Reconceptualizing Church and State
39 Pages Posted: 29 Mar 2010 Last revised: 6 Apr 2010
Abstract
In this article, we address the need to reconceptualize the relationship between democracy and the separation of religion and state. We argue that previous studies have misconceptualized the impact religion can have on democracy, or have taken a narrow focus by concentrating on specific cases. We use principle component analysis and a large-n dataset covering 125 countries to show that the separation of religion and state should be conceptualized multi-dimensionally and that it should be considered a component of democracy. Our findings also show that as separation of religion and state increases the level of democracy also increases.
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