Religion and foreign-policy views: Are religious people more altruistic and/or more militant?
| Author | Ivica Petrikova |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512118756242 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512118756242
International Political Science Review
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Religion and foreign-policy views:
Are religious people more altruistic
and/or more militant?
Ivica Petrikova
University of London, UK
Abstract
Religion shapes people’s identity and behaviour, and thus influences their foreign-policy views. Yet, existing
research has thus far not explored this issue in depth or cross-nationally. This article contributes to filling
this gap by examining the effects of religious belief, belonging, and behaviour on people’s foreign-policy views
across a large sample of countries. Further, it investigates how these effects are influenced by religions’ social
standing and countries’ income level. The study finds that religion significantly heightens followers’ militant
internationalist views. Its effect on cooperative internationalist views is more ambiguous. Frequent religious
attendance, self-identification as a religious person, and adherence to Islam tend to make people more
altruistic in their foreign-policy views, while affiliation with Christianity and other religious faiths (Hinduism,
Buddhism, etc.) may have the opposite effect. Overall, religion has a stronger effect on foreign-policy views
among adherents to majority religions and in poorer countries.
Keywords
Religion, public opinion, foreign policy, cooperative internationalism, militant internationalism
Introduction
Recent events like the rise of ISIS and Boko Haram and religiously motivated terrorist attacks
across Europe demonstrate that religion plays an important role in international affairs. Research
by the Pew Centre (2015) validates this: by 2050, the global percentage of religious people is
expected to increase from the current 84 to 87. Hence, it is likely that religion will retain a size-
able influence on international relations for the foreseeable future; yet, to date, cross-country
research on how religion affects foreign-policy attitudes has been scarce. This study examines
the impact of religious belief, belonging, and behaviour on people’s international views across a
large number of countries.
Corresponding author:
Ivica Petrikova, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Founders
Building, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK.
Email: ivica.petrikova@rhul.ac.uk
756242IPS0010.1177/0192512118756242International Political Science ReviewPetrikova
research-article2018
Article
2 International Political Science Review 00(0)
The article proceeds in the following manner. The next section offers a brief discussion of the
relevant literature and proposed theoretical arguments. The following sections talk about the
empirical models employed and introduce the data used along with their summary statistics.
Thereafter, I present the results of my analysis, discuss major findings, and provide some conclud-
ing remarks.
The effects of religion on foreign-policy views
What is religion and how does it affect people’s views?
Religion has been commonly defined as an ‘institutionalised system of beliefs and practices con-
cerning the supernatural realm’, as well as ‘the personal beliefs by which an individual relates to
and experiences the supernatural realm’ (Lunn, 2009: 937). Thus, religion both forms part of one’s
multifaceted identity (i.e. one’s socially influenced and culturally constructed conception of self)
and serves as a source of world views and values that ‘provide a guide to the right living’ (Warner
and Walker, 2011: 120).
Since different religious groups promote ‘different values, worldviews … [and] tradi-
tions’, the effect of religion on people’s views and attitudes likely varies with specific reli-
gious affiliation (Wuthnow and Lewis, 2008: 193). Religious beliefs and affiliations further
interact with other social identifiers (e.g. ethnicity, race, etc.). They are also shaped by
attendance at religious services, which generally ‘consist of elevating the importance of [cer-
tain] values in the decision-making process of [congregation] members’ (Djupe and Calfano,
2013: 644), as well as by the cultural and social portrayal of religion. A study aiming to
understand how religion influences people’s views and attitudes should, therefore, ideally
include measures of religious belief, belonging, and behaviour (Glazier, 2013: 129), along
with consideration of the religion’s social standing and country context. Accordingly, and in
a relatively unprecedented manner, the study presented in this article examines all five of
these religious elements.
Classification of foreign-policy views
The literature on public attitudes, published predominantly in the US, initially found that the gen-
eral public was largely uninterested in, and ill-informed about, international relations (Holsti,
2004). Thus, for a long time, little attention was paid to people’s foreign-policy views and their
determinants. However, this consensus eroded as research showed that ‘people have [actually]
relatively well-defined attitude structures that make public opinion about foreign policy stable over
time’ (Taydas et al., 2012: 1222). Ensuing research evolved into measuring people’s foreign-policy
views along the ‘Wittkopf–Holsti–Rosenau’ typology of cooperative and militant internationalism
(Guth, 2013: 229).
Cooperative, or altruistic, internationalism (CI) is a foreign-policy attitude that emphasises
international cooperation, the role of international institutions, and the welfare of people globally
(Guth, 2013). Militant, or hegemonic, internationalism (MI) sees other countries as a possible dan-
ger to one’s own and considers the use of force in international affairs an often-inevitable necessity
(Guth, 2013). The two opinion axes are orthogonal, with people’s views on them giving rise, as
Figure 1 shows, to a four-fold classification into ‘hardliners’ (high on MI, low on CI), ‘internation-
alists’ (high on MI, high on CI), ‘accommodationists’ (low on MI, high on CI), and ‘isolationists’
(low on MI, low on CI) (Wittkopf, 1990). Hence, it is possible for people to be, for example, both
highly cooperative and highly militant internationalists.
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