We used Barrett’s (1982) and Barrett, Kurian and Johnson’s (2001) discussion of
each country (supplemented in some cases by individual country reports) to obtain a
proxy for state regulation of religion. We used the concept suggested by Chaves and
Cann (1992)—whether the government appoints or
approves church leaders. The Barrett,
et al
, discussions of this concept typically refer to the late 1970s. However, the
information is often incomplete and is not fully consistent across countries. The data
used in the present analysis are in Table 1.