Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T13:23:18.523Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Religious reasons in the public sphere: an empirical study of religious actors’ argumentative patterns in Swiss direct democratic campaigns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2012

André Bächtiger ,
Judith Könemann ,
Ansgar Jödicke  and
Dominik Hangartner
André Bächtiger*
Affiliation:
Swiss National Science Foundation Research Professor, Institute for Political Science, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Judith Könemann
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Catholic Theology, University of Münster, Germany
Ansgar Jödicke
Affiliation:
Senior Researcher, Department of Religious Studies, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Dominik Hangartner
Affiliation:
Lecturer, London School of Economics, Methodology Institute, London UK, and University of Zurich, Department of Political Science, Zurich, Switzerland
*
*E-mails: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The ‘going public’ of religious actors is taking central stage both in religious studies and political philosophy. But this ‘going public’ of religious actors is controversial. The debate revolves around the question of whether religious actors must frame their religious convictions in terms of secular reasons or whether they should be allowed to introduce religiously grounded beliefs into public political argument without constraints. Despite vigorous and ongoing debate, there is little systematic and empirical research on this question. This article focuses on the public statements of religious actors in the context of Swiss direct democratic votes on abortion and immigration. Our empirical findings reveal an interesting gap: while many political philosophers and religious thinkers have moved to a position where religious actors can – and even should – openly employ religious arguments, the practice of religious actors in Switzerland is different. The larger denominations of Catholics and Protestants especially have a tendency to use a great amount of secular vocabulary. In addition, our findings also reveal that the use of religious or secular reasons varies considerably according to different issues, different media types (religious vs. secular press), different religious traditions, different alliance structures, and different media genres, while there is no clear time trend.

Keywords

religionpolitical philosophyargumentation
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 105 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Audi, R. (2000), Religious Commitment and Secular Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boettcher, J.W.Harmon, J. (2009), ‘Introduction: religion and the public sphere’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 35: 5–22.Google Scholar
Bruce, S. (2002), God is Dead: Secularization in the West, Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Carter, S.L. (1993), The Culture of Disbelief. How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Casanova, J. (1994), Public Religion in the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, J.A. (2001), ‘Public religion and religion in public’, Wake Forest Law Review 36: 279–304.Google Scholar
Davie, G. (1994), Religion in Britain Since 1945. Believing Without Belonging, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Davie, G. (2000), Religion in Modern Europe. Am Memory Mutates, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dobbelaere, K. (2002), Secularization. An Analysis at Three Levels, Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Entman, R.M. (1993), ‘Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm’, Journal of Communication 43: 51–58.Google Scholar
Gabriel, K. (1996), Religiöse Individualisierung und Säkularisierung. Biographie und Gruppe als Bezugspunkte moderner Religiosität, Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus.Google Scholar
Gelman, A.Hill, J. (2007), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, A., Carlin, J.B., Stern, H.S.Rubin, D.B. (2003), Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd edn., London: Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Gelman, A., Jakulin, A., Pittau, M.G.Su, Y-S. (2008), ‘A weakly informative default prior distribution for logistic and other regression models’, The Annals of Applied Statistics 2: 1360–1383.Google Scholar
Gill, J. (2007), Bayesian Methods for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn., Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Giugni, M.Passy, F. (2002), ‘Between post-nationalism and neo-institutionalism: the structuring of public debates in Switzerland in the field of immigration and ethnic relations’, Swiss Political Science Review 8: 21–52.Google Scholar
Firth, D. (1993), ‘Bias reduction of maximum likelihood estimates’, Biometrika 80: 27–38.Google Scholar
Habermas, J. (2006), ‘Religion in the public sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy 14: 1–25.Google Scholar
Hänggli, R. (2010), ‘Frame building and framing effects in direct-democratic campaigns’. PhD thesis, Zurich: University of Zurich.Google Scholar
Hervieu-Léger, D. (1999), Le pélerin et le converti. La religion en movement, Paris: Editions Champs-Flammarion.Google Scholar
Kettell, S. (2009), ‘On the public discourse of religion: an analysis of Christianity in the United Kingdom’, Politics and Religion 2: 420–443.Google Scholar
Klemp, N.J. (2010), ‘The Christian right: engaged citizens or theocratic crusaders?’, Politics and Religion 3: 1–27.Google Scholar
Koopmans, R.Statham, P. (1999), ‘Political claims analysis: integrating protest event and political discourse approaches’, Mobilization 4: 203–221.Google Scholar
Kriesi, H., Bernard, L.Hänggli, R. (2009), ‘The politics of campaigning – dimensions of strategic action’, in F. Marcincowski and B. Pfetsch (eds), Politik in der Mediendemokratie, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 345–366.Google Scholar
Lafont, C. (2007), ‘Religion in the public sphere: remarks on Habermas's conception of public deliberation in postsecular societies’, Constellations 14: 239–259.Google Scholar
Luckmann, T. (1967), The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society, New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
McGraw, B.T. (2010), Faith in Politics. Religion and Liberal Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Norris, P.Inglehart, R. (2004), Sacred and Secular, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Norris, P., Curtice, J., Sanders, D., Scammell, M.Semetko, H.A. (1999), On Message. Communicating the Campaign, London: Sage.Google Scholar
Perry, M.J. (2001), ‘Why political reliance on religiously grounded morality is not illegitimate in a liberal democracy’, Wake Forest Law Review 36: 217–249.Google Scholar
Pollack, D. (2003), Säkularisierung – ein moderner Mythos, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag.Google Scholar
Pollack, D. (2009), Rückkehr des Religiösen?, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag.Google Scholar
Rawls, J. (1993), Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Schockenhoff, E. (1996), Naturrecht und Menschenwürde. Universale Ethik in einer geschichtlichen Welt, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag.Google Scholar
Sniderman, P.M.Theriault, S.M. (2004), ‘The structure of political argument and the logic of issue framing’, in P.M. Sniderman and S.M. Theriault (eds), Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error and Change, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 133–165.Google Scholar
Solum, L.B. (1990), ‘Faith and justice’. DePaul Law Review 39: 1083.Google Scholar
Weithman, P.J. (ed.) (1997), Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Weithman, P.J. (2002), Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wolterstorff, N. (1997a), ‘The role of religion in decision and discussions of political issues’, in R. Audi and N. Wolterstorff (eds), Religion in the Public Square. The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate, Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 67–120.Google Scholar
Wolterstorff, N. (1997b), ‘Why we should reject what liberalism tells us about speaking and acting in public for religious reasons’, in P.J. Weithman (ed.), Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 162–181.Google Scholar