My thanks to Dr. Mantilla for his generous and insightful review of Religious Parties and the Politics of Civil Liberties. Here I offer information on the availability of the book’s appendices and some reflections on his comments. The online appendix to the book, which contains tables A1.–A.3, is publicly available through my website and Harvard Dataverse. These tables detail the coding protocols and sources used to operationalize all variables and their summary statistics. They also contain the list of all religious parties by country included in the analysis and the sources used to code their electoral and government performance.

Mantilla and I both agree that religious organizations (ROs) deserve much more detailed attention from scholars because they differ widely not just in their ideological beliefs but also in their organizational strengths, political engagement, and tactics. Where we differ significantly is in our definitions and analysis of religious parties. I define religious parties by the extent to which religious beliefs and positions influence their founding ideology. Changes in subsequent ideological and policy positions are then the object of study. Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi in their extensive study of religious party platform over time also find that Islamist parties start out with fairly similar positions based on orthodox interpretations of civil liberties in their founding moment but change these positions over time in response to political imperatives (“Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” Journal of Democracy, 21 [2], 2010). Thus, the book does not assume, as Mantilla states, that religious parties are forever “indistinguishable” in their ideological positions. Rather it studies why and how they become different over time with respect to the one well-defined issue of civil liberties in their agenda.

Given this definition of religious parties, variation in positions on civil liberties is the dependent variable being analyzed in all the empirical chapters, including the large-N and case study chapters. This is why the relevant comparison in Turkey is between the Saadet party and the AKP, not with secular parties that never had a religious agenda to begin with. Both religious parties were founded by leaders and activists belonging to the same banned religious Fazilet party who shared the same Millî Görüş outlook. The puzzle, given the definition of religious parties in my book, is why the AKP chose to moderate its religious positions for a long time and then began reverting to them recently, whereas the Saadet Party, which is now represented in parliament, did not soften its positions on civil liberties at any time. This approach differs fundamentally from Mantilla’s approach to religious parties, which reclassifies other parties as religious if they adopted a sufficiently religious identity, ideology, and associations at a given time. His definition therefore is not limited by the platforms that parties adopted at their founding moments. Which of these approaches to religious mobilization better explains politics in countries where religion is mobilized is an important question with which the field needs to engage.

The question Mantilla raises about the willingness of religious organizations to take risks by allying with religious parties is an important and intriguing one, because assumptions about the risk preferences of religious organizations, parties, and politicians are endemic in political science research. Yet, we know very little about them. Research based on citizens finds that individuals with more assets are more risk averse, and prospect theory, the most empirically supported decision-making model under uncertainty, posits that individuals take more risks when they believe they are facing losses. This suggests that smaller religious organizations and those facing losses should be willing to take higher risks in their tactics, including allying with religious parties. However, whether we can apply these models to understand the risky choices of religious and political organizations and religious leaders and politicians is an open question worthy of attention from scholars.