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This article examines how the engagement of diverse religious organisations and individuals in grassroots politics impacts the nature of politics and coalition building through a case study of an urban grassroots political coalition in Australia: the Sydney Alliance. Based on eight-months of exploratory ethnographic fieldwork in one campaign team, this article argues that whilst religious organisations bring significant symbolic and institutional resources to political coalitions, and can be flexible coalition partners, they tend to moderate both conservative and progressive political tendencies within a coalition and demand focused attention from organisers and leaders to manage the coalition dynamics. This article examines the way many religious activists understand their political action to be an inherent and necessary part of their religious practice: problematizing the characterisation common in much social science literature that religious engagement in more progressive politics primarily serves political, and not religious, ends. In doing so, it shows how political action can be directed both outward towards the work, and inward towards the &lsquo ; church&rsquo ; .

AbstractThe literature on voting for Christian-democratic parties has emphasized that voters of these parties are still motivated by the old religious cleavages that led to the formation of these parties and that structured the vote for these parties for years. Their strong attachment to religious parties even immunized Christian voters from the temptation of the radical right. Yet what the role the new cultural dimension about immigration, civic integration, and identity plays in structuring the vote for religious parties is unclear. Are voters of religious parties immune to the effect of the party polarization of immigration? This paper shows that the policy positions of religious parties matter for what kind of voter votes for them. This paper shows the importance of immigration attitudes in voting for three different religious parties in the Netherlands by combining eight national election surveys between 1994 and 2017.

AbstractThis article explores the conditions under which religious organizations push for democratization by addressing variation in support for democracy among Catholic Church authorities in South America. It argues that this can be best explained by leveraging key concepts used in the study of social movements: cultural frames, mobilizing resources, and political opportunity structures. This approach yields counter-intuitive insights about the role played by the Second Vatican Council, the size of national churches, and the crucial role of political parties. The empirical argument is formulated in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and tested using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis.