Does government treatment of religion affect intergroup religious violence in Western democracies? This study asks whether government-based religious discrimination against minorities and government support for majority religion influence religiously motivated societal violence involving Muslim minorities.
🔎 New cross-national time-series covering 25 Western countries
- A novel, disaggregated dataset tracks religiously motivated societal violence across 25 Western democracies.
- Incidents are coded by both victim and perpetrator group to capture violence perpetrated by and against Muslim minorities and by majority religious groups.
🔬 How the relationship was tested
- Cross-country time-series models estimate associations between two government behaviors (religious discrimination and government support for the majority religion) and occurrences of religiously driven societal violence.
- A focused case study of the United Kingdom uses the synthetic control method to probe causal plausibility and to validate cross-national results.
📈 Key findings
- Government religious discrimination is associated with a greater likelihood that a country will experience religiously motivated societal violence.
- This association holds for violence perpetrated by Muslim minorities and for violence perpetrated by majority religious groups (i.e., both directions of intergroup violence).
- Government support for the majority religion shows no evidence of increasing societal religious violence and therefore appears not to pose a security threat in the measured contexts.
- The UK synthetic control case corroborates the main cross-country results.
💡 Why it matters
- Results suggest that formal state discrimination against religious minorities elevates the risk of religiously driven societal violence in Western democracies.
- Findings carry direct policy implications for designing counter-strategies aimed at both Islamist and right-wing violent extremism, by highlighting the danger of discriminatory government treatment of minorities.
