Veto Players and Stakeholders: Religion in Polish and American Politics

Abstract

A model of religion-inspired political activity—taking into account internal organization of a religious actor, with its members, resources, leadership structures and level of ideological cohesion; external political opportunity structure offering access points but also restricting political options of churches; and the strategies it chooses—is applied to the analysis of Polish and American religious actors in terms of their potential impact on the political process. The Polish Catholic Church has been described as a veto player, an actor able to block the change of the status quo. This is demonstrated with the case study on the making of the Polish constitution, where the Church succeeded in blocking regulations potentially inhibiting its public presence. Conversely, American religious actors have been described as stakeholders, interested and involved in public policymaking, but—due to a variety of differences in social structure, architecture of the political system and political culture—often unable to exert their influence in a direct, causally demonstrable way the Polish Church has been.

Epilogue

Political science of religion, rather than being a theory of everything religio-political, is a set of concepts and ideas of how to most effectively approach the relation between politics and religion from the vantage point of political science. And since political science deals primarily with power relations, religion is seen, in this perspective, as a power resource, while religious organizations are political actors attempting to realize their goals within a political system.

The critique offered at the outset has been just a jumping-off point to formulating two basic methodological principles in studying the political role of religion: non-normativism and political focusing . The former is worth reiterating (even if it seems a bit of a positivistic pedantry), since the subject of religion is so value-laden. It postulates understanding religion non-theologically as a social phenomenon which influences political attitudes and behaviours of individual and collective actors, but which is neither true or false, good or evil, necessary or redundant for politics. The latter principle, what I refer to as political focusing (or reduction), insists on looking at religion primarily from the perspective of its political significance, with other aspects of religion coming into focus only insofar as they help explain its relationship with politics. Such a view is not, however, necessarily superficial. It is narrow, but deep: narrow, because it focuses solely on the political aspect of the role religion plays in human experience; deep, because it seeks to explore this relationship on various levels. This is precisely why I proposed to combine three main approaches I identified in the scientific study of the subject—the cultural, the social movements theory and the transactional—into a single explanatory scheme, in which these approaches are not treated as alternative and mutually exclusive, but as addressing various layers at which religion impacts on politics.

The cultural perspective explains how individuals come to espouse religious ideas related to political power, how they use them to assess the validity (legitimacy) of power claims of other actors or to put forward such claims themselves, and how these ideas predispose them to political mobilization. Note that “culture” in the cultural approach is understood broadly in the extended anthropological sense, where the extension reaches as far as evolutionary origins of human psychological traits and patterns of political behaviour. SMT can then be used to explain how, at a sociological level, a range of material, symbolic and other resources are employed to organize these religion-induced dispositions into politics. Finally, the economic/transactional models show how religious actors thus constituted pursue their agendas in interaction with other actors populating political systems, employing a variety of strategies, both general-purpose and religion-specific. To integrate all these levels of analysis into a thorough explanation of religio-political phenomena would indeed be a great accomplishment, something which is rarely if ever attempted. This book is no exception: it postulates such a synthesis, without actually achieving it in relation to every issue it deals with (tentative examples of such integration are discussions of legitimation of power in Sect. 3.1 of Chap. 3 and of religious extremism in Sect. 5.4 of Chap. 5). But it does offer a number of conceptualizations and ideas which, I trust, may facilitate further inquiry into the subject.

These contributions come, first, in Chap. 2, in the form of general theoretical and methodological guidelines (the “nine theses” of political science of religion). Next, in addition to the three approaches discussed earlier, constituting separate but integrated levels of analysis, a conception of a political system is developed, viewed functionally (“black box”) or structurally (“white box”), in which religious actors, perceived either as institutional units or as internally diverse communities (ROI vs. ROC), engage in power relations as either veto players or stakeholders.

I then focus on the three thematic fields political science of religion should cover: internal power relations in religious organizations; theocracies; and religion and religious actors in non-theocratic political systems. All the specific topics that have been discussed—religious legitimation of power, religious leadership, religion-based political mobilization, religion-induced political protest or violence and so on—pertain to or are closely related with these fields. In theorizing theocracy (Chap. 3), a non-procedural understanding of the term was proposed (based on supernatural legitimation of power), which facilitates its integration with typologies of political systems by making the source of legitimacy an important dimension of these classifications. I then discuss how religious legitimacy of power is achieved (“sacralization” of power) and how theocratic power relations are created and maintained through a series of interactions (exchanges) between religious functionaries, secular rulers and their subjects.

The analysis of theocratic power relations (Chap. 4), both in theocratic states and non-state political systems (e.g. of various religious organizations), addresses the three key issues: how political power is gained and lost, how it gets institutionalized and by what means it is maintained against potential resistance. These three issues—theocratic succession procedures, institutional regimes and political control, respectively—are discussed using examples of mostly North American theocracies, particularly the New England Puritans, the Shakers and the Mormons.

In the second part of the book, I use the notion of survival strategies to explain the persistence of religion in democratic political systems (Chap. 5), where it lost its legitimating function for political authority, but never withdrew completely from the public sphere. Religious organizations are conceived of as political actors using a spectrum of strategies, both emulating political behaviour of their secular counterparts and employing religion-specific methods. Religion itself can be a source of conflicts, both violent and symbolic, intense and protracted, with stakes ranging from the assertion by a religious actor of its public presence to thorough reconstruction of states and societies.

Finally, in Chap. 6, the varying ability of these actors to affect the policymaking processes is conceptualized with a dichotomy of veto players against stakeholders, with only the former being actually able to block the change of the status quo. Methodologically, to assign the status of a veto player to an actor, one should be able to demonstrate a causal link between this player’s actions and the outcome in question—something I have attempted to do in relation to the Polish Catholic Church in the process of enacting the constitution. The ability of an actor to exercise political agency depends on a number of variables, such as confessional structure of the society; internal organization, patterns of leadership and cohesion of the religious actor; the strategies it uses; and the political opportunity structure it encounters, featuring factors such as the type of political regime, dynamics of the party system, model of church-state relations, patterns of political competition and political culture. The comparative analysis of these variables between Poland the United States served to explain the differing potential of religious actors in these political systems.

In sum, to answer Steven Kettell’s question: yes, we do need a political science of religion. We need it to promote the awareness of the enduring significance of religion for the sphere of politics among political scientists and, perhaps paradoxically, to convince them to study it with similar categories and methods they apply to other political phenomena. When these goals are reached—when religion moves into the mainstream of political science—political science of religion, having accomplished its mission, might rest in peace.