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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.

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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.

Last updated March 2013