When authorities collide: Religious leaders, political elites, and attitudes towards human rights
Abstract
Coordinated illiberal or “anti-rights” transnational advocacy networks (TANs) are mobilizing to roll back or redefine existing rights protections, often focusing on gender equality, sexuality, and minority rights. These issues serve as entry points to justify broader anti-democratic restrictions. Despite growing scholarship on the rise and diffusion of these illiberal TANs, we know little about effective counter-strategies. Illiberal TANs derive much of their persuasive power from religious and moral rhetoric, framing their agenda in terms of protecting religious freedom, national sovereignty, and family values. In this paper, we argue that religious leaders occupy a unique position in this contest: they can deploy the same moral vocabularies that illiberal political leaders lay claim to, without ceding the legitimacy of those claims. Using a pre-registered survey experiment, we test how respondents evaluate rights claims from competing moral authorities. When religious leaders oppose a political leader’s stance, whose moral authority ultimately affects an individual’s perception of messages put forth by illiberal advocacy networks? Are these beliefs mutable? Does messenger credibility matter? Our findings contribute to debates on moral authority, elite cue-taking, and persuasion in polarized environments, while offering practical guidance for civil society coalitions building counter-narratives against illiberal TANs.
Code
All the raw code and data for this paper is available in a GitHub repository.