Old and new boundaries: National Identities and Religion (ONBound)

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The proposed project focuses on better understanding of how national and religious identities are intertwined in the modern world. This will be pursued through secondary analysis of existing - but newly compiled - data from comparative surveys and from academic macro-level data sets in a multi-level perspective. Aiming for a truly international scope, the project will combine data from a multitude of sources around the world. In times of increasing institutional convergence at the supra-national level, and growing diversities in e.g. wealth and life chances at the individual level, national and religious identities seem to re-gain salience as markers between "us" and "them". Potential consequences are changes in the patterns of social cohesion and societal solidarity. The project contributes to existing research in this area with regard to two core questions: The first concerns the relationship between religious and national identities at the individual level - how strongly do these two important cognitive frames for the social world overlap, or conversely, create cross-pressures? How consistent are the patterns of overlap or independence across countries, and how stable over time? The second question extends the first one, in that it asks about the effect of institutional characteristics and historical events at the country level on the particular relationship between religious and national identities. Constitutions as societal self-descriptions, the countries' social diversities and the history of internal and external conflicts are the main context indicators. In the course of the project, a unique database integrating a vast array of public data sources will be assembled. This data base combines extracts from existing individual survey data (e.g. from ISSP, ESS, WVS, Latinobarometer, Asian Barometer) on national and religious identities, and country level context data (e.g. Conflict Barometer, International Constitution Finder, Minorities at Risk) across approximately 30 years and 130 countries worldwide. The result will be a publicly available multi-level database and at the same time, a data linkage exercise, of a scope and coverage that is unprecedented for the subject area. Strategically, this will be an exemplary case study for an increasing demand to flexibly arrange existing data sources for matching ever-changing research questions.