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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

communitarian, political behavior, religiosity, individualism

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Political Science

Abstract

Some political science and sociology scholars distinguish between two dimensions of religiosity or religious commitment: individualism and communitarianism. The former means that individuals are motivated toward piety with an emphasis on an intrinsic or individual-level religious practice and belief (Allport and Ross 1967). The communitarian perspective, by contrast, claims that religiosity is driven by communal experience, with an emphasis on religion’s social and group-based rituals. Political scientists regularly measure religiosity with an almost exclusive focus on individualistic beliefs and behaviors such as whether the individual survey respondent believes in God, attends church, or believes the Bible to be the word of God. A recent paper by Mocakbee, Wald and Leege argues that those traditional measures fail to capture the communitarian dimension of religiosity.

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