Luis Felipe Mantilla, Associate Professor with the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus, recently published his book How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey.
The book analyzes the emergence and evolution of political parties with ties to Catholicism and Sunni Islam from the mid-20th century to the present. Relying on a combination of cross-national statistics and case studies of Mexico and Turkey, it finds that religious political engagement responds to laws and regulations, but not always in the ways lawmakers intend, and that it also depends on the internal structure of religious communities. At a time when passionate debates about the role of religion in public life seem to be everywhere from cable news to the campaign trail to the supreme court, the book offers a timely analysis of both the resilience and costs of religious engagement in partisan politics.