*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

During a recent talk I gave to the Rome Summer Seminars on Religion and Global Politics—an excellent workshop for graduate students run out of Notre Dame in Rome—I opened by asking students what event or personal experience got them interested in studying this topic. For me it was the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) 2002 victory in Turkey. While I tell my students my interest in terrorism and the Middle East came from the 9/11 attacks—my second week of college—my eventual focus on the religious nature of contemporary terrorism came from this election. Early debate had to do with whether this was an Islamist rejection of Turkish secularism, or even the victory of al-Qaeda’s struggle. As I studied the AKP—and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan—I realized it was more complex than that. The AKP was far from Islamist, and Turkey had religious parties contest elections before this.  My inquiries inspired me to pursue a PhD and study religion and international relations. Specifically, I was interested in how changing religious beliefs and activism influenced international security.

This, however, was just an idea. When I began my graduate studies, I realized I needed to turn it into a dissertation. And a major part of that involved working out a research design: how to translate the initial interest into a real academic study. As I will discuss in this piece, I settled on a quantitative approach. This worked out for me; I published books and articles and got a tenure-track job. But I also realized the limits of quantitative analysis in studying this topic. The realization of these limits actually helped me, though, as they inspired new directions in my work.

So if I had PhD students (which I do not), I would suggest they follow my route: begin with quantitative analysis, and push it as far as it will go. This piece is addressed primarily to junior scholars, but even more established scholars may benefit from thinking through how to broaden their research designs. And while it discusses religion and international relations, many of the methodological takeaways are general.

The methodological debate in the study of religion and international relations

Junior scholars reading this may have already encountered this debate, but just in case they have not—and to make sure all readers are on the same page—I wanted to provide a short overview of what I mean by quantitative analysis.

Quantitative analysis comes from the broader neo-positivist approach to social science, defined by Patrick Jackson as assuming a “separation” between the researcher and

the world and the desirability of basing conclusions on an examination of past occurrences.” Scholars should, according to this approach, turn the specifics of the cases they’re studying into variables: an independent variable that causes an outcome, and a dependent variable that measures the outcome. We should aspire to model the relationship between these variables.

This can be done with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods rely on deep understanding of one or a few cases through approaches such as archival research or interviews. Quantitative methods involve turning the concepts—the basis for the variables—into numeric form. This could be measures of religiosity, measures of regime type, or measures of political instability, among many others. Scholars would then conduct analysis looking at the average effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable, as well as the certainty of this effect.

The most common way to do this is regression analysis, modeling the independent variable (X), the dependent variable (Y), and control variables that may also explain the effect. But there are also newer approaches being used. There’s network analysis, where the focus is on how actors connect with each other, how networks form. There’s textual analysis—in which a scholar “teaches” a computer how to read a lot of text and summarize topics and understand the sentiment in the texts. Finally, there are survey experiments, in which scholars randomly assign different scenarios to people to see how they react and measure the effect.

The debate over whether quantitative analysis is appropriate thus extends beyond the study of religion and international relations to social science in general. It deals with questions such as what is the standard for determining if a finding is valid, and what should students be taught? Some will argue for the precision of quantitative analysis, others the depth of qualitative analysis. Others say the attempt of both to impose causal claims is inappropriate, and instead focus on interpretive methods, what Jackson calls reflexive approaches. Reflexive approaches are a sharp contrast to neopositivist ones, rejecting neopositivism’s focus on repeated patterns in data and instead arguing researchers can “grasp the deeper processes and factors” that produce phenomena (Jackson 2011, 35–7).

But this debate intersects with a specific one on how best to study religion. There is essentialism, typified by scholars such as Ernest Gellner or Bernard Lewis. This focuses on enduring elements of religions, often based on religious texts, to explain political behavior. There is constructivism, advanced by figures........

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