Thread by @kai_arzheimer

New publication klaxon 🚨🚨🚨𝗔 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗺, published today in @PandRJournal @CUP_PoliSci #OpenAccess. Say what? This is about a new (and hopefully useful) survey instrument 1/8 cambridge.org/core/journals/…

What's the deal? Secularisation is 𝗔 𝗠𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 in the West. Churches lose privileges/influence, people stop attending/believing, with massive political consequences (Euthanasia! Stem Cell Research! Same-Sex marriage!!). 2/8

There is a zillion of measures for religiosity, but there was no scale for politically secular attitudes - until 𝙉𝙊𝙒. And they are 𝙉𝙊𝙏 two sides of the same coin 3/8

Individual political secularism is ＮＯＴ the absence of religiousness, but rather a (centuries old) philosophy which holds that religion should play no role in politics. In the article, I present a battery of items that tap into this conviction 4/8

Using four large representative samples, I show that these items form an internally consistent scale. In other words: measuring political secularism with these items is reliable (in this specific sense). Cool, cool, cool. 5/8

Did I mention that this is cool?

This scale also displays convergent and discriminant validity. WHAT? Convergent validity: stuff must correlate closely with other stuff it is substantively related to. Discriminant validity: BUT one must still be able to differentiate between stuff and other stuff 6/8

More specifically, the scale "displays a moderate to strong positive correlation with permissive views on abortion and a strongly negative correlation with religiousness, yet it remains clearly distinguishable from both". So: (mostly) happy days! 7/8

In sum: if you need to measure politically secular attitudes, the scale is ready for you to use. If you want to do that or if you are just interested, the full (reasonably short) write-up, additional tables, and full replication data/scripts are all available here 👉 8/8

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cambridge.org/core/journals/… 9/8

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