Project Details
Projekt
Political participation
Applicant
Professor Dr. Andreas Busch
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2013 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 200984086
This research project focuses on protestantism's influence on political decision making in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1949 and 1989. Although it is generally acknowledged that religious affiliation and church affiliation play an important role e.g. in electoral decisions and the influence of Christian churches on key policy decisions is often summarily appreciated, German political science for a long time all but neglected to analyse the influence of churches and religion on political decision making -- in stark contrast to other academic disciplines like history, law or sociology. Over the past decade -- more precisely: since 11 September 2001 -- a rising interest in this topic was evident in political science discourse, though. This research project aims to contribute to the political science debate about the relationship between religion, state and politics. In the second funding phase applied for here, political participation of Protestantism will be analysed on the one hand (to complement the work done in the first phase of work) outside established institutions of political decision-making, i.e. through participation in community groups and social movements. On the other hand, a second project aims to use a select topic to bring the various threads on "Political participation of Protestantism" together in a longitudinal analysis of the SPD. It aims to allow towards the end of the second funding period a theoretically and empirically valid answer to the question, in what way, with what resources, and with which results Protestantism influenced political decision-making in the Federal Republic during the period of investigation. In summary, the proposed project promises to make an interesting and relevant contribution to the discussion about the relationship between politics and religion in an area largely neglected in political science and thus help close a research gap.
DFG Programme
Research Units
