Religious parties and secular politics in Mexico and Turkey

The growing prominence of religious parties in global politics raises pressing questions. Why do religious parties feature prominently in some elections and not in others? How do patterns of religious mobilization change over time? What role do religious traditions play in shaping these organizations? My dissertation examines the contrasting trajectories of Catholic parties in Mexico and Sunni Muslim parties in Turkey in order to explain patterns of religious mobilization in the political arena. It develops an analytical framework centered on religious community structure and electoral incentives that builds on existing institutionalist and rationalist approaches. Relying on a mixed-methods strategy that combines carefully contextualized historical case studies and an original cross-national dataset, it finds that religious party strategies are not simply a function of tradition and regime type but evolve in response to the internal dynamics of religious communities and changes in electoral laws. At a time when the political role of religion is becoming increasingly prominent, this study problematizes overarching generalizations about the compatibility of religion and democracy by building and testing a framework that captures the impact of religious communities and political institutions in practice.