https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0333-5319
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Evren Çelik Wiltse, How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey. By Luis Felipe Mantilla, Journal of Church and State, Volume 64, Issue 4, Autumn 2022, Pages 747–749, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csac055
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In-depth comparisons of cross-religious studies have been relatively rare, despite the growing salience of religion in politics across the world. The more common trend in the literature has been either single case studies and regional works on one religious tradition or large-n empirical works. If religious constituencies are mobilizing politically, which they do, from India to the United States, it is important to understand whether there is variation across different religions. Do doctrinal differences matter? Dearth of cross-religious studies inevitably leads to an essentializing rhetoric, where inherent and fixed differences between religions dominate, large variations within the same tradition get overlooked, and certain traditions (particularly Islam) can be easily vilified for radicalism or democratic incompatibility.
Luis Felipe Mantilla’s work lands on that sweet spot of cross-religious analysis, as he looks at patterns of religious mobilization in Roman Catholicism (Mexico) and Sunni Islam (Turkey). His book deploys mixed methods. The quantitative section offers a cross-national analysis of religious mobilization in twenty-two majority Catholic and eighteen majority Sunni nations from 1990 to 2012. The important question he attempts to answer is: Where do we see successful mobilization of religious parties? The category of “religious party” is not as straightforward as one might think, given the complicating factors—most important being formal bans on such parties in some polities. Nevertheless, the author provides satisfactory explanations of his terminology and categorizations throughout the book. As independent variables, he uses religiosity scores from the World Values Survey, basic economic development indicators, democracy scores from Polity II, data on party systems, political fragmentation, and data from Jonathan Fox’s database on state–religion relations.
