Religious parties

Abstract

The saliency of religious parties in recent democratic consolidation processes forces the discipline to reconsider key questions on party change: Under what conditions do (radical) religious parties moderate? Is their mere inclusion in the democratic process enough to result in their moderation? If so, exactly what mechanisms are at work here? What roles are played by intervening variables such as coalition politics and electoral systems? And if this is not the case, what other variables may explain the movements of religious parties along the axis between moderation and radicalization? Does religion itself play a role? In the endeavor to answer these and related questions, this introduction to the Special Issue on Religious Parties initially provides some conceptual clarifications and offers an overview of the relevant literature. It is followed by a list of conditions under which the development and shift of religious parties towards ideological and behavioral moderation may be expected. The argument posits that the democratization of the political system and inclusion in electoral competition are not the sole determining factors. Inclusion, indeed, seems to be neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. The four case studies presented after the introduction (by Carolyn Warner, Michael Buehler, Steven T. Wuhs, and Sarah Wilson Sokhey/Kadir Yildirim) analyze this in more depth by working diachronically and across parties of different religions. The first article revisits the development of Catholic parties in Italy, while the following set examines religious parties in the third- and fourth-wave democracies of Mexico, Turkey and Indonesia, and in Egypt, which has still not reached the status of a constitutional democracy.