From Faith to Freedom: The Role of Religious Actors in Global Democratic Progress

Abstract

Examining all cases of global democratization between 1972 and 2009 (excluding countries with populations of less than 1 million, while including countries that made democratic progress but fell short of consolidated democratic perfection), the paper explores where and why religious actors made a pro-democratic difference. The analysis finds that religious actors played a significant supporting or leading role in more than half of all cases of global democratization in this period. Although the majority of the pro-democratic religious actors in these cases was Roman Catholic, the best explanation for their pro-democratic activity lies not in religious tradition or identity per se (Catholic v. Protestant or Christian v. Muslim, for example). Instead, the paper argues that the best explanation lies in a combination of two key variables: (1) the given religious actor's institutional or structural relationship to the state and (2) the religious actor's theology of politics and government -- its political theology. Where religious actors enjoy some instititutional independence from the state as well as a political theology that is at least compatible with liberal democracy, they are likely to play a democratizing role. The combination of these two factors -- a religious actor's proximity to power and its theology of power -- provides a robust explanation even of differences in political behavior between religious actors of the same religious tradition (for example, why Brazilian and Chilean Catholic actors were pro-democratic while Argentine Catholic actors were not for the most part) as well as offers a satisfying explanation of the so-called democracy deficit in the Muslim world.