Coalitions of the Weak: Political Parties and Religious Influence on Policy

How does religion influence politics? Religious organizations have historically manipulated public policy and intervened in politics: legitimating monarchs, shaping public morality, exerting control over education and the welfare state, or simply securing a favorable legal status. Yet in the modern era in predominantly Christian countries, churches are far more constrained, and cannot act alone. Religious bodies do not have direct access to policymaking or legislatures. Legal and institutional firewalls stymie even powerful churches with rows of loyal adherents. Clerics do not stand for office, and church delegates do not sit in legislatures, governments, or administrative bodies. How, then, can these actors - Christian churches in modern democracies - obtain their preferred policy outcomes? The prevailing answer is that political parties are the critical actors. Parties represent and channel voter demand, serve as potential coalition partners for churches, and propose and pass policy. For churches, political parties thus offer three mechanisms of potential influence: translating popular electoral demand for church involvement into policy, forming coalitions with sympathetic political parties that exchange policy concessions for electoral campaigning, and incurring “debts of gratitude” that newly democratic governments owe to their erstwhile religious sponsors. Electoral coalitions with powerful churches, especially, have been a prevalent explanation (Warner 2'008 Donovan 2003). In such coalitions, churches mobilize the support of their faithful for political parties, and in exchange obtain policy concessions from the government parties they helped to bring into office. For example, the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) relied on the support of the dominant Roman Catholic Church to keep the DC in power for nearly five decades after World War II in Italy (Hanley 1994, Kalyvas 1996, Warner 2'008 Donovan 2003.).Yet there are reasons to doubt these accounts. I argue instead that explicit coalitions with political parties are frequently a sign of relative church weakness, not strength. Incumbent political parties enact the preferences of churches when the latter lower the costs of governance after elections. The critical explanatory variable is the moral authority of the churches, and their ability to keep social peace as non-partisan, apolitical, and credible representatives of national interest. Where such moral authority is high, churches gain long-term institutional access to policymaking, and can directly mold public policy to obtain their preferences. Where their moral authority is lower, churches rely on costly and risky political coalitions, which can provide specific policy concessions but frequently fail to ensure the long-term influence churches seek. Below, I examine the variation in church influence on policy in Section I. Section II examines the competing explanations. Section III provides an alternative model of church-state bargaining, and section IV tests this explanation against existing accounts of church influence on politics. Section V concludes.