Luca Ozzano

• Professor
• Professor (Associate) at University of Turin

Although the Community of Damanhur has already been the subject of a number of academic works, its political organization has mostly been neglected by academic studies. This chapter will try to fill the gap, by analyzing first the internal political organization of the community, which is quite elaborate and codified, and has endured several change...

Community organising, an approach aiming at building local leadership and empowering local communities, has become increasingly popular in the last few decades because of the crisis of more traditional practises of civil society building and political action. In this paper, the authors first describe the main tenets of this approach, formalised bet...

There is a growing focus in political science on right-wing populist parties. But few comparative studies address their discourses and politics relating to family values, especially when involved with policy-making. Moreover, many comparative works about populism focus on a single region – often Western and Eastern Europe. This paper adopts a defin...

Since the 1990s, the literature about social cleavages and political parties has been enriched by contributions hypothesizing the existence of new cleavages, based on materialist vs. postmaterialist sets of values and on the acceptance or rejection of globalization and Europeanization processes. In this context, scholars have highlighted that some...

The current global political landscape is increasingly marked by the growth of right-wing populist parties. Although this party family has been the subject of a bourgeoning scholarship, the role played by religion in shaping its ideology is still an under-researched topic. Drawing on the qualitative context analysis of a large database of newspaper...

LGBT+ issues and marriage equality have for long been taboo in predominantly Catholic Italy, although since the 2000s they had been the subject of public debate. This might partly explain why in 2016 the country was the last western European state to approve a law legalizing same-sex partnerships, although the literature has also focused on the inf...

The Economy of Communion (EoC) movement is one of the most interesting phenomena both in today’s Catholicism and in the global field of spiritually oriented entrepreneurship. This model – first elaborated by the founder of the Focolare movement, Chiara Lubich – is focused on a ‘culture of giving’; on the development of a relation of ‘communion’ wit...

The political science literature analyzing the genetic profile of European political parties has mainly focused on the salience, for the identity of today’s parties, of four social cleavages rooted in European history: among them, a religious/secular cleavage created by the birth of the modern national state. However, in the past two decades, some...

For centuries, Rome and Istanbul have been representing and epitomizing two empires and two entities with both significant spiritual and temporal power: the Papacy and the Caliphate. During the 19th and the 20th centuries, these institutions underwent significant changes in a context of state secularization: in the case of the Papacy, there was a l...

The Gülen movement, led by the Turkish cleric and philosopher Fethullah Gülen, has been in the past years the subject of extensive scholarship, also as a consequence of its spreading in the west through dozens of dialogue and education institutions. While the literature has covered the Gülen organizations in many European countries, the Italian cas...

There is a peculiar relationship between religion and the political system in twenty-first-century Italy. In particular, the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party has favored the rise of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit religion as a legitimacy factor, while the Catholic Church has attempted to influence politics without the mediat...

La centralità della religione nella vita pubblica delle società contemporanee è dimostrata, nel caso particolare dell’Italia, dal modo con cui si è articolata e sviluppata la discussione sui temi bioetici (inizio e fine vita, aborto, eutanasia), sui simboli religiosi e i luoghi di culto (con particolare riferimento all’Islam), sui rapporti tra educ...

This book is to understand the European political debate about contentious issues framed in terms of religious values by religious and/or secular actors in 21st century, focusing specifically on the Italian case, which, due to its peculiar history and contemporary political landscape, is a paradigmatic case for the study of the relationships betwee...

Issues related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights have for a long time been taboo in Catholic Italy, and they began to be debated in the mainstream media only after the organisation of a gay pride march in Rome during the 2000 jubilee. In the years since, the subject has become a bone of contention between the centre-left and the cen...

Throughout the world, religiously-oriented conservative political movements are well known for their defence of ‘traditional models’ in terms of both family conception and gender roles. Therefore, one should expect to find a limited social and political mobilization of women within them as well as in right-wing religiously conservative parties. How...

This article is part of a special issue on the five Muslim democracies. It aims at understanding the role played by religion, and particularly by religiously oriented actors, in Turkey's democratization processes. The first section analyzes the different theoretical approaches to the role of religion in democratization. The second section analyzes...

The role of religion in politics is still understudied as a consequence of the so-called “secularization paradigm”, which has been hegemonic in twentieth-century social sciences. Particularly, the role of religiosity within political parties has often been neglected for two reasons. First, there is a widespread normative prejudice about the role of...

This conclusion places the main findings of the special issue in a wider theoretical context. First, it examines the types of impact on democratization processes that different religiously oriented parties have, highlighting how the progressive and the conservative types are more favourable to democratization. Conversely, the religious nationalist...

Religion can influence party politics in several ways: directly, through the activity of explicitly religious parties; indirectly, both through the lobbying activity of institutional actors such as churches and religious non-governmental organizations, and through the influence of religious values on the manifestos of non-explicitly religious parti...

Although the presence of the crucifix in public classrooms and other public offices is an ancient Italian tradition, it was never a political issue until recent times. In the early 2000s, some court cases and other events (first at the national and later also at the European level) turned the public display of the crucifix into a major issue in the...

This article introduces the subject of the symposium, by outlining the main points of the debate, developed in the past two centuries, about the compatibility of religion with democratic institutions and values. The different points of view about the adaptability to democracy of specific religious traditions, and their potential for change, are als...

Religious fundamentalism is a phenomenon still understudied in political science: both analytical perspectives and definitions are indeed crafted mostly for sociological, theological and philosophical analyses. Moreover, comprehensive studies of the interactions between religious fundamentalism and democracy have rarely been worked out. This paper...

This essay deals with religious fundamentalist movements engaged in democratic politics: a phenomenon still not thoroughly analyzed by comparative political science. First of all, it proposes a definition of religious fundamentalism which can be suitable for political science research (connecting the existing theories about fundamentalism to the li...

This paper deals with religious fundamentalist movements engaged in democratic politics: a phenomenon still not thoroughly analyzed by comparative political science. First of all, it proposes a definition of religious fundamentalism which can be suitable for a political science research (connecting the existing theories about fundamentalism to the...