Confederacies need not be confined to the nation-state level: in Britain the
major pressure group for business interests is the CBI, the Confederation of
British Industry, so called because it is an amalgam of separate interests. One
theory of importance when dealing with the federal/confederal choice is that
confederacies allow for the disproportionate influence of the larger members,
while federations can more easily control any drive to such dominance. This
has become important recently in the debate about what, if any, form of
political unionshould be developed in theEuropean Union.
Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe
(see Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe)
Confessional Parties
Confessional parties, mainly to be found in Europe and Latin America, are
political parties whose members and, to a lesser extent, voters belong to a
specific religious denomination. Even where the identities of political parties
are not so firmly and objectively tied to questions of religious identity, religion
can still be a major element in voter choice, but the idea of a confessional party
is restricted to those political movements where the appeal is intentionally to
voters with a specific commitment to an overall religious creed, and not simply
policy attitudes that correlate with aspects of religious beliefs. The principal
role of such parties is to support policies specifically in the interest of, or
influenced by, their faith. There are two main types of confessional party. One,
often known as a clerical party, exists in a political system where there is a high
degree of religious uniformity among those who subscribe to a religious belief
at all, but where there is also ananti-clericalpolitical movement which is
opposed to the influence of any religious body on national politics. A good
example comes from the old Italian party system, where the confessional party
was the Christian Democrat Party, founded in 1943 as the successor to the pre-
fascist Popular Party by groups allied toRoman Catholicismand funded,
initially, directly by thepapacy. Itsanti-clericalopponent was the Italian
Communist Party, and its aim, originally at least, was to preserve Italy as a
Christian nation, with policy in many areas deliberately set to conform to the
church’s views.
An alternative version of a confessional party is where a society is split by
religious identities, so that political parties evolve to support a particular
religious community against both a potentially secular state, and against parties
Confessional Parties