2010/11/18 by Ateş Altınordu · 73 citations
Social Sciences · #German #History #Islam #Law #Philosophy #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Protestantism #Religion and Society Interactions #Religion, Society, and Development #Religious Education and Schools #Religious studies #Social science #Sociology #Sociology of religion #State (computer science) #Theology #Turkish
paper · doi:10.1177/0032329210381238
published in Politics & Society 38(4), 517-551 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2010/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While religious politics have been a widely discussed topic in the social sciences in recent decades, few studies develop general explanations based on systematic and detailed comparative analysis. This article seeks to explain when and how successful religious parties rise. To that end, I comparatively analyze the politicization of German Catholicism in the second half of the nineteenth century (1848—1878) and Turkish Islam in the post-1970 period (1970—2002) and briefly examine the negative case of nineteenth-century German Protestantism. According to the theory of revival-reaction-politicization I propose, successful religious parties rise when major religious revivals confront social counter-mobilization and state repression, provided that existing political parties do not effectively represent religious defense. The study's findings challenge the pervasive tendency to treat Christian and Islamic politics as incommensurable.