Author Description

Over the past twenty-five years the study of religion and politics - and especially of the impact of the former on the latter - has witnessed a veritable renaissance. This volume brings together a wide and varied range of articles published over that period which illustrate and exemplify a number of contrasting approaches to the study of the interrelations between these two. In terms of focus it is restricted to questions of particular interest to empirically-minded political scientists with an interest in comparative politics, although it includes contributions from scholars of many disciplines specialising in widely-dispersed areas of the world and different time periods; it also broaches a number of normative of issues of continuing - even resurgent - significance. Substantively it is sub-divided into sections dealing with Religion and Regime, the Politics of Church-State Relations, Religion and Electoral Politics, and Religion, Public Policy and the Politics of Identity.