Institutional Constraints and Change in Church-State Relations in Europe

In recent years religion-state institutions in Europe have come under sustained pressure due to increasing religious pluralism brought about in part by the growing presence of religious “newcomers,” such as Muslim migrants and their descendants.  To the extent that the literature on church-state relations has dealt with these issues, there have been two broad approaches.  One approach represented by the work of Fetzer and Soper (2005) argues that responses to increasing religious pluralism are shaped by preexisting institutions which are deeply rooted in the respective countries’ histories and thus resistant to major changes.  An alternative approach questions the constraining power of church-state institutions.  Laurence (2012) found that “European policy responses to Muslim communities have not been dictated by ‘inherited’ institutional traits.”

I argue in this paper that existing institutions constrain policy responses but the extent of such constraints varies.  To be more specific, some institutions are less bureaucratically entrenched than others, and legal constraints are less binding when an area of law is new.  Furthermore, religion-state institutions themselves are subject to change.  I distinguish between two causal pathways for explaining institutional change.  First of all, institutions change when existing rules are reinterpreted to serve new goals (Thelen 2004).  Second, institutional arrangements are frequently renegotiated when there are shifts in the social coalitions supporting particular institutions.  The empirical focus of the paper will be how Austrian, German and Swiss governments have dealt with demands by religious minorities for legal recognition as well as the regulation of ritual slaughter and burial practices.