The Politics of Religious Party Change

A. Kadir Yildirim is Fellow for the Middle East at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Ohio State University.

• 1. Explaining religious party change; 2. Catholic and Islamic religious institutions; 3. Anticlericalism, religious revival, and the rise of religious political identities; 4. The origins of religio-political identity; 5. Intra-party conflict.

'Religious parties around the world, such as the Muslim Brotherhood associated parties of the Arabic-speaking counties, or the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe, all began their lives as traditionalist organizations fervently opposed to the expansion of personal freedoms and deeply skeptical of political democracy. And yet some of these parties evolved not just to accommodate themselves to these things, but to actively champion them, while others remained as they were, tilting against the social and cultural change and waging war on modernity itself. In explaining this difference, A.Kadir Yildirim has produced a model of comparative social science and an instant classic in the study of religion and politics.' Tarek Masoud, Harvard University