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Measurement and Conceptual Approaches to Religious Violence: The Use of Natural Language Processing to Generate Religious Violence Event-Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Robert Brathwaite  and
Baekkwan Park
Robert Brathwaite*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Baekkwan Park
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Robert Brathwaite, Michigan State University, (517) 884-1276, Case Hall, 842 Chestnut Rd. (Rm. S369L) East Lansing, MI. 48825, E-mail: Brathwa1@msu.edu
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Abstract

How do we measure religious violence? This study is focused on utilizing new methodological approaches and data sources to measure religiously motivated violence. Previous attempts to measure religious violence concentrated on coding U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom reports or utilizing existing datasets on armed conflict/civil wars. These previous attempts provided state-level data of the levels of religiously motivated violence, but due to data limitations cannot provide more fine-grained measures of specific acts of violence tied to religious motivation. In particular, accounting for varying levels of intensity especially in regards to non-lethal acts of religiously motivated violence is missing. This study builds upon previous attempts focusing on the creation of more fine-grained measures and accounting for its variation at the sub-national level utilizing natural language processing. The data generated are used to examine incidences of reported religious violence in India from 2000 to 2015.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 81 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank the Global Religion Research Initiative at the University of Notre Dame for funding that made this research possible. In addition, special thanks to Ani Sarkissian, Michigan State University for providing comments on an earlier version of this draft.

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