ABSTRACT
The question of how, or if, religious traditions might affect the possibility of successful democratisation has been hotly debated for several decades. During the immediate post-war years many writers stressed the importance of political culture in explaining the success or otherwise of democratisation and some focused on the ways in which religious traditions fed into the making of any country’s political culture. More recently a ‘new orthodoxy’ has emerged which concentrates on institutional or economic factors in the making of democracy and tends to see the impact of cultural factors as marginal or irrelevant. Few authors analysing the ‘third wave’ give much space to religion, except in discussing countries such as Poland where institutional religion played a role in undermining authoritarian regimes. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, analysing the East European experience, suggest that religion is a hypothesis that one can do without because other factors are sufficient to explain the differential results of democratisation in the region (Linz and Stepan 1996: 452-453). In similar vein Fred Halliday argues that the barriers to democracy in Islamic countries have to do with ‘certain other social and political
features that their societies share. … Though some of these features tend to be legitimised in terms of Islamic doctrine, there is nothing specifically “Islamic” about them’ (Halliday 1996: 116). By way of contrast Samuel Huntington has seen religion as crucial in defining the civilisational blocs into which he claims the world is divided and has argued that religious tradition does have an impact upon the likely success of democratisation efforts (Huntington 1991, 1996).
