From Pulpit to Party: Party Formation and the Christian Democratic Phenomenon

Abstract

How are parties formed? This fundamental question has far-reaching implications. One of the most robust insights in political science, Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan's freezing hypothesis, is directly linked to the issue of party formation. Since the configuration of party systems and voter alignments today still reflects cleavages that froze in the 1920s, it is essential to explain what accounts for the initial configuration. Despite its obvious significance, the study of party formation remains very much where Rokkan's seminal contribution left it., Recent theoretical innovations offer fresh perspectives and tools for approaching this issue.2 In this paper I tackle the issue of party formation in the context of emerging party systems by focusing on a central but surprisingly overlooked European political actor: Christian Democratic parties. These parties have been, and still are, a dominant feature of European (and to some extent Latin American) politics, yet their identity is puzzling, and their nature enigmatic.3 The sheer existence of these parties, which stand at the intersection of religion and politics but thrive in secular and liberal societies, raises important theoretical questions about the relationship between politicized religion and democracy. While Christian Democratic parties are unquestionably secular, their prewar predecessors emerged as confessional parties. How did such parties appear in Europe? Is there any causal link between the process of their formation and their secular postwar evolution? Here, I provide Rokkan's theoretical framework with microfoundations. I focus on actors and mechanisms to unpack the dual processes of the construction of political identities and the emergence of political organizations.4 This account of party formation goes beyond the usual references to Catholicism, papal encyclicals, and the impersonal forces of modernization. The formation of confessional parties was the contingent outcome of state-church conflicts. Theoretically, cleavage and party formation are distinct processes. Contrary to what Rokkan implied, the actors who foster the emergence of a new cleavage are not necessarily the same as those who create and lead the party representing it. Thus, while the church was instrumental in the emergence of a religious cleavage, it did not form the confessional parties. Nor were these parties formed by conservative political elites. These actors initiated the process that eventually led to the formation of con-