“Religious NGOs play significant roles in service delivery, community organization, advocacy and mediating flows of information and resources across the globe. Their religious inflections can both enhance the effective reach of particular projects and complicate the already fraught policy environment in which NGOs operate.While policy frameworks influence the kinds of activities that religious NGOs are able to undertake and aim to govern practice, the way this takes place in context is an empirical question. In this interview, we talk with Erica Bornstein about…” [go to site]
Author Archives: Ricardo M. Barrera
Alfred Stepan’s legacy
“Alfred Stepan’s death left a gaping hole in the academy and the world. A giant in the field of comparative politics, Al (as he was known to friends) was an even more powerful force in the world of democratic development, having dedicated much of his life to understanding the forces that lead to democratic transition, democratic consolidation, and democratic breakdown.
Readers of The Immanent Frame are likely to be familiar with his work on religion, including his influential article, “Religion, Democracy and the ‘Twin Tolerations.’” Yet, although he worked closely with Father Theodore Hesburgh on the elimination of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, Al came to the academic study of religion relatively late in his career having already authored or coauthored ten books on the military, authoritarianism, and democratic transition and consolidation. As a result, Al brought a distinctive ethical sensibility to the study of religion and politics. In this essay I want to elucidate that sensibility since it is central to his legacy. ….” full article
APSR Article: Taking Religion Seriously? Habermas on Religious Translation and Cooperative Learning in Post-secular Society
by Giorgi Areshidze, Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Abstract
This article evaluates Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to reopen political liberalism to religion. In trying to “take religion seriously,” Habermas goes further than John Rawls and other liberal theorists by affirming that religious traditions articulate truths on which democratic societies continue to depend for their civic and moral health. “Post-secular” societies, in his view, should learn from religion by translating its “moral intuitions” into universal secular language. Although Habermas in this way appears friendlier to religion than Rawls, unlike Rawls he also calls for the “modernization of religious consciousness.” This theological transformation not only reveals the foundationalist presuppositions of liberalism, but also points to a highly attenuated conception of learning from religion. Taking religion seriously will require us to be open to its insights not only when they agree with, but especially when they challenge, our secular presuppositions. This dimension of religion is at risk of getting “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm.
The Idea of the Muslim World and the global politics of religion
Responding to Cemil Aydın’s exceptional new book, The Idea of the Muslim World,
Harvard University Press 2017. [amazon]
by past Section Chair, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
“Recently, a friend of mine originally from Calcutta was outside his house gardening on a Sunday morning when a neighbor came by and asked, “How was church this morning?” “I didn’t go to church,” he replied, “I’m Hindu.” “I’m sorry,” she responded. Another day, also while gardening, a different neighbor approached to ask how much my friend charges for landscaping. He explained that he owns the house.
We live in a moment in which for some Americans, to be perceived as Muslim, dark-skinned, and/or non-Christian, generates confusion and, at times, hostility. This is not new.”
2018 APSA Annual Meeting – Boston
Theme Statement for the 2018 Annual Meeting
Program Chairs:
Henry Farrell, The George Washington University
Anna Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University
Democracy and Its Discontents
The theme for this year’s meeting of the American Political Science Association is Democracy and Its Discontents. These are challenging times for democracy. In many established democracies, the aftermath of the 2008 and the 2011 economic crises is opening up new spaces for new challengers and popular grievances. The complex relationship between national systems of rule and a global economy is leading to greater tensions both within democracies and between them. Existing rules and party systems are under strain as new cleavages emerge, with populism, nativism, and illiberalism all jostling for popular support, as well as new experiments in representation. Developed democratic systems are experiencing greater discontent among voters. Global flows of people, capital, and investment undermine national identities and institutional arrangements. At the same time, there are challenges to the legitimacy of international institutions that are seen as limiting economic and democratic choices.
The United States faces particular questions, as economic inequality, identity politics, and polarization dominate political debates. The presidential victor, for the second time in sixteen years, won office without a majority of the popular vote. Emerging and relatively new democracies too are undergoing upheaval, as some leaders turn away from traditional norms of liberal democracy based on contestation between plural forces towards an illiberal model, in which leaders and ruling party are entitled to reshape domestic rules to their own benefit. Informal norms of democratic behavior, such as opposition rights, accountability, and transparency are being violated across several democracies. Non-democratic countries too are being affected, both because there is no longer much of an expectation that they will become democratic over time, and because their own policies and options are affected by the changes in democratic states elsewhere. All this poses political theoretic questions as well as empirical ones.
The current dilemmas of democracy provoke scholars to work across different sub-disciplines and specializations to understand these changes. For example, how do we understand the impact of international factors such as migration, automation, and changes in economy on domestic political party systems? The recent turn in several countries towards illiberalism is in part a product of parallel evolution under similar pressures, but is also plausibly the consequence of cross-national influence, as actors in one context learn from another. How do security arrangements, predicated on coordination among democratic nations, survive the erosion of liberal norms? What are the consequences of regime shifts for social policy, welfare, courts, or the media?
Taking a page from scholars of competitive authoritarianism and illiberal democracies, can we fruitfully think about recent political developments in the United States as regime backsliding? How are political parties, civil society, and interest groups responding? What is the role of the center-left and the center-right here? Which comparative and historical parallels provide the greatest insights in examining the discontents of democracy? How do informal norms depend on and interact with formal institutions such as courts, parliaments, and central banks?
Equally, understanding the dilemmas of national democracies requires an attention to theoretical issues as well as empirics. Is the legitimacy of democracy in crisis, or is this simply a transitory phase? Which institutional equilibria, regimes, and political configurations are especially likely to be fragile, and which are resilient? How ought we to think about the role of demagogues and anti-liberal rhetoric? Are there other plausible models for institutions of representation and decision making that might lead to better democratic outcomes?
As Chairs for the 2018 Conference, we welcome proposals that address the discontents of democracy from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. We particularly welcome proposals that work across subfields and approaches to address the new questions that are emerging, and work that looks to bring disciplinary debates and public dialogue into closer alignment with each other.