Religion, clubs, and emergent social divides

Authored by Michael D. Makowsky

Date Published: 2011-09

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2011.02.012

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: MASON

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Arguments regarding the existence of an American cultural divide are frequently placed in a religious context. This paper seeks to establish that, all politics aside, the American religious divide is real, that religious polarization is not a uniquely American phenomenon, and that religious divides can be understood as naturally emergent within the club theory of religion. Analysis of the survey data reveals a bimodal distribution of religious commitment in the U.S. International data reveals evidence of bimodal distributions in all twenty-nine surveyed countries. The club theory of religion, applied in an agent-based computational model, generates bimodal distributions of member commitment. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Tags

Agent-based model Club theory Culture divide Religious divide Sacrifice and stigma