Religion and Political Behavior 313
explicitly on the stability of the religious cleavage have usually found that while at-
tendance at religious services has declined, among those who remain churched levels
of religious voting remain stable. Visser (1993) showed with panel data that religious
affiliation had a stabilizing impact on individual vote choice in elections in the 1980s.
Scheepers et al. (1994) examined the Dutch elections of 1990–1 and found that reli-
gion and class still explained a significant amount of the variation in voting. More
specifically, religious participation inclined one to vote for a confessional party and
decreased the likelihood of voting for a nonreligious party; nonreligious working-class
persons were inclined to vote for Labour; and nonreligious middle- or upper-class per-
sons were inclined to vote Liberal. Thus, they conclude the pillar system may have
been weakened, but was nowhere near complete dealignment by the time of the early
1990s.
The case of France exhibits some similarities, but also some important differences,
with the Dutch case. There is evidence of a persistent relationship between religious
service attendance and conservative voting, and this stable cleavage persists despite
the fact that there is a growing diversity of political, theological, and social value posi-
tions articulated within the Catholic church (e.g., Donegani 1982), and despite the fact
that far less than 90 percent of the French who are baptised Catholics are consistently
attending religious services and many more of the nonattendees are now showing
preferences for left parties. Similarly, Lewis-Beck (1998) has characterized France as
a “stalled electorate” because both the religious cleavage and class cleavage have re-
mained roughly the same throughout elections in 1968, 1981, 1988, and 1995, with
religiosity remaining the most important predictor of vote choice.
Religious Change and Support for Right-Wing Parties
Finally, we note that a number of analysts have argued that the declining connection
between two traditional bases of voter alignments – class and religion – and individual
political behavior has opened the door for the resurgence of far-right-wing parties and
activism (for overviews, see Ignazi 1997; Karapin 1998). Wust (1993) argues that the rise
of the new radical right parties in Germany in the early 1990s is directly attributable
to the dealignment of Catholic voters from the Christian Democratic Party (and its
Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union). As more and more voters became
disconnected from the Catholic Church, and when the Church became disconnected
from the CDW and CSU, the older patterns of alignment began to dissipate. Veugelers
(2000) makes a similar argument for support of the French National Front party (FN) in
France in the late 1990s, arguing (like Wust) that support for the FN can be accounted
for solely by the dealignment of Catholics with traditional right-wing parties. These
issues are likely to generate much further research and scholarly interest in the near
future.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has considered the impact of religion on voting behavior in the United
States and Western Europe. Religion emerged, alongside class and ethnicity, as cen-
tral political cleavages at the founding of the modern party system and democratic