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This essay explores the well-known tension between the commitment to a state religion and expressions of tolerance for other religions. The background question concerns the consequences of state religion, the more suspect of the two commitments, at least with respect to intergroup relations. A useful conception of state religion is as a central part of an identity regime, which can take several forms in national constitutions. It seems likely that state religion—and other exclusive elements of identity regimes—threaten the national attachment of ethnic minorities in ways that unwind many of the benefits of tolerance provisions. A simple typology helps to understand the variation in these provisions across jurisdictions and over time, and original historical cross-national data on national constitutions describes this variation in some detail. The evidence suggests that the world's constitutions are moving in strikingly divergent directions with respect to their provisions on religion. ; Government

"On the Paradox of State Religion and Religious Freedom" published on by Oxford University Press.

Almost any attempt at classification runs into a boundary problem. Some cases fit neatly into one category, some fit one category only partially, and some fit multiple categories. This is a well-understood issue among both cognitive psychologists, who have documented how the brain's hard-wiring classifies stimuli, and taxonomists,1 who seek to "soft-wire" additional sorting schemes. My focus here is mostly on the soft wiring. How, exactly, should researchers build classification systems—referred to here as taxonomies—that account for partial membership in categories, if at all? An important reference point is fuzzy sets, an intriguing concept that has gained some traction in sociology and political science. I explore a set of measurement strategies for assigning partial membership scores in the context of executive-legislative relations, a research domain overdue for innovation in conceptualization and measurement.

This article begins with a rather forceful defense of the explanatory role of formal institutions—and, in particular, constitutions—in the study of democratization. Important aspects of constitutions play a significant part in shaping the quality, type, and survival of institutional arrangements in new democracies. With this assumption, the article turns seriously to theories of constitutional design, any of which must grapple with the overwhelming prima facie evidence of constitutional diffusion. It is well known that constitutional ideas travel easily across contexts. However, scholars until now have lacked even basic empirical evidence regarding the patterns of constitutional similarity across time and space. This article introduces exactly this sort of evidence in the context of 19th-century Europe, employing a new data set expressly designed for such a purpose. The analysis uncovers a number of new insights regarding the spread of constitutional ideas in Europe, insights that disturb some of the classic narratives of democratization in these cases.