{"id":479,"date":"2012-06-04T14:13:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T14:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rulesofreason.wordpress.com\/?p=479"},"modified":"2012-06-04T14:13:17","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T14:13:17","slug":"protestants-missionaries-and-the-diffusion-of-liberal-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=479","title":{"rendered":"Protestants, Missionaries and the Diffusion of Liberal Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new APSR article<\/a> [ungated<\/a>] argues for the crucial role of Protestant missionaries in the global spread of liberal democracy.\u00a0The\u00a0statistical analyses\u00a0tease out the effect of missionaries from the\u00a0influence of\u00a0the characteristics of\u00a0colonizers\u00a0(Britain, the Netherlands, France, etc.)\u00a0and pre-existing geographic, economic and cultural characteristics of the\u00a0states. Interestingly, Protestant missionary influence not only remains a significant predictor of democracy outside the Western world once these factors are controlled for, but it renders them obsolete (which is a big deal because the same institutional, geographic, economic and cultural characteristics have been the usual explanations of democracy diffusion). On the other hand, the patterns in the data are consistent with the plausible mechanisms through which the effect of Protestant missionaries is exercised – the spread of newspapers, education, and civil society.<\/p>\n

I am sure this article is not going to be the last word on democracy diffusion, but it certainly\u00a0puts the influence of Protestantism center stage. The major issue, I suspect, is not going to be methodological (since the article already considers a plethora of potential methodological complications in the appendix<\/a>), but conceptual – to what extent the effect of Protestant missionaries can be conceptually separated from the improvements in education and the growth of the public sphere. In other words, do (did) you need the religious component at all, or education, newspapers and civil society would have worked on their own to make liberal democracy more likely (even if fostered by other channels than Protestant missionaries) .<\/p>\n

In terms of methodology, it might be interesting to\u00a0analyze the same data\u00a0using necessary and sufficient conditions: I would find it even more\u00a0informative to see whether the presence of Protestant missionaries is necessary and\/or sufficient for the emergence of stable liberal democracy, in addition to the evidence for a robust (linear?) association between the two, as\u00a0reported in the current article.<\/p>\n

Here is the abstract<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America andOceaniaand removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new APSR article [ungated] argues for the crucial role of Protestant missionaries in the global spread of liberal democracy.\u00a0The\u00a0statistical analyses\u00a0tease out the effect of missionaries from the\u00a0influence of\u00a0the characteristics of\u00a0colonizers\u00a0(Britain, the Netherlands, France, etc.)\u00a0and pre-existing geographic, economic and cultural characteristics of the\u00a0states. Interestingly, Protestant missionary influence not only remains a significant predictor of democracy outside the Western world once these factors are controlled for, but it renders them obsolete (which is a big deal because the same institutional, geographic, economic and cultural characteristics have been the usual explanations of democracy diffusion). On the other hand, the patterns in the data are consistent with the plausible mechanisms through which the effect of Protestant missionaries is exercised – the spread of newspapers, education, and civil society. I am sure this article is not going to be the last word on democracy diffusion, but it certainly\u00a0puts the influence of Protestantism center stage. The major issue, I suspect, is not going to be methodological (since the article already considers a plethora of potential methodological complications in the appendix), but conceptual – to what extent the effect of Protestant missionaries can be conceptually separated from the improvements in education and the growth of the public sphere. In other words, do (did) you need the religious component at all, or education, newspapers and civil society would have worked on their own to make liberal democracy more likely (even if fostered by other channels than Protestant missionaries) . In terms of methodology, it might be interesting…<\/p>\n

Continue readingProtestants, Missionaries and the Diffusion of Liberal Democracy<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[13,19,33],"tags":[174,383,413,414,526,573],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7g3hj-7J","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":619,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=619","url_meta":{"origin":479,"position":0},"title":"The European Commission vs. the People","date":"December 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Note: re-post from the sister-blog The Commission has recently published its vision about the future of European integration. 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