Manfred Brocker and Mirjam
Künkler, "Religious parties: Revisiting the
inclusion-moderation hypothesis - Introduction," Party
Politics, 19 (March 2013), 171-186. [Available at
http://ppq.sagepub.com/content/vol19/issue2/
]
First paragraph:
As the past quarter-century has witnessed the persistence of
Christian parties in Europe and Latin America, the inclusion
in governmental coalitions of Hindu-Nationalist parties in
South Asia and Jewish parties in Israel, and an increased
participation of Islamic parties in electoral processes
across the Muslim world, the debate over whether religious
parties grow more moderate over time when included in the
electoral process - known as the 'inclusion-moderation
hypothesis' (Bermeo, 1997; Huntington, 1991: 165-171;
Przeworski and Sprague, 1986) - has experienced a revival.
In 1996, Stathis Kalyvas published his seminal work on
Christian parties in Europe, which explained the
'democratization' of erstwhile illiberal Christian political
parties over time. Drawing on the example of 19th and early
to mid-20th century Christian parties in Europe, researchers
of Latin American, Israeli, Turkish, Indian and Indonesian
politics have recently turned to exploring the extent to
which Catholic, Jewish, Hindu and Islamic parties have
moderated, or can be expected to moderate, the more they are
included on even playing fields in the electoral processes
of their political systems.
- Figures and
Tables:
- None.
Last Paragraph:
The case studies present the precise modes of action of the
factors and mechanisms specified, and explain why the
development of moderation in the countries examined has
proceeded at different speeds - in some cases not at all (or
not yet) or only in the case of individual parties. While
throwing light on the 'inclusion-moderation hypothesis',
they certainly also give rise to new issues which will
require further case studies to be answered.
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