17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Leonid Peisakhin
Discussant/s:
Shared by Panellists
Meeting Room B

Lasse Aaskoven, Jonathan Doucette
Elite Control of Religious Institutions: Evidence from Denmark

Kamil Marcinkiewicz, Ruth Dassonneville, Martin Elff
The Transformation of Religious Cleavages in European Democracies: A Comparative Analysis

Olav Elgvin
The dialogue paradox: Assessing interfaith and intercultural dialogue as a policy tool in Europe

Leonid Peisakhin, Didac Queralt
When the State and Church Clash: Political Legacies of Religious Repression in Nazi Germany
Elite Control of Religious Institutions: Evidence from Denmark
Lasse Aaskoven 1, Jonathan Doucette 2
1 University of Essex, Department of Government
2 Aarhus University, Department of Political Science

We study whether elite ownership of religious property had an effect on electoral power of the conservative elites. We use the case of Denmark, where church buildings were private property, usually of local landed estate owners, until a reform in 1903. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we show that after the 1903 reform, where traditional estate owners lost control of Church property, the conservative party lost electoral support in constituencies that formerly had many estate-owned churches. These findings suggest that religious legitimacy and control of religious institutions played an important role in shoring up support for the old elite in the early days of competitive elections.