How do religious leaders influence support for political compromise in conflicts involving sacred values? While existing literature suggests religious leaders can be effective peace entrepreneurs, their actual influence remains debated. We examine this question through two survey experiments in Israel, varying religious leaders’ religious authority and political credibility to understand their ability to generate support for compromise in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our results reveal important limitations on religious leaders’ influence: while we find modest effects of combined religious and political authority among religious respondents, neither form of authority alone significantly affects support for peace. Our findings suggest religious leaders’ capacity to promote political compromise is more constrained than previously theorized. When effects do emerge, they concentrate among already-religious audiences, suggesting religious leaders may better reinforce than transform political attitudes. These results contribute to understanding conditions under which religious authority shapes political behavior and highlight practical challenges in leveraging religious leadership for conflict resolution.
While the right to practice one’s religion is considered a fundamental value in Western European democracies, there is considerable debate about government employees wearing religious symbols. In this study, we test whether disapproval of civil servants wearing religious symbols originates from a general opposition against the expression of religion in public settings or from prejudice, specifically Islamophobia and Antisemitism. We test this by analyzing a split ballot experiment, which assesses the acceptance of government employees wearing three different religious symbols: the Christian cross, the Muslim headscarf, and the Jewish yarmulke. On the one hand, we find that an endorsement of the right to publicly express one’s religion predicts support for government employees wearing any religious symbol. Yet, prejudice, particularly Islamophobia, predicted opposition against both the Muslim headscarf and the Jewish yarmulke, overturning the abovementioned effect, indicating that these attitudes are closely aligned with attitudes regarding the place of Islam in societies.
Which levels of religiosity are most associated with terrorism threat perception amid conflict and why? Using three waves of the Israel National Election Study conducted around national elections (2015, 2019, 2022; pooled N = 1,848), we estimate cumulative link models with multi-point religiosity measures to examine nonlinear effects. Results reveal a robust inverted U-shaped relationship: threat perception peaks at intermediate religiosity and declines among both the very religious and the secular. The pattern holds across election cycles and after adjusting for political orientation, gender, education, and age. We interpret these findings through the concept of existential clarity, arguing that coherent religious and secular worldviews provide stable interpretive frameworks that buffer perceived threat, whereas intermediate positions may reflect lower belief-system coherence. By integrating nonlinear modeling with religion-politics theory, the study reconciles inconsistent findings in the literature and clarifies how religiosity structures threat perception in democracies facing sustained insecurity.
Scholarly interest in the evaluation of atheist candidates for office has been growing. In the aggregate, atheists are a political pariah. However, aggregate effects conceal a wide partisan gulf, with Democrats more open and Republicans more averse to atheist candidates for office. Less is known about biases that nonreligious candidates with less stridently secular views might encounter in political evaluation. Focusing on broadly conceptualized nonreligion, I make several contributions to the literature: 1) I partially replicate the findings on the links between nonreligion and political appraisal using a conjoint experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey; 2) I assess the relative importance of nonreligion and other factors that influence candidate appraisal; 3) I investigate how partisanship and religiosity interact to affect receptivity to candidate nonreligion; and 4) I examine how age and religiosity interact to influence Democrats’ and Republicans’ openness to candidate nonreligion.
In what conditions are national episcopates in Latin America likely to confront autocratic regimes? In what conditions are bishops positioned to mediate state-society conflicts? This article offers a structural account of episcopal responses to autocracy through comparative analysis of church-state relations and pastoral letters published in Cuba and Nicaragua during critical junctures from the Cold War to the 2020s. The personalization of regime authority, combined with repressive violence, increases the likelihood that bishops publicly confront autocracy. Personalization reduces opportunities for mediation, as regime leaders resist compromising their authority in mediation processes. Moreover, United States punitive measures against autocracies dependent on great power support can shift bishops into confrontational roles. Latin American regimes seeking alliances with geopolitical adversaries of the United States can also preclude opportunities for bishops to mediate conflicts. Conversely, the depersonalization of authority and the necessity to alleviate United States pressure opens the space that makes episcopal mediation efforts possible.
