Political regime change and cultural transmission of secularism

Nobuaki Hori ()
Additional contact information
Nobuaki Hori: Kyushu University

Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, 2017, vol. 1, issue 2, No 9, 450 pages

Abstract: Abstract This paper develops a theory of the intergenerational transmission of the cultural value of secularism and its interaction with endogenous regime shifts between democracies and dictatorships. Religious citizens negatively value the personal and public use of “civil liberties” and secular citizens positively value such use, and the degree of civil liberties afforded is restricted by a politically determined legal cap (limitation) depending on the regime. The attitudes toward liberties are transmitted across generations, and governments can intervene in the directions of the cultural transmission. Civil liberties promote secular citizens’ investments and contribute to expanding the economy, which is a central concern of dictatorships. Religious citizens are more likely to prefer a religious society with a severe cap on civil liberties. The possibility that secular citizens prefer a secular dictatorship to a religious democracy makes a religious democracy more vulnerable to dictatorships. As a result, there could be a “weaker secularization cycle” in which secularization under dictatorships and de-secularization under religious democracies alternately happen. In this case, paradoxically, the nation needs to stay with a secular dictatorship for a long time and foster sufficient secularism to consolidate a future democracy.

Keywords: Secularism; Cultural transmission; Socialization; Political regime; Liberties; D72; D74; H11; Z10; Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41685-017-0061-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:apjors:v:1:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s41685-017-0061-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... cience/journal/41685

DOI: 10.1007/s41685-017-0061-1

Access Statistics for this article

Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science is currently edited by Yoshiro Higano

More articles in Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().