Religion and subnational public policy: accommodation of minority religious practices in the post-communist Muslim republics

After decades of severe restrictions, religion has returned with a vengeance in the post-communist world. The quest for meaning, related to or decoupled from organized religion, is also present in other parts of the world. The relationship between religion and state, expressed as public policy, defines the nature of the political system at the national level. However, little is known about religion as public policy among subnational entities. This chapter seeks to (1) conceptually refine the notion of “religion as public policy” and empirically (2) examine religion as a dimension of public policy by considering the case of the Muslim republics’ accommodation of Christian and Jewish religious practices in the former communist bloc. It focuses on the subnational level, which informs the path-dependent outcomes in the supply levels of public policy toward the religious sector. For that purpose, it presents and analyzes an original dataset.