ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how and in what ways interactions between religion and society shape political parties, in terms of their voters’ preferences, culture and programmes. The chapter focuses on mechanisms other than those generally considered by secularisation theory, which are dealt with in other chapters in this handbook.
To avoid overlap with coverage in other chapters, this one uses case studies from England, Northern Ireland, Denmark and India. These represent, respectively: a highly secularised case, yet one that is still marked by religion-related cleavages; a mixed Catholic–Protestant case, where religion is widely regarded as a key marker of ethnicity and sectarian identities; a Lutheran Protestant case, in some ways highly secularised, but where religion arguably still plays a key role in defining national identity which can be mobilised by populist nationalist parties; and a Hindu majority society that has seen the rise to electoral dominance of a party ‘which seeks to establish the primacy of Hindu identity’. Together, these cases illustrate eight mechanisms through which religion impacts on political parties, under a range of conditions.
