Religious Actors in the Fourth Wave of Democratization: Constructive, Obstructive or Destructive?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION We (Mirjam Künkler/Julia Leininger) are applying for a research session to work on a book proposal for Oxford University Press’ Comparative Politics series. The book is tentatively titled “Religious Actors in the Fourth Wave of Democratization: Constructive, Obstructive or Destructive?” and builds on previous work we have done, published in the journal Democratization(2010, 16, 6)and a volume edited by Julia Leininger (2014). It also builds on a panel we organized for the 2009 ECPR General Conference in Potsdam, Germany. We are fortunate to enjoy the sponsorship of the Religion and Politics Standing Group (chair Jeffrey Haynes) for this application. RESEARCH QUESTION Religion has been an underlying current in the study of democratization for years. Until recently, the literature was permeated by the implicit assumption that non-Christian religions presented significant impediments to democratization. In analyses that proceeded from rather essentialist notions of religion, certain religions were portrayed as more compatible with the development and persistence of democratic values and processes than others. In this vein, scholars such as Samuel Huntington (1996) have assumed an incompatibility between Islam, Confucianism and Orthodox Christianity on the one hand, and democratic values and respect for human rights on the other. By contrast, Western Christianity, especially Protestantism, has often been characterized as the religion most compatible with democracy. Empirically, the first three waves of democratization (Huntington 1996) supported the compatibility thesis from a macro-historical perspective: While the first two waves (1820s-1926 and 1945-1962) swept across Protestant-majority countries, the Third Wave (1974-1989) took predominantly Catholic states. However, the Fourth Wave, which started at the beginning of the 1990s, has affected countries across a wide variety of religious backgrounds: Orthodox Christianity (e.g. Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Georgia), Buddhism(e.g. Mongolia, Taiwan), Hinduism (Nepal), and Islam (e.g. Albania, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, Turkey). Overall, 61 states with a diverse religious make-up started a democratic transition after 1989. The recent history of democratization empirically disproves the axiom that certain religions, in particular Islam and Orthodox Christianity, are incompatible with democracy. Instead, the fact that democratization processes have now occurred across a wide variety of religious settings lends credence to the argument that religious dogmata interact with their respective socio-political contexts and therefore take diverse political and social forms. Despite the context-dependent diversity of religious attitudes and behaviors as well as the acknowledgement of religion as an important factor in democratization, few attempts have been made in the transition literature to analyze the contributions of religious actors to democratization processes (and conversely, de-democratization processes (Tilly) and authoritarian reversal). Accordingly, few studies systematize the factors that determine the influence of religion on regime change. In the proposed volume on “The Role of Religious Actors in the Fourth Wave of Democratization,” we aim at closing this gap. We build on our previous work to systematize the role religious actors have played in the democratization processes of the Fourth Wave across all three phases of the democratization process (erosion of authoritarian rule, transition, and consolidation) and across a diversity of cases from all major religious backgrounds. Compared to our previous work, which focused on Muslim and Christian cases, the proposed volume adds cases from other world religions, notably Buddhism, Orthodox Christianity, and Hinduism. It also, importantly, will systematize not only the contribution of religious actors to democratization, but also to de-democratization processes and authoritarian reversal. Building on our previous work, the main research question that guides the book is three-fold. It highlights the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of religious actors’ roles in the Fourth Wave: 1. In countries that started a democratic transition after 1989, did religious actors significantly influence this process? 