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The Religious and Spiritual Underpinnings of Party Choice in Christian Europe
Abstract
Many studies have shown that individual religiosity is related to a Christian Democratic vote. Recently, studies from sociology of religion have reported the rise of holistic spirituality. This paper is the first to examine the effects of holistic spirituality on party choice. In addition, it critically assesses the assertion that conventional religiosity prevents individuals from affiliating with Green parties.
Our results show that spirituality is related to a higher probability of choosing Green parties. Moreover, conventional religiosity increases the probability that moderate left voters will prefer a Green party to a Social Democratic party. This result shows that there is common ground between the electorates of Green and Christian Democratic parties, thus creating possibilities for new political coalitions.
... Yet, while continued loyalty to the CDU/CSU may have made many Christian voters unavailable to the AfD, a factor that has often been overlooked in the literature is the analogous role played by other German mainstream parties. Thus, although the CDU/CSU is regarded as the primary party for Catholic voters, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens have often offered political homes for German Protestants (Siegers and Jedinger 2021;Siegers et al. 2016). Siegers and Jedinger (2021: 163) hence found that 'Protestant identification with the Social Democrats results in a similar immunization effect against the RWP [right-wing populist] vote as Catholic identification with the Christian Democrats'. ...
Right-wing populists across Western democracies have markedly increased references to Christianity in recent years. While there is much debate about how and why they have done so, less attention has been paid to how Christian communities react to this development. The present study addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of Christian responses to right-wing populist politics in Germany, France and the US. It relies on quantitative studies, survey data and the qualitative analysis of 39 in-depth interviews with right-wing populist leaders, mainstream party politicians and church officials. The findings of this analysis suggest a potential ‘religious vaccination effect’ among Christian voters against right-wing populism but underline its connection to elite actor behaviour. Specifically, the availability of a ‘Christian alternative’ in the party system, as well as religious leaders’ willingness and ability to create a social taboo around the populist right seem critically to impact religious immunity to populism.
... In diesem Beitrag geht es jedoch nicht um eines der Syndrome in seiner Gänze, sondern um die Nähe zu einzelnen Merkma-2 Brettschneider et al. zeigen, dass die nachlassende Erklärungskraft sozialstruktureller Parameter nicht an deren sinkenden Einfluss liegt, sondern an deren Ausdifferenzierung, die in den Erhebungsinstrumenten nicht entsprechenden Niederschlag fand. Siegers et al. (2016) argumentieren mit einem Formwandel des Religiösen. Winkler arbeitet in seiner Analyse der saarländischen Landtagswahl hingegen die Bedeutung der Konfessionszugehörigkeit für die Parteiwahl heraus, die Literatur, auf die er verweist, stammt aber durchgehend aus den 1980er Jahren (vgl. ...
Zusammenfassung
Demonstrationen selbsternannter Retter des Abendlandes gegen Einwanderung, Islam, Flüchtlingspolitik und Genderwahn, punktuelle Zusammenarbeit zwischen christlichen Gruppen und Mitgliedern der neuen Rechten sowie die Existenz der Arbeitsgruppe „Christen in der AfD“ (ChrAfD), haben in Deutschland die Frage nach rechten Christen, wie man sie z. B. in den USA schon lange kennt, relevant werden lassen. Es gibt kaum empirische Studien zu diesem Thema, vorliegende Publikationen aus der Forschung zu Rechtsextremismus und Gruppenbezogener Menschenfeindlichkeit zeigen widersprüchliche und über die Zeit instabile Befunde. In diesem Beitrag wird in Anlehnung an das durch Gordon W. Allport formulierte Paradoxon zu Religiosität und Vorurteil mittels Sekundäranalyse von Daten der Europäischen Wertestudie und des Allbus diesem Zusammenhang nachgegangen. Es zeigt sich, dass ein exklusiver Religionsanspruch mit Vorurteilen einhergeht, ein inklusiver Religionsanspruch die Wahrscheinlichkeit von vorurteilsbeladenen Einstellungen mindert. Deutlich wird, dass religiöse Menschen eher Vorurteile gegenüber religiös sanktioniertem Verhalten wie Homosexualität zeigen, nicht jedoch gegen die Mitglieder anderer Religionsgemeinschaften – wogegen es bei nicht-religiösen Personen eher gegenüber den Angehörigen religiöser Minderheiten der Fall ist. Ergebnisse einer qualitativen Studie verweisen darüber hinaus auf ein nicht zu unterschätzendes Maß an Ambivalenz, das es in weiteren empirischen Studien zu berücksichtigen gilt.
