Carolyn M. Warner

Political parties and the opportunity costs of patronage

Analyses of patronage and political parties often start from the assumption that patronage is a vote-winning and useful organizational strategy for a political party. This paper questions this assumption and suggests that, for the political party using it, patronage exacts a variety of costs. These undermine the partys existence as an organization with a collective purpose, and even its vote-winning capacities. Examples from a number of different countries and parties illustrate the argument.

Religion and Intergroup Conflict Findings From the Global Group Relations Project

How might religion shape intergroup conflict? We tested whether religious infusion—the extent to which religious rituals and discourse permeate the everyday activities of groups and their members—moderated the effects of two factors known to increase intergroup conflict: competition for limited resources and incompatibility of values held by potentially conflicting groups. We used data from the Global Group Relations Project to investigate 194 groups (e.g., ethnic, religious, national) at 97 sites around the world. When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them—despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research.

Christian Democracy in Italy An alternative path to religious party moderation

This article argues that historical context can be a strong force for the origins of an ideologically and behaviourally moderate religious political party. It explores the origins of Italian Christian Democracy, following the trajectory of the Partito Popolare Italiano and Democrazia Cristiana in order to highlight a path to religious party moderation that excludes extremism and violence at all stages. That path includes the development of a moderate ideology prior to inclusion in the democratic system, influenced by efforts to reconcile Catholicism with democracy. Extremist alternatives are eliminated not through the moderating tendencies of a democratic political system but by historical events and by efforts of the moderate religious party to ensure that the democratic system does not collapse. Ideological and behavioural moderation are understood as acceptance of democracy and promotion of civil liberties, not as the notion that a party becomes in some way less religious.

Theorizing and Measuring Religiosity Across Cultures

For almost 50 years, psychologists have been theorizing about and measuring religiosity essentially the way Gordon Allport did, when he distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. However, there is a historical debate regarding what this scale actually measures, which items should be included, and how many factors or subscales exist. To provide more definitive answers, we estimated a series of confirmatory factor analysis models comparing four competing theories for how to score Gorsuch and McPherson’s commonly used measure of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. We then formally investigated measurement invariance across U.S. Protestants, Irish Catholics, and Turkish Muslims and across U.S. Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims. We provide evidence that a five-item version of intrinsic religiosity is invariant across the U.S. samples and predicts less warmth toward atheists and gay men/lesbians, validating the scale. Our results suggest that a variation of Gorsuch and McPherson’s measure may be appropriate for some but not all uses in cross-cultural research.

Micro-Foundations of Religion and Public Goods Provision: Belief, Belonging, and Giving in Catholicism and Islam

While debates continue about the relationship between state-provided social welfare and religious charities, and whether organized religions are more capable of providing social welfare than is the public sector, less attention has focused on the question of what motivates religious adherents to contribute to the charitable work of their religions. In this article, we examine how adherents of Catholicism and Islam understand their generosity and its relationship to their faith. Through 218 semi-structured interviews with Catholics and Muslims in four cities in France, Ireland, Italy, and Turkey, we find systematic differences between the two religions. Catholics emphasize love of others and Muslims emphasize duty to God. We also find, contrary to expectations of the literature that emphasizes monitoring and sanctioning within groups to obtain cooperation, that Catholics and Muslims see their generosity as also motivated by the positive affect they feel towards their respective communities.