CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Religion and Political Behavior
Jeff Manza and Nathan Wright
In the history of social science research on group-based political alignments, religious
cleavages have often been shown to be a more powerful predictor of individual voting
behavior than class location (e.g., Rose and Urwin 1969; Converse 1974; Lijphart 1979;
Dogan 1995; Brooks and Manza 1997). Yet it has received significantly less attention
than studies analyzing class politics, and even when acknowledging the existence of
religious-based political divides, scholars have often assumed that some other, nonre-
ligious antecedent factor lays behind it. As Demerath and Williams (1990: 434) put it,
“While students of voting do cite religious affiliation as a significant variable, they often
tend to interpret its effects less in terms of theology and ecclesiastical influence than
in terms of ethnic, class, and regional factors lurking beneath the symbolic surface.”
Since the late 1970s, however, dramatic religious mobilizations around the world –
including a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran, the visibly active role of the
Catholic Church in the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980–1, growing publicity
about “liberation theology” movements in Latin America, and, in the United States
the rise of politically active conservative Christian organizations such as the Moral
Majority – have made it more difficult for scholars to ignore the ways in which reli-
gion shapes political action and behavior. And indeed, over the past fifteen years there
has been considerable growth in research on (and scholarly controversies about) the
association between religious group memberships, doctrinal beliefs and practices, and
voting behavior.^1
This chapter dissects what we have learned from this scholarship about how reli-
gion and political behavior are linked. We should note two limitations of our analysis at
the outset. First, we consider only one type of political action – voting – and not other
types of religious influence on political life, such as participation in social movements,
political lobbying, or the impact of religion on public opinion. Second, our analytical
focus is limited to the postindustrial democracies of Western Europe and North America,
with special attention to the (arguably “exceptional”) American case. Lack of space
(^1) There is, unfortunately, no systematic overview of the growing literature on religion and polit-
ical behavior. This chapter aims to fill that gap. See Wald (1996) and Leege (1993) for overviews
of the research on the American case; a good textbook treatment, again for the United States,
can be found in Corbett and Corbett (1999).
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