Book about spiritual transcendence (in Polish)
The Netherlands has two electorally significant parties that might be considered to be part of the ‘Green’ family: GreenLeft and the Party for the Animals. These two parties appeal to different niches of the Green electorate, identified on the basis of issue dimensions, demographics, and their trust in government. GreenLeft tends to attract voters from the traditional Green niche: those with egalitarian, cosmopolitan, environmentalist, and libertarian values. The Party for the Animals attracts another type of Green voter: significantly less cosmopolitan and evincing lower levels of political trust.
It is often found that religious people are underrepresented among the radical right electorate, despite radical right parties’ claim of being defenders of the Judeo-Christian society. This study investigates this paradoxical finding and examines to what extent two dimensions of religion – practice and belief – play a role in voting for a radical right party across seven West European countries. Using the European Values Study from 2008, it was found that religiously active people are indeed less likely to vote for a radical right party, because they tend to vote for a Christian party. However, the study challenges the common wisdom that religion alone is a restraint on radical right voting and shows that orthodox believers in three countries – Belgium, Norway and Switzerland – feel more threatened by the presence of immigrants and therefore are more likely than their mainstream counterparts to vote for a radical right party.
Previous research on morality does not present a clear picture regarding religious effects on abortion and same-sex partnership policies. An examination of the level of permissiveness in the two policy fields across Western European countries reveals that Catholic states do not significantly differ from their Protestant counterparts in terms of policy outputs. Our descriptive analysis of the reform processes in the two fields from 1960 to 2010 shows that Catholicism has no direct impact on morality policy outputs, but may slow down the pace of reforms. The delaying effect, however, is contingent upon the presence of additional conditions. In order to inductively develop theoretical insights into this relationship, particular emphasis is placed on the case of Austria, which was quick to liberalise abortion but a laggard in introducing legal recognition of same-sex couples. The Austrian case reveals that the influence of the Catholic Church may impede reforms so long as institutional and cultural opportunity structures do not promote secular efforts to politicise the issue and build consensus for policy change.
Survey data indicate a substantial minority of westerners who have no attachment to Eastern or New Age religion but who nevertheless believe in reincarnation. This paper summarizes the findings of a small intensive interview study of a group of English people who take seriously the possibility of reincarnation: 1) Many of them hold reincarnation alongside Christian belief; 2) Most are less than dogmatic about their belief; 3) Some entertain the possibility of reincarnation because of experience (first or second hand), for others reincarnation solves intellectual problems, e.g., concerning theodicy; 4) They see bodily incarnations in the context of long-term spiritual progress, and they value spirit over body; 5) Their belief in reincarnation has rather little effect on the rest of their lives. It is concluded that rising belief in reincarnation heralds neither a spiritual nora moral revolution, but fits easily into the privatized religion that characterizes contemporary western societies, and England in particular.
This article examines the relationship between Christian religiosity and the support for radical right parties in Western Europe. Drawing on theories of electoral choice and on socio-psychological literature largely ignored by scholars of electoral behaviour, it suggests and tests a number of competing hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that while religiosity has few direct effects, and while religious people are neither more nor less hostile towards ethnic minorities and thereby neither more nor less prone to vote for a radical right party, they are not 'available' to these parties because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or conservative parties. However, given increasing de-alignment, this 'vaccine effect' is likely to become weaker with time.
While the endorsement of universalistic values by the New Left led to a first transformation of political space in Western Europe, the counter-mobilisation of the extreme populist right resulted in a second transformation in the 1990s. This article focuses on the discursive innovations and normative foundations that have driven the emergence of a conflict opposing libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values. An analysis using data from the media coverage of election campaigns confirms that the New Left and the populist right represent polar normative ideals in France, Austria, and Switzerland. A similar transformation of political space occurred in the absence of a right-wing populist party in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. In these contexts, the author hypothesises the value conflict to prove less durable and polarising in the longer run. The analysis of an election in the mid 2000s confirms that party systems evolve in a path dependent manner in the two contexts.
