The Rise and Rise of Religiously Oriented Parties?

Abstract

The relationship between politics and religion has been back on the scholarly agenda for quite some time, as scholars had to adjust to the reality that modernization was not necessarily going hand in hand with the disappearance of religion as an instrument for political mobilisation. The thesis of progressive secularisation has been questioned by the apparent rise of religion as a crucial variable to understand many current political phenomena, creating the need for new analyses on the subject. There is specifically one aspect of the relationship between religion and politics that is under-explored, namely the status, role and changing nature of religiously-oriented political parties. This panel builds on recent preliminary work on the link between democracy and religiously-oriented parties (Ozzano and Cavatorta, eds., Religiously Oriented Parties and Democratization, Routledge 2013). Particularly, we are interested in answers to the following questions: how and in what ways can a party be considered ‘religiously-oriented’? Does the distinction between different types of religious influences on parties make sense? And, most importantly, how can we empirically measure the religious orientation of a party? Contributions can be comparative in nature (across the same religion or different religions) or in-depth individual case-studies.

Title	Details
What determines national Catholic hierarchies’ interaction with political parties in morality policy debates? A comparison between Portugal and Spain	View Paper Details
The morality of Asylum-seeker policy and the religion of politicians: the (bad) example of Australia	View Paper Details
Are Religious Influences so Influent for Religiously-Oriented Parties?	View Paper Details