Heaven on Earth: Explaining Religious Party Formation and Strength

• In Event: Religion and Party Politics

Abstract

Why do some countries have religious political parties and others do not? And why does the electoral performance of religious parties vary so widely? This paper provides a comprehensive answer to both of these puzzles. My argument adds to the literature on religious parties in two main ways. Unlike most studies – which usually analyze religious party formation in particular confessional contexts – my work attempts to provide a general theory of religious partisanship that applies across civilizations. Moreover, it contributes to the literature by theorizing jointly about party formation and party strength, linking two phenomena that have hitherto been analyzed separately and showing how they are affected by one common process: the building of the modern bureaucratic state.

I start by constructing a new typology that categorizes organized religion’s role in the political system into one of three ideal-types. The first, which I call ‘religion-state collusion’, is characterized by the absence of explicit confessional parties. The second, called ‘unstable confessional partisanship’, comprises cases where religious parties exist but have a small and/or a volatile support base. The final ideal-type is characterized by a socially entrenched and broadly popular party – which I call ‘institutionalized confessional partisanship’.

Combining a macrohistorical perspective with attention to the microfoundations of actors’ preferences, I develop a formal model of religious party formation in order to explain why either of these ideal-types was prevalent in a given country. The historical focus is on the crucial years of state-building, spanning roughly the second half of the 19th century for Western nations and the second half of the 20th for postcolonial countries. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I assume that the status quo at the start of the period – before the state-building process is complete – is characterized by an alliance between religion and the state, with the former being granted a quasi-monopoly of public service provision. Everywhere around the world, religion has traditionally been responsible for education, health care and charity. In the second step of the model, secular politicians decide whether to maintain their alliance with religion or to expand the state at their expense – taking over public service provision. If politicians choose to cooperate with religion, the game ends without the formation of a confessional party. Organized religion has no reason to incur the costs of joining the partisan arena when it enjoys a privileged sociopolitical position. This choice thus leads to the ideal-type of ‘religion-state collusion.’

Contrarily, if politicians opt to challenge the traditional religious role in public service provision, organized religion will fight back through the creation of a political party. Whether said party is successful or not will in turn depend, I argue, on the infrastructural power of the state; that is, the ability of the government to mobilize its citizens. When infrastructural power is low, the state’s ability to provide public services is inferior to that of religion. Despite the state’s claims to monopolize public service provision, existing religious networks – the traditional providers of education, health care, and poor relief – will fill the vacuum by continuing their activities much as before. The role played by religious bodies in citizens’ lives facilitates the mobilization of a vast number of grateful voters come election day, leading to the ideal-type of ‘institutionalized confessional partisanship.’ In contrast, a state with high infrastructural power is capable of providing reliable public services to broad segments of the population. The daily lives of citizens will thus slip from the grasp of religion and a confessional party will only manage to mobilize the most religiously committed. This is the ideal-type of ‘unstable confessional partisanship.’

My theoretical propositions about the role of public service provision and infrastructural power on the formation and strength of religious political parties are empirically evaluated using a novel dataset on the electoral performance of confessional parties in all democratic countries between 1830 and 2015. The results support my theoretical claims. First, the existence of a religious political party is positively and significantly associated with the secularization of public services. In particular, countries with a secular education system entirely managed by the state are almost two-thirds more likely to have a confessional party than comparable countries where religion plays a role in education. Second, those religious parties that do exist perform better electorally – and have more consistent levels of support across consecutive elections – in countries where the state has low levels of infrastructural power (operationalized as the proportion of children aged between 6 and 10 enrolled in school).

Author

• Mario Rebelo, University of Oxford