Religion and Politics Across Boundaries

This Section aims at reviewing and advancing the current state of research in the religion and politics field, also by strengthening the dialogue and integrating findings across sub-disciplines of political science (i.e.: study of democratization, study of political parties and political movements, policy analysis, international relations, etc.). In the past decades, after the so-called ‘revenge of god’, the role of religion in European and global politics has steadily increased: on the one hand, also because of migration and globalization processes, the role of faiths in politics and international affairs has become more relevant and more complex; on the other hand, religion has become a significant factor in domains where it was previously not taken into account. A situation which is quite paradoxical, considering that at the same time – especially in the developed world – ongoing secularization processes have often downsized both the role played by faith in people’s everyday life and the authority of religious institutions. The Section aims at casting light on these apparent contradictions by considering the current research on the relations between religion and politics, at the international and domestic levels, and thus, across different political science sub-disciplines. At the international level, it will focus on the role of faiths in the current international system, both as a source of conflict and intolerance phenomena, and as a positive factor in processes of peace-building, supranational integration, and the development of an international civil society. In relation to the domestic field, it will try to understand the role played by religion in electoral and party politics (for example with the analysis of parties with a religious orientation, including new party families such as the right-wing populist one; or the analysis of patterns of religious voting) and the political society, both in fully-fledged democracies and in contexts marked by authoritarian involution. Moreover, it will analyse the increasingly complex entanglements of faiths in policy-making, not only in fields traditionally related to religious values such as the role of religion in the public sphere, bioethics, LGBT+ rights, and immigration; but also in new domains, such as for example the protection of the environment. This review and dialogue will take place both at the theoretical level, through Panels focused on critically analysing and rethinking the main categories and theses commonly adopted to understand the relations between religion and politics; and through Panels focused on the empirical analysis and comparison of different phenomena and cases (i.e., case studies, statistical analyses, experiments etc.).