The rise and transformation of German political Catholicism (1848-1914) and Turkish political Islam (1970-2011)

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11577-013-0231-8

While cultural assumptions of incommensurability lead to a dearth of cross-religious and cross-regional studies in the sociology of religion, such studies offer distinctive analytical opportunities for gaining empirically grounded general insights on religious politics. This article explores the rise and transformation of the German Center Party (1848–1914) and of Turkish Islamic parties (1970–2011) in comparative perspective. It is argued that the significant structural parallels in the trajectories of these religious parties stem from similarities in the policies of secularist actors and from common characteristics of the political structure in the two settings. The article concludes with a call for a relational approach that takes the political environment and interactions with secularist actors as constitutive of religious-political movements.