Historical Religious Structure.

[Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], 2024

[University Park, Pennsylvania] : The Association of Religion Data Archives, 2024

English

1 online resource.

10.17605/OSF.IO/PD783 doi

(ARDA)arCOSGEL

The purpose of the Historical Religious Structure dataset is to provide a measure of historical religious fragmentation and favoritism at the country level. Annual historical information on the territories occupied by today's nation states dating back to year 1000 provide unique insights into the complex relationship between fragmentation (versus favoritism) of specific religions by the state. Indices that measure weighted fractions of years with fragmentation and shared religion with the ruler (to serve as a proxy for favoritism) were constructed for each society's history. This unique dataset contains a millennium of historical religious data, whose indices were constructed in two stages. First, two dummy variables were defined for each territory and period that marked whether the territory experienced substantial religious fragmentation and whether the ruler shared the religion of a substantial religious segment. Interactions between these two dummy variables create four distinct ways in which the political ruler's religion could differ (or be the same as) the main and/or substantial secondary religious groups in the population. In the second stage, the annual information was aggregated over time to calculate the corresponding weighted cumulative indices.

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