"This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behavior. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be explained by the revised version of modernization theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernization is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how value systems are likely to evolve in coming decades. They demonstrate that mass values play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions."--BOOK JACKET.
This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Secondly, participants undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Thirdly, spirituality has entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees' alienation to increase both their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical 'sociologisation' of New Age research is called for to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than reproduce sociologically naive New Age rhetoric about the primacy of personal authenticity.
Various analyses of World Values Survey data find a syndrome of emancipative orientations, mostly known as "self-expression values," on the rise throughout all countries with longitudinal evidence. But, as much as scholarship agrees on the rise of self-expression values, there is disagreement on whether these values are civic or uncivic in character. Some declare self-expression values uncivic because they see them as indicative of egoism and weak social capital. Others consider self-expression values as civic for the opposite reasons. They interpret them as a sign of altruism and strong social capital. Cross-cultural evidence from the World Values Surveys supports the civic view on both accounts. First, in a Schwartz value space, self-expression values are associated with altruism, especially at high levels of self-expression values. Second, in a social capital space, self-expression values go together with trust in people and peaceful collective action. The findings qualify self-expression values as a civic form of modern individualism.
Research from the Netherlands has pointed out that the increased popularity of New Age since the 1960s by no means compensates for the dramatic decline of the Christian churches. From a theoretical point of view, however, it is more important to study why those remarkably divergent developments have occurred in the first place. This article does this by analyzing survey data collected among the Dutch population at large in 1998, focusing on a comparison of the young and the elderly. It is concluded, first, that there are no indications that the decline of the Christian tradition has been caused by a process of rationalization. Second, the decline of the Christian tradition and the growth of nonreligiosity as well as New Age are caused by increased levels of moral individualism (individualization). Implications for the sociological analysis of cultural and religious change are discussed.
As a dependent variable, party choice did not lend itself to analysis by means of powerful multivariate methods until the coming of discrete-choice models, most notably conditional logit and multinomial logit. These methods involve estimating effects on party preferences (utilities) that are post hoc derived from the data, but such estimates are plagued by a number of difficulties. These difficulties do not apply if advanced statistical procedures are used to analyze utilities directly measured with survey data. Such variables have been employed for a number of years and have been extensively validated in past research. Analysis of party choice on the basis of measured utilities is less hampered by restrictions and (often implausible) assumptions than discrete-choice modeling is. Particularly problematic is the inability of discrete-choice models to analyze small-party voting. The resulting elimination of voters of small parties results in strong biases of the coefficients of explanatory variables. No such need for eliminating cases arises when analyzing empirically observed utilities, so parameter estimates from these analyses do not contain this bias. Finally, observed utilities provide opportunities to answer research questions that cannot be answered with discrete-choice models, particularly in comparative research. We therefore urge that direct measures of electoral utilities should be included in all election studies.
Although the notion of the party family, with the various cross-national and cross-temporal similarities it implies, underlies much of the standard work on comparative party politics, it nevertheless remains one of the most undertheorized and least specified approaches to the general classification of parties. Four of the principal approaches that are used to identify party families are discussed: origins and sociology, transnational links, policy and ideology, and party name. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are assessed, as are some of the more generic problems that may be associated with all four approaches. The two approaches that appear best suited to the specification and classification of party families are those based on the origin of parties and their ideology, but these should be developed in parallel rather than as alternatives. Both tap into what parties are rather than what parties do and hence are more likely to uncover core identities and shared political goals.
Two issues have been especially contentious in debates over religious change in Europe: the unity or diversity of the trends
observed across the continent, and the significance of the large subpopulation that is neither religious nor completely unreligious.
