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The problem d cultural identity is central to political science. Three distinct elements of cultural identity are defined: the conceptual, symbolic. and de‐monstrative. Religion. language, and the teetotalist movement are suggested as indicators of these three components in the Norwegian context. The relative importance of these three aspects of cultural differentiation is analysed with regard to the changes in the Norwegian patty system in the years after 1884. It seeqs that language was the most significant element of cultural dissent in the formative years of the Norwegian party system.

AbstractMiddle East scholars have traditionally attributed the survival of monarchs in the Gulf to the use of financial appeasements fueled by oil revenues. With rampant political insecurity in the region and the revolutionary fervor present after the Arab Spring, leaders have gone beyond the traditional rentier state system to ensure political survival by playing on the sentiments of sectarianism and identity politics. This paper argues that religious sectarianism is not only a question of attitudes and sentiments toward a religious minority but also a politically motivated state mechanism used to maintain the status quo and ensure an extended legitimation of power. We argue that the state often capitalizes on people's fear of economic adversities to incite sectarian exclusions of religious minorities, this is especially evident in times of economic hardships. With survey data from the Arab Barometer, we examined such political psychology in Saudi Arabia in 2011, at the onset of the Arab Spring. We found that Sunni Muslim sentiments of sectarian exclusion toward the Shi'a minority could be attributed to not just religiosity but also state crafted incitement by the Saudi government. In particular, our results show that state-based sectarian intolerance was in part fueled by the government's scapegoating of the Shi'a communities during times of economic downturns.

"Protest and Religion: Christianity in the People's Republic of China" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractWhite evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, producing extensive debate as to who evangelicals are, what it means to be an evangelical in the United States today, and whether the electoral results are surprising or not. This paper offers empirical clarity to this protracted discussion by asking and answering a series of questions related to Trump's victory in general and his support from white evangelicals in particular. In doing so, the analyses show that the term "evangelical" has not become a synonym for conservative politics and that white evangelical support for Trump would behigherif public opinion scholars used a belief-centered definition of evangelicalism rather than relying on the more common classification strategies based on self-identification or religious denomination. These findings go against claims thatnominalevangelicals, those who call themselves evangelicals but are not religious, make up the core of Trump's support base. Moreover, strong electoral support among devout evangelicals is not unique to the 2016 election but rather is part of a broader trend of evangelical electoral behavior, even when faced with non-traditional Republican candidates. Finally, the paper explores why white evangelicals might support a candidate like Trump. The paper presents evidence that negative partisanship helps explain why devout evangelicals—despite Trump's background and behaviors being cause for concern—coalesced around his presidential bid. Together, the findings from this paper help make sense of both the 2016 presidential election and evangelical public opinion, both separately and together.

Starting from the puzzling effects of religion on conflict, both its escalation and deescalation, this article investigates the role of religion in maintaining boundaries (sacred/profane, clean/unclean, good/evil, etc.) that become constitutive of "self" and "society." The conceptual tools developed in this context are then applied to the issue of "fundamentalism" in contemporary politics.

The welfare regime in Turkey has been undergoing a radical transformation since the early 2000s. Welfare provisions, especially poverty alleviation schemes, are increasingly framed as gifts, and select civil society organisations have assumed the state's welfare provision functions through non-transparent public funding. Waqf, the Islamic institution of endowment, has played an important role in this transformation. It provides both the institutional frame of operations and the religious imaginary signification that interpellates subjects to take part as givers and receivers of gifts. This material exchange of care and money through newly configured gift-relations between the providers and beneficiaries constitutes not only a realm of politics but also a site of ethical negotiations with embodied consequences. This book is based on an extensive ethnographic study conducted between 2008-2009 among the charitable organizations of Kayseri, a central Anatolian city with booming industry and a majority conservative political orientation. A stronghold of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power in Turkey since 2002, the city has showcased the tenets of the welfare transformation that is to come, even in the early stages of AKP rule. With a focus on the daily practices within the field of beneficence, the book investigates the gift circuits that bring together central state institutions, municipalities, local notables and business people, religious groups, volunteers and employers of charitable organisations, and the urban poor. In these gift circuits, objects, money, services, prayers, recognition, and political and social influence flow in various directions through formal and informal routes. The book illustrates the growing significance of these particular forms of gift-giving in the field of poverty alleviation and welfare provision in Turkey and their role in the drastic political transformation of the country. ; The welfare regime in Turkey has been undergoing a radical transformation since the early 2000s. Welfare provisions, especially poverty alleviation schemes, are increasingly framed as gifts, and select civil society organisations have assumed the state's welfare provision functions through non-transparent public funding. Waqf, the Islamic institution of endowment, has played an important role in this transformation. It provides both the institutional frame of operations and the religious imaginary signification that interpellates subjects to take part as givers and receivers of gifts. This material exchange of care and money through newly configured gift-relations between the providers and beneficiaries constitutes not only a realm of politics but also a site of ethical negotiations with embodied consequences. This book is based on an extensive ethnographic study conducted between 2008-2009 among the charitable organizations of Kayseri, a central Anatolian city with booming industry and a majority conservative political orientation. A stronghold of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power in Turkey since 2002, the city has showcased the tenets of the welfare transformation that is to come, even in the early stages of AKP rule. With a focus on the daily practices within the field of beneficence, the book investigates the gift circuits that bring together central state institutions, municipalities, local notables and business people, religious groups, volunteers and employers of charitable organisations, and the urban poor. In these gift circuits, objects, money, services, prayers, recognition, and political and social influence flow in various directions through formal and informal routes. The book illustrates the growing significance of these particular forms of gift-giving in the field of poverty alleviation and welfare provision in Turkey and their role in the drastic political transformation of the country.

The Catholic clergy and the military have played crucial roles in Mexican history yet have been largely ignored in recent twentieth-cenury scholarship. The military received some attention in the early post-revolutionary period because it was intertwined with political leadership, but religious elites and the Catholic Church, which were separate from the state and suppressed by it, have not been analyzed. As a rule, cohesive leadership groups in Mexico with values differing from politicians, strong institutional structures, and autonomy from the state have rarely been examined, especially in relationship to the state and politics in general. Conversely, the greater a group's ties to the Mexican political establishment, as measured by exchanges between leadership, the more scholars have learned about that group. Whereas intellectuals, entrepreneurs, military officers, and even opposition politicians share some ties with the state, the Catholic Church has no direct links, and its contemporary leaders, goals, and institutional structures remain relatively unknown and little understood.

This paper presents the discourse, or more often the struggle, between secularists and Islamists in Tunisia relating religion and the state within the desired democratic system. The movement of 18 October is a landmark in the efforts for constructive work between different political constituents which emphasized that the relationship between religion and the state is not expected to have a ready-made formula; instead, it is the product of a social pact that interacts with politics, culture and economics. The paper looks into the basis or foundation for cooperation, the feasibility of the merger between religion and the state, the timing – before or after democracy takes hold – the focus on form and substance of democracy, its connection to laws, etc. Whereas it may be possible to separate religion from the state, it is not possible to separate it from politics as this requires a dissociation of some devout believers from their system of belief, thus denying their basic rights. There are no guarantees that within a democratic system some groups and parties basing themselves on religion will be against democracy. These groups should remain part of the political system, the solution being to honour a social pact that is based on respecting constitutional institutions, national identity, principles of the republican system and human rights.

An original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the Church's historical scholarship, social science, pastoral care, and political practice amounted not to a culturally backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalisation. In seeking to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided over what it meant in practice