 A provocative event, media, and religious choice in post-Soviet RussiaPost-Soviet Affairs, 2016, vol. 32, issue 6, 512-541 Abstract: This paper uses the famous events related to Pussy Riot as a natural experiment to examine the effect of alternative media on church membership. A difference-in-differences strategy is used to explore the effect in question. The hypothesis is that, given a lack of religious background in the majority of the population and strong temporary interest in religious issues promoted by a particular provocative event, mass media substantially affect religious choice. To check if this is the case, I compare the dynamics of religious choice of those exposed to alternative media reports on church topics and the rest of the population. As a proxy of familiarity with an alternative view, I use a dummy variable for using the Internet to obtain news. The main finding is that, during the experiment run over the year 2012, the growth of self-reported Orthodox believers was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group. Exposure to alternative media coverage turned out to heavily affect religious choice. Date: 2016 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpsaxx:v:32:y:2016:i:6:p:512-541 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2015.1097045 Access Statistics for this article Post-Soviet Affairs is currently edited by Timothy Frye More articles in Post-Soviet Affairs from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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