Co-sponsored by Division 33: Religion and Politics
Full Paper Panel with Virtual Participation
Participants:
- (Chair) David T. Buckley, University of Louisville
- (Discussant) Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison
Session Description:
Religion’s impact on democracy, whether promoting Third Wave democratization or threatening liberal rights through the rise of fundamentalism, was central to the growth of scholarship on religion in political science in the late Twentieth Century. The global study of democracy is as vital as ever, with significant challenges facing democratic institutions across regions. New scholarship on religion and democracy is now assessing the contribution of religious dynamics to democratic fragility and resilience. This panel gathers five papers, reflecting diverse regional and methodological perspectives, that focus on the diverse responses of religious elites and populations to ongoing challenges to world democracy. In keeping with the section’s call for papers, the papers all grapple with the nature of social cleavages tied to religion and how those divisions shape the nature of democratic politics.
A shared thread through the papers is the varied preferences of political and religious populations during periods of regime change and democratic uncertainty. To what extent does decision-making by religious traditions, movements and parties vary from that of secular actors in political society (Grewal)? To what extent is there internal variation among religious movements or individuals in their decision-making (Shamaileh and Ciftci; Sperber)? And in each case, what explains this variation (Reheman; Buckley)? Explanations may be theological, resting on distinct interpretations of scripture or religious social teaching. Explanations may, however, draw more on psychological or material motives, for instance distinct experiences of repression at the hands of coercive states.
Additionally, the papers advance comparative scholarship on religion and democracy by working past a blunt dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism. While much scholarship on religion and democracy’s Third Wave, for instance, rested on a fairly crisp distinction between support for democracy or dictatorship, this era of democratic backsliding presents more nuanced institutional equilibria. Scholarship related to religion and democracy needs to reflect this “gray area” reality. With this in mind, papers on the panel take up strategies related to specific institutional choices like lustration (Grewal), multidimensional views of religion and political institutions during a time of rapid transformation in Syria (Shamaileh and Ciftci), responses to populist and illiberal threats to rule of law (Buckley), reactions to strategic manipulation of electoral systems (Sperber), and distinct institutional preferences in public opinion (Reheman),. In each instance, the papers address religious preferences over political institutions that go beyond a blunt democracy-authoritarianism divide.
The panel’s geographic and religious diversity also advances scholarship in this area. Two papers grapple with Christian-majority contexts (Buckley and Sperber), where earlier scholarship on religion and the Third Wave at times overstated the unity of Christianity’s support for democratization. In each of these papers, the authors highlight significant variation among Christian churches in their posture towards periods of democratic backsliding. Three papers (Shamaileh and Ciftci, Grewal, and Reheman), in contrast, examine patterns in Muslim-majority cases, where earlier scholarship often exaggerated an essentialist “Muslim exceptionalism” in resistance to democracy. Each paper challenges this assumption, again tracing internal variation within Muslim-majority societies in postures toward democracy and associated political institutions.