This article addresses these problems. An analysis of the first wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) shows that each generation
in every country surveyed is less religious than the last. Although there are some minor differences in the speed of the decline
(the most religious countries are changing more quickly than the least religious), the magnitude of the fall in religiosity
during the last century has been remarkably constant across the continent. Despite these shifts in the prevalence of conventional
Christian belief, practice and self-identification, residual involvement is considerable. Many people are neither regular
churchgoers nor self-consciously non-religious. The term ‘fuzzy fidelity’ describes this casual loyalty to tradition. Religion
usually plays only a minor role in the lives of such people. Religious change in European countries follows a common trajectory
whereby fuzzy fidelity rises and then falls over a very extended period. The starting points are different across the continent,
but the forces at work may be much the same.
In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the history of socialism and working-class politics in Western Europe. While examining the social contexts, organizational structures and political developments of thirteen socialist experiences from the 1880s to the 1980s, he reconstructs the steps through which social conflict was translated and structured into an opposition, as well as how it developed its different organizational and ideological forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize its reference groups politically. Bartolini provides a comparative framework that structures the wealth of material available on the history of each unit and allows him to assess the relative weight of the complex explanatory factors.
This book is the fourth in the ‘Beliefs in government’ series, and focuses on phenomena indicative of widespread change in the value orientations of citizens in Western Europe during the past two decades. These include a decline in religious belief, waning class values, and rising post‐materialism – along with environmentalism, feminism, and post‐modernism. The extent of these changes, and their impact on the conduct of politics, are the dual concerns of this book. Its first few chapters present a simple model of the relationship between value orientations and political participation, and follow up with an account of how value orientations can be established empirically. Subsequent chapters draw on extensive data from across Europe, in order to track changes in three key types of value orientation – religious/secular, left/right materialism, and materialism/post‐materialism – and additionally discusses the emergence of the value orientations relating to feminism, post‐modernism, and environmentalism. The third part of the book examines the impact of the three key types on political effectiveness, political trust, interest in politics, voting behaviour, and involvement in new social movements. It concludes with an assessment of the implications of changing value orientations for the governability of advanced industrial societies.
Major study of the role of European Christian democratic parties in the making of the European Union. It radically re-conceptualises European integration in long-term historical perspective as the outcome of partisan competition of political ideologies and parties and their guiding ideas for the future of Europe. Wolfram Kaiser takes a comparative approach to political Catholicism in the nineteenth century, Catholic parties in interwar Europe and Christian democratic parties in postwar Europe and studies these parties' cross-border contacts and co-ordination of policy-making. He shows how well networked party elites ensured that the origins of European Union were predominately Christian democratic, with considerable repercussions for the present-day EU. The elites succeeded by intensifying their cross-border communication and coordinating their political tactics and policy making in government. This is a major contribution to the new transnational history of Europe and the history of European integration.
Christian democracy has been one of the most successful political movements in post-war Western Europe yet its crucial impact on the development of the modern European welfare state has been critically neglected. This book describes the origin and development of the Christian democratic movement and presents comparative accounts of the varying degrees of political entrenchment of national Christian democratic parties. Drawing upon cross-national indicators of welfare state development the existence of a distinctively Christian democratic (as opposed to a liberal or social democratic) welfare state regime, called social capitalism, is identified.
Ausgehend von den Anfängen der christlichen Demokratie befasst sich dieses Buch in einer vergleichenden Perspektive mit den christdemokratischen Parteien. Aufgrund ihrer starken Präsenz in den Parteiensystemen westeuropäischer Länder haben diese in den vergangenen 60 Jahren die Politik in Westeuropa maßgeblich mitgeprägt. Nach wie vor verfügen sie in vielen Ländern über eine starke Stellung, trotz einer Schwächung ihres
traditionellen Wählerpotentials. Anhand empirischer Modelle und Analysen des Wahlkampfverhaltens wird aufgezeigt, dass ihre Erfolgschancen noch intakt, aber in einem höheren Maße von der Organisation und Führung der Parteien abhängig sind, als dies bei anderen, auf strukturellen Konflikten basierenden Parteien der Fall ist.
Der Autor ist Generalsekretär der Christlichdemokratischen Volkspartei der Schweiz (CVP).
