Iranian Journal of Sociology

Abstract The present study is organized for the empirical test of religious market theory. In the main formulation of the religious market theory, the reduction of the Government Regulation of Religion in society fosters religious pluralism, religious pluralism creates competition, and competition between religious firms or institutions leads to the more and more efficient supply of religious products, and that as a result overall religiosity and religious vitality will increase in the whole society. This argument of the religious market theory was formulated as a hypothesis that the government regulation of religion is negatively related to religious commitment.
To examine the empirical validity of this theory, the hypothesis was confronted with secondary data from 179 countries to assess the degree of conformity and correspondence of the religious market theory prediction with empirical evidence. Overall, the findings of this cross-national research could not provide significant and reliable support for the religious market theory in explaining the variance of religious commitment levels.
 
 

Abstract Theoretical tradition of dependency/world-system relies on the separation between core and periphery countries in the world. This tradition asserts that global system of capitalism, with transfer of resources from less developed third world countries to the developed core countries, prevents their national and independent development and thus promote their peripheralization within international division of labor. In other words, the developed core countries, seize economic surplus from the periphery countries and allocate it for their own more and more development. On the contrary, due to the lack of access to their own economic surplus, the periphery countries remain underdevelopment. One of the political consequences of such a system is noticeable differences in levels of rebellious political conflict among the developed core countries and underdevelopment periphery countries. In the present research attempts have been made to formulate the hypotheses for explanation of political conflict within the theoretical framework of dependency/world-system theories. Then, the said theoretical model was evaluated through collecting data from 95 periphery countries for a 20- year period (1980-1999). Overall, the findings of this cross-national study could not provide empirically support for the dependency/world-system theoretical perspective. In other words, all hypotheses extracted from the dependency/ world-system theoretical tradition to explain rebellious political conflict were rejected by this empirical test.