ABSTRACT
The search for religious and spiritual experiences has been an inspiration for travel from the earliest parts of human history. Newer research on comparative political economy can also help researchers better understand how religious organizations and their efforts to promote religious tourism and pilgrimage are affected by differences in national political economies that help shape the development of macro and micro religious institutions within a country. Political economy as a disciplinary field of study focuses on the relationship between the marketplace and the powerful actors that work within it, with an emphasis on the political, economic, and societal institutions that shape the distributional outcomes between and within countries as well as the results that arise from these interactions. An important division in the study of political economy revolves around the level of institutional analysis. The mapping of Amable’s political economy types onto models of church-state relations reveals several clusters.