The electoral success of many West European Christian Democratic parties as prototypical people’s parties has been threatened in recent years by growing secularization and economic trends. In the light of these challenges, this article analyses the importance of social and attitudinal variables in predicting support for seven Christian Democratic parties at the individual level using data from the European Social Survey. The results highlight the continuing centrality of religion in Christian Democratic voting. Regular attendance at church, particularly among Catholics, raises the probability of supporting Christian Democracy at the ballot box substantially. Class, by contrast, offers a weak guide as to the likelihood of a Christian Democratic vote. The importance of religion is such that expectations about other potentially important independent variables (character of domicile, age) are generally not met. Yet the reliable support of religious voters is increasingly an ambiguous electoral asset with clear signs that this partisan constituency is in decline throughout Western Europe.
Previous studies of the relationship between religion and environmentalism have suffered the lack of measures of religious beliefs or of environmental attitudes and behaviors, or samples that were not clearly representative or sufficiently large. We address these problems using data from the 1993 General Social Survey, which has over 40 measures of environmental attitudes and actions, as well as a large number of measures of religious membership, belief, and participation and other background measures. We focus on 10 indexes of environmentalism and 3 indexes of religiosity. Our findings give some support to the thesis of Lynn White that Christian theology has an "antienvironmental" effect, and they do not support the contention that it has a "stewardship" effect. There are, however, complications. We do find evidence of a "proenvironmental" effect of religious participation. Further, the negative effect of Christian "theology" seems to be largely an effect of fundamentalism or sectarianism. While this could be theologically oriented, it might also be an offshoot of conflict between religious conservatives and liberals.
The self-identification "spiritual" has gained considerable popularity in the last 30 years. This article focuses on its meanings and connotations in everyday understanding. Do persons identifying themselves as spiritual, as religious, or as neither nor refer to the same concepts, when talking about "spirituality" or "religion"? Does it make a difference whether they live in Germany or in the United States? First analyses from the Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-cultural Study on "Spirituality" are based on the semantic differential approach to comparing self-identified "neither religious nor spiritual", "religious", and "spiritual" persons regarding semantic attributes attached to "religion" and "spirituality". Results show: Regarding "religion," religious persons differ significantly from the spiritual persons. "Spirituality" seems to be something the "neither-nor" group and the religious group agree on. However, additional differentiations become visible from the comparison between the United States and Germany. Implications for the understanding of spiritual/religious self-identifications in the different cultural contexts are discussed.
Some environmental and religious scholars, religious leaders, and media figures have claimed there has been a “greening of Christianity” in the United States since the mid-1990s. Such a trend would be socially significant, as the integration of Christian values and environmental values may invigorate both domains. Using nationally representative data from the 1993 and 2010 General Social Surveys, we analyze how green self-identified Christians in the U.S. general public are in their pro-environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, we find no clear evidence of a greening of Christianity among rank-and-file Christians in the general public between 1993 and 2010. Indeed, the patterns of our results are quite similar to those from earlier decades, which documented that self-identified Christians reported lower levels of environmental concern than did non-Christians and nonreligious individuals. We did find evidence of some greening among evangelical Protestants, especially relative to mainline Protestants, between 1993 and 2010. We close by suggesting a few fruitful avenues for further research in this area via variable-oriented, case-oriented, and experimental studies and discussing some theoretical implications of our findings.
The inherent unity of all phenomena, or oneness, is a central concept of mysticism, but there have heretofore been no measures of oneness beliefs. We developed the Oneness Beliefs Scale, with spiritual and physical oneness subscales. The spiritual oneness subscale fills a need in the field for a short, reliable measure of spirituality not characterized by the language of traditional Western religiousness. The physical oneness subscale allows researchers to juxtapose spiritual beliefs with a nonspiritual, materialist counterpart. We found that spiritual oneness beliefs were more strongly related to mystic experiences and spirituality than to traditional religiousness. Physical oneness was not strongly associated with either religiousness or spirituality. Both spiritual and physical oneness were positively associated with pro-environmental attitudes but not with depression, anxiety, or negative affect. Spiritual oneness was a better predictor of pro-environmental attitudes than was religiousness. Spiritual oneness also predicted donating to a pro-environmental group, making this to our knowledge the first empirical study to show a positive association between a religion or spirituality measure and observed, rather than self-reported, pro-environmental behavior.
