Is there a religious bias? Attitudes towards military humanitarian intervention in Germany

Abstract

Is individual support for internationally agreed military humanitarian interventions (MHIs) subject to a religious bias? Conducting a vignette-based survey experiment, the paper provides micro-level evidence for such a bias within a highly unlikely sample: German university students. Participants in our survey experiment were more compassionate and indeed more supportive of an MHI when the victims of war-related violence were Christians rather than Muslims. The paper thus contributes to the literature on support for MHIs in two important ways: first, whereas the existing literature has a strong focus on the United States, this paper studies individuals’ support in another Western country that regularly contributes to MHIs, namely Germany. Second, while the existing literature has mainly examined how other social factors, such as the race or gender of the victims, affect individuals’ support for MHIs, drawing on social identity theory, this paper claims that religious identification also has an impact. Moreover, by showing that the religion of the victims of war-related violence shapes individuals’ attitudes towards MHIs through compassion, the paper also speaks to more recent literature that demonstrates that individuals’ attitudes towards refugees depend on – among other things – their religion. Against the background of a general rise of identitarian politics in many Western societies, our findings seem to be of particular relevance.