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Mair 1995: Chapter 8). The largest of these parties are Catholic in origin, such as those
in Italy, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. (The Italian Christian Demo-
cratic Party has recently collapsed because of scandal, but governed, or was part of the
governing coalition, for most of the postwar period.) The German Christian Demo-
cratic Party, which has governed the Federal Republic (West) Germany between World
War II and the late 1960s, and again from 1983 until 1998, has been a “biconfessional”
party with roots in both Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Christian Democratic
Appeal in the Netherlands is another biconfessional party (formed in a merger in the late
1970s between the Catholic People’s Party and two smaller Protestant parties). Purely
Protestant parties are mostly limited to Scandinavia, where Christian Democratic par-
ties with ties to Protestant churches emerged in the 1950s and 1960s to contest elections
in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (albeit with relatively little success). The only major
country in Western Europe without a significant religious party is Britain, and Ireland is
a complicated case.^8 In France, a Catholic party in the Fourth Republic (1946–58), the
Popular Republican Movement, evolved into the two major conservative parties of the
Fifth Republic, the Gaullist, and (to a lesser extent) the Union for French Democracy
blocs. Although the direct connection to major religious bodies has largely been bro-
ken, there is continuing evidence of a strong association between church attendance
and/or religiosity and support for one of the major conservative parties (Heath et al.
1993; Lewis-Beck 1998).
The electoral performance of these parties has traditionally been strong, although
declining in most countries in recent years. In those countries where a religious party
has been the dominant party on the center-right of the political spectrum, such as
in Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, vote shares
averaged over 30 percent, and in Germany over 45 percent, from the 1950s through
the early 1990s (see Gallagher et al. 1995: 194). In all of these countries, secular parties
of the right (or sometimes the center, such as in Germany) compete for votes and
often become governing coalition partners. The rise of new right-wing parties, and
declining rates of church attendance across most European countries (discussed later),
have combined to put considerable pressure on religious parties (van Kersbergen 1999).
In such an environment, to remain electorally competitive, many of the religious parties
have tended to become more secular in their appeals over time, a pattern not unlike
that of social democratic parties in these same countries (Przeworski and Sprague 1986).
Nonetheless, the persistence and continuing strengths of religious parties across Europe
(and their distinctive impact on policy outputs) suggest an important difference with
the American model.^9
(^8) In overwhelming Catholic Ireland, with very high rates of religiosity, neither of the two major
parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fail) have organized linkages to religion, and both parties are
plausibly classified as center-right parties (Gallagher 1985). Yet Fine Gael has affiliated itself
with the Christian Democratic parties in the European Parliament and in cross-national bodies.
Not coincidentally, the British political system has important parallels to the United States, in
that members of Parliament are elected in a first-past-the-post system, which discourages the
formation of major third parties (although not to the same degree as in the United States).
(^9) In the comparative welfare-state literature, the “conservative” welfare states of continental
Europe that have been built or consolidated under governments controlled by religious parties,
some unique policy outcomes are visible. Perhaps the most notable are the strong forms of
social provision for citizens, especially mothers, outside the labor market. See, for example,
Esping-Andersen 1990; Castles 1994.