Religious-Themed Threat Messaging and Sociopolitical Attitudes in India

• In Event: Poster Session: New Avenues in Human Rights Research & South Asian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: South Asian Politics

Abstract

Among other features, intergroup conflicts involve threat scenarios where a group’s security is being brought into question by another, ostensibly aggressive, group. While there are many different ways in which such conflicts can be portrayed, political leaders seem to often cast intergroup conflicts in religious terms, creating or emphasizing a religious fault line between the groups. In this project, we seek to understand how adding a religious dimension to a message of threat to the group's safety impacts people’s attitudes. Given that leaders frequently do this, does this help them politically -- in the sense of improving their approval or reelection chances? Furthermore, what are the impacts on nationalism, intergroup trust, and (in)tolerance? We answer these questions by conducting an original survey experiment in India focusing on the Hindu-Muslim divide. Participants are randomly assigned to a control or one of two treatment conditions, providing either a generic message of threat to the group’s safety or a threat message containing religious references. We find that the treatment versus control assignment results in attitudinal changes and that the changes are more pronounced given the assignment to the religious versus generic threat treatment. While increases in the respondents’ willingness to approve and vote for the incumbent are modest, decreases in intergroup trust and tolerance and increases in nationalism are more pronounced. This suggests that politicians’ use of religious-laced threat messaging creates broader negative societal ramifications while not helping their political standing all that much. And the resulting societal divisiveness does not bode well for the quality and survival of democracy.

Authors

• Jaroslav Tir, University of Colorado Boulder

• Isha Banerjee, University of Colorado at Boulder