The Religion and State Project, Round 1

DOI

10.17605/OSF.IO/XDVTA

Citation

Fox, J., & Sandler, S. (2021, September 23). The Religion and State Project, Round 1.

Summary

The Religion and State (RAS) project is a university-based project located at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Its goal is to create a set of measures that systematically gauge the intersection between government and religion. The RAS dataset measures the extent of government involvement in religion (GIR), or the lack thereof, for 175 states on a yearly basis between 1990 and 2002. This constitutes all countries with populations of 250,000 or more, as well as a sampling of smaller states.

Data File

Cases: 175
Variables: 996
Weight Variable: None

Data Collection

1999-2002

Funded By

Israel Science Foundation and The Sara and Simha Lainer Chair in Democracy and Civility

Collection Procedures

For each state, coders would prepare a report based on human rights reports, academic resources, as well as news media sources, primarily taken from the Lexis/Nexis database. Based on this report the coder filled out the codesheet under the supervision of Jonathan Fox. An additional measure to ensure inter-coder reliability is our policy that about one in every four states were recoded by additional coders based on the reports discussed and compared to the original codings.

Sampling Procedures

This project coded all countries which in 2000 had a population of at least 250,000 and Western Democracy countries with lower populations.

Principal Investigators

Jonathan Fox, Bar Ilan University and Shmuel Sandler, Bar Ilan University.

Related Publications

Fox, Jonathan. 2008. A World Survey of Religion and the State. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Uslaner, Eric. Forthcoming. Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Religion and State project website: http://www.religionandstate.org