Priming Religious Belief and Religious Social Behavior Affects Support for Democracy

The effects of religious belief and religious social behavior on support for democracy are investigated in a priming experiment conducted among Turkish Muslims and Israeli Jews. By varying the question order of World Values Survey (WVS) items, which measure religious belief and religious social behavior, it was demonstrated that priming religious social behavior facilitates, while priming religious belief impedes, support for democracy, compared with a control group of no prime. These results were independent of participants ’ intensity of religious belief or the frequency of their religious social behavior and held for the most part across both religious affiliations and political contexts. The global resurgence of religion as a political force has led scholars to reexamine the relationship between religion and democratic attitudes. Although religiosity was trad-itionally thought to be in conflict with democratic tendencies (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), recent perspectives emphasize the multidimensionality of the religious phenomenon, with different dimensions of religi-osity having differential effects on democratic attitudes (Ben-Nun Bloom & Arikan, 2012a, 2012b). On the one hand, religious belief—owing to its association with con-servative and traditional values, such as opposition to change and desire for orde