Religion and Political Authority under Autocratizing Pressures
Thursday, September 3, 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-Person | Full Paper Panel
Participants:
- (Chair) Jonathan A. Laurence, Boston College
- (Discussant) Elizabeth S. Sperber, University of Denver
- (Discussant) Feyaad Allie, Harvard University
Session Description:
This panel examines how political authority is constructed, exercised, and contested under conditions of democratic erosion and autocratizing pressure through the strategic mobilization of religion. Across diverse religious traditions and regions, the papers analyze how both religious and political actors deploy religious ideas, institutions, and symbols to legitimate authority, resist corruption, reshape political belonging, or consolidate illiberal rule.
The panel is explicitly comparative and cross-regional, bringing together work on Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and transnational Jewish politics. Several papers emphasize transnational dynamics and diaspora publics, while others focus on localized mobilization and national-level political struggles. Methodologically, the panel is mixed-methods, combining cross-national quantitative analysis, archival research, elite and clergy interviews, protest documentation, and digital media analysis.
The papers illuminate distinct but related pathways through which religion becomes politically consequential under autocratizing conditions. Buckley analyzes variation in Catholic clergy involvement in anti-corruption mobilization in the Philippines, showing how religious leaders engage in costly democratic contention amid political backsliding. Menchik examines Jewish internationalism as a long-standing, transnational religious–political tradition that articulates alternative forms of political belonging and democratic solidarity, particularly in contexts marked by ethnonationalist projects or autocratic pressures. Abdelgadir shows how transnational sponsorship enables religious actors to expand organizational capacity and local influence, demonstrating how foreign resources reshape religious competition and political authority through the diffusion of Salafism in Uganda. Sundaram examines how political actors deploy Hindutva as a transnational ideological project through media, mobilizing religious symbolism and digital publics to manufacture authority and legitimate authoritarian tendencies. Sperber examines how political economy theories of religion fare in Sub-Saharan Africa, where she finds that religious competition can generate or intensify democratic mobilization or regime legitimation depending on institutional legacies, political opportunity structures, and transnational religious ties.
By placing these rigorous, mixed-methods papers in dialogue, the panel illuminates shared questions of authority, belonging, mobilization, and democratic erosion across several sub-literatures. Purposefully, the panel leverages regional, religious, and disciplinary diversity to generate broader insights into how religious and political actors respond to, or may be implicated in, antidemocratic politics. In doing so, it speaks directly to the conference theme, Democracy under Threat, by illuminating both the mechanisms through which democracy is undermined and the varied forms of resistance and alternative political imaginaries that emerge — especially from religious actors — under pressure.
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