2. If yes, how precisely across the different phases of the democratization process, and possible de-democratizationprocesses?3. What factors determinedreligious actors’influence on regime change, or the lack thereof? To our knowledge, only two comparative projects have addressed this gap in the relevant literature to date: a large-N study by Toft et al. based on Freedom House data, and a qualitative comparative study of five young democracies from the Catholic, Protestant, Christian-Orthodox and Muslim world (Künkler and Leininger 2010). As Toft et al. outline, their research project examined all upward movementson Freedom House scores between 1972 and 2000, and found that in more than half of all cases of political liberalization, religious actors played a supportive or leading role. The authors conclude that if religious actors already embraced, or at least accepted, pro-democratic interpretations of their religion, they could only exert a supportive or leading role toward liberalization when they enjoyed a) substantial freedom from state control and b) possibilities to avert state co-optation. In particular, religious actors could exert such a constructive role where religion-state relations were “independent” rather than “integrated” (Philpott 2007): that is where religions benefited from a) some legal autonomy which allowed them to become a platform for dissent somewhat immune to state intervention, and b) transnational linkages which made them financially less dependent on domestic sources of income. In our reading of their work, Toft et al. regard pro-democratic theologies as a necessary condition, while independent relations between religion and state are a sufficient one. The Künkler/Leininger qualitative comparative study of five young democracies from the Catholic, Protestant, Christian-Orthodox and Muslim world corroborates and refines but also contestsToft et al.’s findings. It corroborates Toft et al. in so far as in all five cases, religious actors only played a constructive role towards the democratic transition where they enjoyed some de facto legal and financial autonomy from the state. For instance, the Christian-Orthodox churches in Georgia and Ukraine played a less active role in challenging authoritarian power because their personnel was mostly appointed by political authorities. Conversely, in the last days of Nazi Germany, priests of the Protestant churches had slightly more leeway in resisting Nazi politics than their Catholic counterparts, who were bound by the Concordat between Pope Pius XII and the Nazi government. This meant that in legal terms, the Curia as much as the Nazi state could prosecute Catholic Church personnel in cases of violations of Nazi rules, whereas resistance by Protestant priests faced no comparable internal church mechanism of prosecution. In addition, the contributors to the Künkler/Leininger study identified another significant condition that shapes the role and influence of religious actors in processes of regime change: the organizational form religious actors take. For instance, where religious organizations were mass-based and hierarchical, as in Indonesia, they were able to play an important role in mobilizing protestors in anti-regime demonstrations. Where religious organizations were fragmented as in Mali, they lacked communication networks that would have allowed them to have significant mobilizational capacity. The concept of democratization is a major difference between the two analytical frameworks and one that heavily shapes the findings of the analysis. Although Toft et al. refer to the processes they analyze as “substantial democratization,” these should more properly be termed “liberalization,” because they lack most of the constituents of democratization the major theoreticians of democracy have identified (Dahl; Linz & and Stepan; O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead). Due to their very thin conception of democratization aka liberalization, Toft et al. code all countries that at some point after 1972 show an upward movement on the Freedom House Index as “substantial democratizations”. Such a limited concept of democratization leads to a classification of countries such as Guinea-Bissau, or Iraq, by all accounts non-free authoritarian polities, as having undergone “substantial democratization” because they have moved from an extremely unfree status on Freedom House (7/7, for instance) to a less unfree but still solidly authoritarian status (5/6, for instance). The categorization therefore creates conceptual confusion, because it mixes countries that indeed have undergone complex and promising processes of democratization, such as Ghana or Chile, with countries that since 1972 liberalized but never promised to undergo transitions to democracy, such as Congo Brazzaville. The fact that a regime liberalizes does not indicate imminent democratic change: authoritarian regimes often liberalize in order to stabilize rather than democratize (cf. Burundi). Toft et al.’s emphasis on a general “progress” toward liberalization also blurs the different roles that religious actors play across the three phases of democratization. For instance, in Mali, Muslim actors neither hindered nor pro-actively supported the erosion of authoritarian rule, but once a democratic order was established, some Muslim associations turned into pro-democratic actors. Their roles were changed and shaped by the democratic process itself. The same must be said about the Orthodox Churches, whose leading personnel, whether in Georgia, Ukraine or Bulgaria, was entirely appointed by the Soviet-dominated Russian Orthodox Church and thus a priori conformist and anti-democratic. This only changed after the national Orthodox Churches could re-establish their autocephaly in 1990, as a result of their countries’ independence from Soviet hegemony. Here too, the attitudes toward democracy(and political order more generally) that religious actors exhibited changed with the new religious elites that emerged as a