Does State Repression Suppress the Protest Participation of Religious People?

Abstract

The relationship between religion and protest participation has long been of interest to sociologists, however few cross-national, quantitative studies have examined this relationship in a robust methodological way. In addition, how state repression influences the protest participation of religious people is still not clear. Using a dataset integrating the sixth wave of the World Values Surveys, the freedom index created by the Freedom House, and the Religion and State project, we first examine the relationship between individual-level religious participation and protest participation on a worldwide scale, and then assess how country-level repression moderates this relationship. The results of our multilevel logistic regression models show that (1) religious participation has a positive effect on protest participation, and (2) this positive effect is stronger in more repressive countries.