Conference Papers & Current Trends
Discussion of Rational Choice Theory
Round 5: Book review
Stathis N. Kalyvas
New York University
The allocation of social science research to the issues vying for attention is oddly uneven. Some matters tend to attract great attention, while others remain for a long time in disproportionate obscurity. The allocation process appears not always to take into account the importance of the issue at hand. For example, research in European politics has long privileged the study of left-wing parties despite the fact that right-wing parties have played at least as defining a role in politics. One of the most blatantly underrepresented topics in social science research is religion, particularly church-state relations. Despite its obvious political and social relevance, this issue has for a long time remained mostly in the hands of antiquarians and constitutional legal scholars rather than social scientists.
There are indications that this is slowly changing. Consider the study of secularization, which has long been the prominent research program in the sociology of religion. As in modernization theory, the main prediction of secularization theory is that economic and social development will cause religion to fade. Since religious practice has failed to vary as predicted, the addition of new sets of conditions to salvage the core of the theory gradually has become dominant. The study of religious practice has been revitalized, however, by the recent infusion of an incentive-based, "microeconomic" approach. Thinking of religion as a "product" produced by "religious firms" is bound to be controversial, bu the empirical returns so far have been extremely encouraging.
Anthony Gill successfully adapts and expands insights from this recent wave of research. The empirical puzzle Gill identifies is politically relevant and theoretically compelling: What explains the political position of Catholic churches in Latin America vis-a-vis authoritarian regimes? Why do some churches ally with these regimes while others oppose them? Despite its relevance, this question has not been addressed before, at least never in a systematic and comparative fashion.
By addressing this issue, Gill embarks on the first sustained effort to define the microfoundations of state-church relations and test them systematically. He currently points out rationality, but leaders of religious institutions are subject to concerns and constraints similar to those of their secular counterparts. Bishops are also bureaucrats running large organizations. Gill begins by specifying a model of state-church relations based on simple and highly realistic assumptions. On the one hand, given that states minimize the cost of ruling, ideology is the least expensive method of obtaining popular compliance, and churches specialize in the production of ideological norms and values, it then follows that states will seek to cooperate with churches in order to minimize the cost of ruling. On the other hand, given that churches maximize membership and are vulnerable to both free-riding and competition, they will seek protection from competition through cooperation with states.
This is particularly true for Catholic churches, which are vulnerable to competition for a number of reasons. Because monopolized religion underproduces religiosity, a Catholic church suddenly facing competition from Protestant churches will suffer substantial membership losses. These will trigger a major political reorientation, and eventually the church will dissociate itself from the authoritarian government. The underlying mechanism is this: Protestant growth is typically fueled by mass conversions of the poorest segments of society. Unless the church is willing to oppose a regime that blatantly enacts antipoor policies, it has no hope of retaining its members, let along bringing those who defect back to its fold. In other words, "if the church was to remain a spiritual and moral force in Latin American society, it needed to match the pastoral efforts put forth by the Protestant churches. Having been associated with the political and economic elite for so long, a credible commitment to the poor meant publicly distancing itself from abusive governments" (p.120). A Catholic church in a monopoly position does not face the risk of membership loss, so it lacks any incentive to dissociate itself from the authoritarian regime.
The empirical prediction yielded by the model (high levels of religious competition will trigger official Catholic antiauthoritarianism) is falsifiable, and Gill proceeds to check it against the available evidence. His empirical analysis is exemplary. He combines an impressive array of tools and approaches typically found in isolation: regression analysis, controlled comparison, short case studies, and an historical overview informed by a good grasp of the large relevant secondary literature and a number of interviews. He is able to disqualify alternative hypotheses, such as repression, poverty, and internal church reform, as well as scrutinize the outliers. The statistical test provides very strong correlation support for the competition hypothesis. A carefully controlled comparison between Chile and Argentina (in which the Catholic church responded to military regimes in opposite ways) sheds light on and confirms the plausibility of the causal mechanism at work. Finally, the hypothesis is extended both vertically, through a discussion of the future of Catholic Progressivism in Latin America, and horizontally, through a preliminary exploration of the challenges faced by Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe. Overall, this is a superior demonstration of how to combine deductive thinking with rich, comparative, empirical research.
Gill's model has yet to be fully specified. This is clear with respect to three broad issues. First, the focus on legitimacy understates the fundamental reality of authoritarianism, namely, its coercive nature. At the same time, stressing legitimacy risks reducing religion to little beyond an "opiate of the people." And while the focus on authoritarian states is fully appropriate to the question at hand, the real challenge is to specify a model of church-state relations under democracy. Such a model will have to take into account the role of parties (which in Gill.s model are largely substituted by the state), democratic institutions, and cleavages and issue dimensions.
Second, the mechanism of individual defection and the ways in which it affects the options of both church and state remain opaque. A key assumption is that cooperation with authoritarian regimes hurts churches that operate in competitive religious markets. This is not part of the model.s core assumptions but derives from an additional implicit assumption, namely, that the poor maximize ideology (broadly understood to include policy). Yet, the mechanism of individual defection toward Protestant churches turns out not to be driven by ideology. What is being maximized by the poor is the quality of the religious product, including such nonideological features as the density of interaction with priests and pastors. But the nonideological utility function of the poor is incompatible with the ideological response of the church to competition (i.e., its opposition to authoritarianism): The church would be providing this kind of inducement that the poor would be disregarding. Indeed, the church could be more successful by improving its services, such as increasing the number of priests and making priesthood a more attractive career option. Gill points out (p. 186), however, that the church is unwilling to act rationally in this respect; it faces such constraints as a conservative pope and a centuries-old doctrine and tradition. These constraints are not exogenous to the church and ought to be specified in the model.
Finally, it is unclear why competition is the only option available to a church that faces membership losses. It presumably can lobby an authoritarian state to quell competition. Assuming that Protestantism and Catholicism are interchangeable legitimation devices (i.e., equally strong opiates), then the states will be indifferent between them and will have no incentive to provide preferential treatment to any of them; instead, it will encourage competition. If the church turns antiauthoritarian to fend off competition, then the state will have a strong incentive to favor Protestantism over the newly progressive Catholic church. Knowing this, the Catholic church should think twice about opposing the regime. Backward induction, however, does not seem to be part of the church.s calculus. Assuming that Protestantism is somehow more harmful to the regime than Catholicism, the church can credibly threaten to withdraw its support from the regime in order to obtain the restriction of competition. These examples illustrate the need to introduce a dynamic dimension into the model, possibly through the use of game theory.
The points I raise suggest that the payoffs from specifying a full-fledged model of state-church relations are likely to be considerable. Such a model will generate interesting empirical predictions about the configuration of "religious regimes," both across countries and within countries across time, especially under a democratic regime. Rendering unto Caesar is, thus, not just an exemplar of imaginative, theory-driven, and solid comparative research; it is also the first step in what promises to be a novel and exciting research program.