When do Secularizing Parties Succeed? Cross-national and Historical Analysis

• In Event: Religion and the Study of Political Institutions

Abstract

What are the conditions under which political parties with a secular agenda gain access to political power? The paper argues that success of secularizing parties depends on two factors. First, higher levels of literacy allow secular political groups to compete with long established and locally embedded religious organizations by utilizing resources such as newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Second, secular political groups are also more likely to succeed if they are not internally divided along other ideological dimensions. Divisions between republican and socialist parties or between secularizing parties with different ethnic constituencies impede cooperation within the secular camp and decrease the chances of success for these parties.

On the methodological front, this study adopts a mixed approach to evaluate the argument outlined above. The first empirical section uses statistical analysis of original data that covers Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East in the post-1850 period. The dependent variable measures whether and when political parties with an explicitly secularizing agenda were in power in each country in the post-1850 period. The coding identifies political parties that aimed to secularize public education, family law, and, where relevant, the criminal justice system. The main independent variables include literacy rates and an indicator that captures the number of parties with a secularizing agenda that had significant differences on socio-economic or ethnic issues. The analysis also controls for a number of other factors such as indicators for economic development, the majority religion in the country, past relations between the throne and altar, and colonial experience.
The second step in the empirical strategy focuses on the comparative historical analysis of two countries (France and Spain, beginning with 17th century). These cases vary in terms of the success of political groups with a secular agenda but share a set of critical characteristics such as the historical role of the Catholic Church and its relation to the monarchy. The comparative analysis evaluates the theory by focusing on its fine-grained empirical implications that cannot be tested via statistical analysis.

Author

• H. Zeynep Bulutgil, University College London