Abstract
The study of religious parties, especially in those areas affected by the ‘Arab Spring’, has been an ongoing trend in recent years. This book, although only marginally considering the topic, is still strongly influenced by such events and the resurgence of religion in politics and its effects on party organisation. Religiously oriented parties are defined by the editors as ‘parties focusing significant sections on religious values’. The book takes a conservative outlook on the definition of religious parties, trying to employ traditional party model analysis, and taking into consideration two aspects of social division within societies in relation to religion and party strategies.
The book offers two intertwined arguments, namely of dilution and categorisation. According to the authors, the concept of religious parties is quite stringent and it should be broadened to introduce the concept of religious inspiration as well. For these reasons, the book follows an extremely strict theoretical path, based on a five-fold typology of religious political parties encompassing conservative, progressive, religious nationalist, fundamentalist and camp parties.
The case studies are selected in order to fit within a scheme designed by the editors and they contribute to the theoretical outlook of the book. They are carefully spread across continents and cover the areas most sensitive to religious discourse, including Turkey, Israel, Tunisia, India, Chile and Italy.
The authors cleverly avoid concentrating only on those areas where religion has emerged as a driving force behind important transformation such as regime change. They carefully introduce and focus on two important aspects of religious-inspired parties: namely, their character as conservative parties and their embedded nationalism. Both of these aspects are important to the authors, as they stress the patterns of normalisation of religious parties combining religion, conservativism and an ethnonationalist agenda.
The book is innovative where it tries to systematise and offer a theoretical framework able to analyse political parties with a religious agenda. However, it lacks somewhat in two aspects: the autonomy of the contributors, who are strictly tied to the theoretical schema indicated by the editors, and the selection of case studies. The latter all fit perfectly and neither challenge nor critique the proposed theory. The case studies also rely on already-established political organisations with strong traditions and ideological evolution (e.g. India, Italy, Tunisia), whereas it would have been interesting to introduce the utilisation of religious political discourse in party agendas in other areas (e.g. the Balkans and Eastern Europe). The book’s theoretical contribution is important in analysing religiously oriented political parties, and it provides a good point of departure for analysing the relation between religion, politics and democratisation.