A Short Scale for Measuring Political Secularism

Abstract

As religiousness is declining across democracies, scientific interest in secular orientations and their political implications is growing. One specific and particularly important aspect of secular attitudes is political secularism. Political secularism is not merely the absence of religiousness, but rather a world view which holds that religious beliefs should play no role in politics. While there are hundreds of survey instruments that measure the strength and content of religiousness, there is no comparable measure that taps into political secularism. In this research note, I briefly review the concept of political secularism and present a cluster of items which target it. Utilizing data from four large population representative samples taken from the eastern and western states of Germany, I use confirmatory factor analysis to show that these items form a short but internally consistent scale. This scale also displays convergent and discriminant validity. It may be readily used in future surveys.

The links between basic human values and political secularism: Evidence from Germany

“…The sample is representative of the German population in 2016 and encompasses a host of measures on political attitudes. Crucially, the survey includes both a validated scale for political secularism (Arzheimer, 2022) 7 and an abridged version of the Schwartz Portraits Values Questionnaire (PVQ) with single‐item measures for both tradition and self‐direction 8…”

“…At the same time, while Germany is an interesting country-case in its own right, findings should generalise fairly well to other European countries, particularly to those that also fall into the 'religious-world' category. both a validated scale for political secularism (Arzheimer, 2022) 7 and an abridged version of the Schwartz Portraits Values Questionnaire (PVQ) with single-item measures for both tradition and self-direction. 8 The survey also contains four indicators that tap into three different facets of religion: belonging to a religion or church 9 , praying outside of services and frequency of church attendance 10 (behaviour) and self-assessed religiosity (belief or internal commitment).…”

Beyond Homophobia: Investigating the Uniqueness of Biphobic Attitudes Under Consideration of Sexual Identity

“…Religiosity is a multifaceted phenomenon that can be expressed through religious affiliation in a community, a sense of community, a religious practice or even religious attitudes (Arzheimer 2022). In particular, we assume in the present case that specific attitudes with an explicitly religious reference should be equally influential in explaining support for homophobic positions or bisexual invisibility.…”