consequence of democratization. The Künkler/Leininger 2010 study not only applies the more comprehensive concept of democratization prevalent in the transitions literature, but also suggests that a differentiation between three phases of the democratic process is important: in some instances, religious actors contributed to the erosion of authoritarianism without favoring a democratic alternative. They helped topple the regime, but did not necessarily contribute to the consolidation of the nascent democracy. This was the case, for instance, for the Hisboullah in Mali and Islamist youth movements in Indonesia (KAMMI). In others, they helped democratic consolidation by endowing nascent democracies with religious legitimacy, such as the mentioned Christian-Orthodox cases, but played virtually no role in the fall of authoritarianism. In addition, Toft et al.’s focus on progress does not allow taking account of religious actors’ contributions to de-democratization and authoritarian stabilization. In Indonesia, for example, religious leaders were major actors in the transition period and considerably aided its success. But it is also true that after the transition was completed,(other) religious leadersturned a blind eye on, and in some cases even supported, attacks against intra-Muslim minorities, such as the Ahmadiyya and Shiites. Not coding the latter as contributing to rising illiberalism and tendencies of de-democratization, but only highlighting the earlier phenomenon of religious actors’ support for democratization, as Toft et al do, renders a false and misleading picture. The proposed volume on ‘Religious Actors in the Fourth Wave’ systematizes religious actors’ contribution to both,democratization, as well as subsequent de-democratization, as well as authoritarian reversal. It asks whether the absence of the factors that were found to enable the role of religious actors in democratization(namely a pro-democratic theology, their legal and financial independence from the state, as well as mobilizational capacity)to a large extent explains whether religiousactors contribute to de-democratization or authoritarian reversal, or whether it is thus far unidentified factors that do so. RESEARCH DESIGN To test the applicability of the Künkler/Leininger study (2010) for cases with a religious background hitherto not included (Buddhism, Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism), the research session will bring together experts on these cases. In addition, experts have been chosen with an eye to their work not only on successful cases of democratization, but also on cases of de-democratization and authoritarian reversal. The primary aim of the research session is to discuss and improve upon the existing theoretical and conceptual framework for the edited volume, which has already been written as the introductory chapter by Künkler and Leininger and has been distributed to the other four participants. These four are now in the process of drafting papers on their case studies with the goal in mind of improving upon the theoreticalframework. At the research session, the four case studies will be discussed together with the theoretical framework and the latter finalized. To prepare the invitation of the rest of the contributors to the edited volume (we aim at a total of 12-14 case studies), criteria for further case selection and methodological issues willbe discussed in detail. Individual chapters will analyze the contribution of religious actors to processes of democratization, as well as possible de-democratization and authoritarian reversal in selected case studies. Those who have been invited as research session participants are experts on their cases and draw from both qualitative and quantitative data in their analysis, with a focus on critical junctures of regime change and religious actors' role therein (Carpoccia/Kelemen 2007). As in our past work on the subject, we will draw explanatory conclusionsfrom the comparative researchdesign in two respects: first,from cases that have a similar context with regard to their majority religion but vary with regard to the path of regime change;and second, from those which are similar with regard to their path of regime change but vary with regard to their majority religion. PUBLICATION PLAN After the research session, about eight additional contributors will be invited to the volume. With abstracts for all case studies, contributor bios, and the theoretical introduction in hand, we will approach Oxford University Press as a preferred publisher. If all goes to plan, final chapters will be due in December 2015/January 2016 with the aim of submitting the completely edited manuscript to the press in summer 2016. INTENDED MEMBERS FOR THE RESEARCH SESSION: 1. Mirjam Künkler, Princeton University, kuenkler@princeton.edu 2. Julia Leininger, German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), julia.leininger@die-gdi.de 3. Duncan McCargo, University of Leeds, d.j.mccargo@leeds.ac.uk 4. Subrata Kumar Mitra, University of Heidelberg, sapol@sai.uni-heidelberg.de 5. Alfred Stepan, Columbia University and King's College London, as48@columbia.edu 6. Kristina Stoeckl, Universityof Vienna and European University Institute, kristina.stoeckl@eui.eu