and procedures through which citizens can express
effective preferences about alternative policies and leaders; 2) the existence of institutionalized constraints
on the exercise of power by the executive;3) the guarantee of civil liberties to all citizens in their daily lives
and in acts of political participation. The Polity IV Institutionalized Democracy is an additive eleven-point
scale (0-10). The POLITY score is computed by subtracting the autocracy score from the democracy
score; the resulting unified polity scale ranges from +10 (strongly democratic) to 10 (strongly autocratic).
The Revised Combined Polity Score is a modified version of the POLITY variable. It modifies the annual
POLITY score by applying a simple treatment, or fix, to convert instances of standardized authority
scores (i.e., -66, -77, and -88) to conventional polity scores (i.e., within the range, -10 to +10). For both
indexes the figures used in the ranks computation are the ones corresponding to year 2006.

b.

The Vanhanen's Index of Democracy represents the data constructed by T. Vanhanen (http://www.prio.no/
CSCW/Datasets/Governance/Vanhanens-index-of-democracy/Polyarchy-Dataset-Manuscript/) in his study
of polyarchy. The index is a combination of two variables: a) the degree of political competition and,
respectively, b) the percentage of the population who actually voted in these elections which was used to
indicate the degree of participation in the political processes. The competition indicator is biased to
produce somewhat higher values for countries using proportional electoral systems than for countries using
plurality or majority electoral systems. In order to restrict the effects of this bias, there is an upper limit of
the smaller parties share that is used in the calculation (70%). In several countries using proportional

electoral systems, the smaller parties' share rises higher than 70 percent, but the value of competition is
not higher than 70 percent for any country. The two indicators competition and participation are
combined into an index by multiplying them and dividing the outcome by 100. a low value for either of the
two variables is enough to keep the index value low. A high level of participation cannot compensate for the
lack of competition, or vice versa. The data used here are the ones for the last electoral cycle in each country
(generally from the 2000 electoral processes).
c.

The Political Rights and the Civil Liberties indexes are reported by Freedom House (http://www.
freedomhouse.org/). The ratings process is based on a checklist of 10 political rights questions and 15 civil
liberties questions. The political rights questions are grouped into three subcategories: Electoral Process (3
questions), Political Pluralism and Participation (4), and Functioning of Government (3). The civil liberties
questions are grouped into four subcategories: Freedom of Expression and Belief (4 questions),
Associational and Organizational Rights (3), Rule of Law (4), and Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights
(4). Raw points are awarded to each of these questions on a scale of 0 to 4, where 0 points represents the
smallest degree and 4 the greatest degree of rights or liberties present. The political rights section also
contains two additional discretionary questions: question A (For traditional monarchies that have no parties
or electoral process, does the system provide for genuine, meaningful consultation with the people,
encourage public discussion of policy choices, and allow the right to petition the ruler?) and question B (Is
the government or occupying power deliberately changing the ethnic composition of a country or territory
so as to destroy a culture or tip the political balance in favor of another group?). For additional discretionary
question A, 1 to 4 points may be added, as applicable, while for discretionary question B, 1 to 4 points may
be subtracted (the worse the situation, the more points that may be subtracted). The highest number of points
that can be awarded to the political rights checklist is 40 (or a total of up to 4 points for each of the 10
questions). The highest number of points that can be awarded to the civil liberties checklist is 60 (or a total
of up to 4 points for each of the 15 questions). The total number of points awarded to the political rights and
civil liberties checklists determines the political rights and civil liberties ratings. Each rating of 1 through 7,
with 1 representing the highest and 7 the lowest level of freedom corresponds to a range of total points. Each
pair of political rights and civil liberties ratings is averaged to determine an overall status of Free, Partly
Free, or Not Free. Those whose ratings average 1.0 to 2.5 are considered Free, 3.0 to 5.0 Partly Free,
and 5.5 to 7.0 Not Free. The figures are corresponding to the 2007 values.

d.

The Direct Democracy index values represents own computation based on information supplied by the
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (http://www.idea.int/elections/dd/world_survey.cfm). The
involved methodology implies to score the countries according to the next rules: 1 point if there are legal
provisions for mandatory referendums -national level; 0.8 points if there are legal provisions for optional
referendums- national level; 1 point if there are legal provisions for citizens initiatives- national level; 1
point if there are legal provisions for agenda initiatives- national level; 1 point if there are legal provisions
for recall- national level; 1 point if the referendum results are binding always , 0.5 points if this is happened
sometimes and 0 points if this is never happened; 0.75 points if both constitutional and other issues could be
brought to a referendum, 0.3 point if only constitutional issues and 0.1 if only other issues could be subject
of a referendum; 1 point for legal provisions at regional level; 1 point for legal provisions at local level; 1

point if there has been a national referendum since 1980 and 0 point otherwise. The index is the nonweighted aggregation of these scores (legal framework updated by the Institute for May 2009).
e.

Turnout represents the average political participation rate computed based on the voting age population as
well as the number of registered voters as these are reported by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance (www.idea.int). The voting age population figure includes an estimated number of all those
citizens over the legal voting age while the registration rate comprises the actual number of people on the
voters roll. The criteria for including elections in the database refer to: 1) the election has been held after
1945; 2) the elections are for national political office in independent nation states (with some exceptions); 3)
there was a degree of competitiveness (that is, more than one party contested the elections, or one party and
independents contested the elections, or the election was only contested by independent candidates); 4) the
franchise was universal. For the European countries, data includes the elections for the European
Parliament. The figures are a simple non-weighted average of the political participation rate.

f.

The religious indexes are computed according to the methodology described by the relations (1) to (5). For
all the variables, the figures represent the corresponding ranks (with1 for the highest value). If there are
two equal values, the ranks in the democracy indexes are the same. All the regressions are including as
instrumental variable a dummy which take the value of 1 for ex-communist countries and 0 otherwise
together with the other mentioned variables.