Replication Data for: Democratization and Religious Nationalist Mobilization Against a Small Minority: Evidence from Myanmar

Under what conditions does democratization motivate the core national group’s religious clergy to propagate religious nationalist hatred against a small and unarmed minority? While we understand that political elites often incite nationalist violence against ethnic minorities during democratization to retain political power, when and why does this nationalist violence take on a religious tone? I contend that the prior autocratic regime's cooptation of the core national group's religious clergy for legitimacy increases incentivizes for these coopted clergy to incite hatred against a small religious minority during democratization to protect the dominance of a religious national identity. The motivation for this hate campaign, however, is not the threat posed by the targeted minority to the religious majority, but rather, the threat posed by formerly repressed secular majority group leaders to an ascriptive religious nationalist identity in a democracy. I use a mixed-methods approach to demonstrate the plausibility of my argument in the case of Myanmar.