Eduard van der Merwe

Religion shapes individuals' beliefs and behavior, but whether and how religious leaders can change social norms remains unclear. I study this in the context of family planning in Meru County, Kenya, using primary data from reproductive-age women. A central challenge to identification is that community behavior, scripture, and the stance of religious leaders are entangled in observed choices. Using a randomized vignette experiment that independently varies these forces, I disentangle them and identify the weight women place on each in a discrete-choice model with social interactions. I show that religious leaders influence women's decisions through two distinct channels. First, they directly shift women's utility. Their support for family planning increases women's willingness to adopt it, and this effect is larger than the corresponding effect of opposition. Second, religious leaders alter how women respond to the behavior of other women in their community. When a leader takes an explicit position, women place less weight on others' behavior. As a result, religious messages have their largest effects when they run counter to prevailing community behavior. I corroborate the experimental findings at scale using difference-in-differences estimates from a faith-based family-planning program, showing that program effects are largest in places where religious leaders are more trusted.

Researchers and policymakers increasingly recognize that cultural and traditional practices matter for economic development outcomes. In this paper, I examine the relationships among ancestral ethnic characteristics, household resource sharing, child poverty, and child nutrition outcomes in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Using a collective household model to estimate the fraction of household resources children receive, I show that child welfare outcomes differ across ethnic groups within every country. To identify the ethnic traits that are most associated with these differences, I apply random forest regressions to screen the Ethnographic Atlas. I find that children in societies with ancestral independent-family or clan-barrio structures receive a larger share of household resources. Children in societies with historically low dependence on agriculture or with early-age male circumcision rituals receive a smaller share. Several traits also correlate with household composition, potentially reversing the association between resource shares and child poverty. I also show that differences in resource allocation do not primarily drive the nutritional gaps between trait groups, and that ancestral practices and location are partially entangled. These descriptive results suggest that policies aimed at alleviating child poverty and undernutrition should account for how cultural context shapes both household formation and within-household resource sharing.

Erratic temperatures and precipitation influence nutrition, human capital investment, and living standards, particularly for children. This study investigates the effect of climate change (changes in the monthly maximum average near-surface temperature and total monthly precipitation) on children's health outcomes, particularly stunting and underweight, in Nigeria. We combine Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) data with high resolution gridded climate data. We find that the rise in temperature is associated with higher levels of stunting – even more so in rural areas. The paper's findings highlight the need for climate-friendly policies to mitigate the long-term effect of climate change on malnourishment. Without such policies, climate change could reverse years of progress in lowering children's malnutrition.

Defining antisemitic and Islamophobic speech are significant public controversies, but sociologists have yet to map the moral boundaries by which the general population appraises such speech. This is a serious oversight given persistent Islamophobia and antisemitism in the U.S. We fill this gap by implementing a novel approach to commonly used measures of antisemitism and Islamophobia. We ask respondents to judge the extent to which such statements are antisemitic or Islamophobic, and we use latent class analysis (LCA) to map distinct positions on these statements and analyze demographic and ideological correlates of these groups. We identify four groups: maximalists, who interpret most statements as antisemitic or Islamophobic; minimalists, who rarely see any statements as such; ambivalents, who are uncertain or undecided; and criticalists, who distinguish antisemitism from criticism of Israel, or Islamophobia from criticism of Islam. Over one third of the U.S. are ambivalents and a concerning percentage are minimalists about antisemitism (20%) and Islamophobia (10%). Religious and political identity, but not race, distinguish class membership, and joint membership in both criticalist classes follows an elite social profile. Class membership also predicts positions on anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bias and responses to the Israel-Palestine conflict net of controls. Our study fills a critical gap, demonstrating that heterogeneity in moral boundary making around antisemitism and Islamophobia is conditioned by religion and class in addition to politics.

Recent global conflicts have amplified long-standing patterns of religion-related bias and discrimination in the U.S. The continuing war on Gaza has led to bias, hostility, and violence against both Muslims and Jews in the U.S. We present an overview of results from a new 1308-person national survey data collection gathered through NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel with oversamples of Jews and Muslims. Our findings reveal important reversals, asymmetries, polarities, and solidarities in perceptions and experiences of bias among Jews and Muslims and experiences of and responses to the war among religious groups. Jews were the most likely group to report experiences of religious bias and hostility in the U.S. and the most likely to register fear about future bias, followed by Muslims, a reversal of patterns from earlier research. Jews were the most likely religious group to report experiencing an increase in religious bias or hostility after October 7, 2023. Americans reported warm feelings towards Jews, Muslims, Israelis, and Palestinians but cool feelings towards the Israeli government and Hamas, suggesting that across most religious groups, Americans demonstrate more sympathy towards religious identities when compared to national identities and political entities.

Understanding the causes and consequences of conflicts continues to be an important contribution to the economic development literature, particularly the mechanisms that can reduce civilian deaths. We contribute to understanding attacks on civilians and the spillover effects by analysing the impact of government religious preference on civilian deaths. Using panel data analysis for 113 countries for the period 1989 to 2015, we find that a higher government preference towards religion causes more civilian deaths for countries experiencing intrastate conflict. Furthermore, we analyse this effect by the different types of conflict and find that the results are driven by both state-based and non-state-based conflicts. Lastly, a regional analysis shows that the negative impact of a strong preference towards religion from the government is particularly notable for countries in Africa and Asia.

When God Stops Fighting explores which factors—both internally and externally—contribute to the downfall of some of the most violent religious movements. Juergensmeyer's work tries to understand how the "collapse of movements is perceived from the perspective of those who are engaged in them" (p. 118). This work aids our understanding in how some of the most violent wars can develop into a state of non-war which is the first step to aid civilians that are caught in the crossfire.