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Abstract
This study introduces a new dataset on world religions. The World Religion Project consists of (a) a systematically developed classification of major world religions and religious families within major world religions, which enabled (b) the collection of data on the distribution of the population of all states in the international system across these religious categories, over the period of 1945–2010, and (c) a set of methods to reconcile among conflicting data from multiple sources, to deal with missing data, and to integrate multiple figures for a given observation. In the present study we discuss the significance of the World Religion Project, its internal logic and the development of the religion tree system of classification, and the data collection and data management process. We then provide a number of descriptive statistics about national, dyadic, regional, and global distributions of world religions, as well as some preliminary relationships between the religious similarity of states and their regime type, alliance patterns, and propensity to conflict. We discuss the potential contribution of this dataset to the study of the relationship between religion and international conflict and cooperation.
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Notes
This project was funded by grant #13242 from the Templeton Foundation, with the support of the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) at the Pennsylvania State University. We wish to thank Roger Finke, the project director, and our assistants and coders: Carl Palmer, Aimee Tannehill, Paul Johnson, Katherine Unger, Tatiana Vashchilko, Molly Sweeny, Anisha Chikarmane, Samantha Gallardo, and Phil Shafer. The World Religion datasets are posted on the Correlates of War (http://www.correlatesofwar.org) and the ARDA (http://www.thearda.com) websites. Responsibility for the data and its interpretations in this paper is ours alone.
1A list of sources is provided on the project's website at: http://www.correlatesofwar.org and http://www.thearda.com.
2A useful example of how this criterion operates is available on the ARDA website with respect to Christian denominations in the United States. See http://www.thearda.com/Denoms/Families/trees.asp.
3For a complete list of sources, see the annotated bibliography on the project's website at http://www.correlatesofwar.org.
4This would be 1945 for states that existed at that time, or the first half-decade year for states that were formed after this point.
5For example, average record reliability scores in 2010 is twice that of 1950.
6For example, there was a 10% drop in the percentage of nonreligious people in Albania from 1990 to 1995 and a 12% increase in the number of Muslims during the same period. Likewise, Serbia shows a 13% increase in the percentage of Christians between 2000 and 2005.
7These data are highly consistent with the Pew survey of world religions of December 2012 (Pew 2012), although we differ significantly on some elements (for example, regional distributions).
8Most of the empirical studies on the relationship between religion and conflict cited above focus on the concept of religious similarity and its impact on conflict and cooperation.
9We do not have reliable figures for Judaism and Buddhism; therefore, we do not use the religious families for these religions.
10Also, as mentioned above, post-Communist or post-Soviet states tended to report more religious affiliations than during the Soviet/Communist era. This accounts, to a large extent, for the growth in reporting of Islamic beliefs among post-Soviet republics.
11The dataset is available in two different locations. First, it is part of the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) at http://www.thearda.com. Second, it is part of the Correlates of War data hosting program at www.correlatesofwar.org. We thank these organizations for hosting and maintaining the data and documentation.