I empirically study the determinants of individuals' green voting behavior. For this I make use of three datasets from Germany, a panel dataset and two cross-sectional datasets. The empirically strongest determinants are the voters' attitude or distance to nuclear sites, the level of schooling and net income. I show that those voters with deviant attitudes or alternative world views are more likely to vote green, a result of the fact that the green party has always had the position of a protest party. I find little role for demographic variables like gender, marital status or the number of children. This is in contrast to the stated preference literature. Age plays a role for explaining voting behavior only insofar as it proxies for health.
The objective is to test if religiosity affects environmental opinion in Europe. Using data from European Social Survey (ESS) 2002/2003, the study answers three questions. At the societal level: Is public opinion about the environment different in political systems with different Christian traditions? Is environmental concern less or higher in the public opinion depending on the degree of secularization in the political systems? At the individual level: Is the environmental opinion of the individual affected by the personal confession of faith, religious involvement, and the dominant religious context? At the societal level, the findings show stronger concern for the environment in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries than in Protestant countries. The tendency also shows a weakened concern for the environment in countries with a rather secular population. At the individual level, there are significant positive effects on environmental care from Catholic culture, negative effect from Protestant culture, and no effect from religious involvement.
Discussions of party system change may be unsatisfactory if insufficient attention is given to the defining properties of a system. A number of dimensions have to be considered, but - as with `social cleavages' - there can be disagreement as to whether a truly constitutive element is involved. In addition, it is necessary to distinguish the various degrees of change that are possible, and in this respect a study of the process of change is essential. Party system typologies are of little help, so that an alternative in the form of `working models' can be employed. The emphasis in this approach is on the identification of the `core components' of the particular system against which the degree of change can be assessed. An examination of representative West European party systems reveals that these core components show a strong persistence.
'Nationalization' theories have been used to explain the integration of electorates and party systems in democratizing and newly formed national polities. This article extends these theories to the 'Europeanization' of politics and to the European Union as an emerging supra-national democratic space. Analysing electoral data for national elections in 30 countries from 1970 to 2008, the article looks at the convergence of party systems in Europe. Results attest to increasingly homogeneous voting distributions for parties of a same family across national electorates, indicating an incipient party system institutionalization at the European level. The article shows that homogeneous patterns are stronger for parties belonging to the left-right dimension and less so for parties stemming from cultural cleavages. In the light of the debate on democratic deficit, the structuring of electoral alignments is interpreted as enhancing the democratic linkage between voters and representatives, and seen as a prerequisite for responsive and accountable politics in the EU.
Christian democracy is still posing theoretical problems of definition and empirical puzzles of classification and interpretation. Analyses based on secularization theory produce puzzles and anomalies and have little to offer as explanations for the variation in Christian democratic power mobilization. Empirically, this article focuses on Christian democracy in The Netherlands and offers an explanation of the party's decline in the 1990s and its remarkable recovery. From this, lessons are drawn for further theory-building on party and party system change, and on Christian democracy. It seems that modern Christian democratic politics is evolving as neither religious nor secular, but as a version of unsecular politics.
English
Important religious phenomena in Eastern Europe challenge the sociology of religion. There are signs of a religious revival and an extended atheism. Yet observers have come to opposing conclusions. These contradicting interpretations call for conceptual and terminological clarifications. The author suggests that key notions in the sociology of religion such as religion itself, faith, religious practice, communal belonging and others have basically different meanings and implications under different socio-cultural circumstances. Accordingly, one needs different indicators and research methodology for them. Focusing on the traditional versus post-traditional dimension, as well as on the supposed differences between religious cultures in Eastern and Western Christianity, the author seeks to isolate structural ideal-types to identify specific kinds of religious settings and to elaborate the contextual and socio-cultural elements of different types of religion.
French
D'importants phénomènes religieux d'Europe centrale défient la sociologie des'religions. Il y a des signes de revivalisme religieux en même temps qu'une extension de l'athéisme. Jusqu'ici les observateurs ont abouti à des conclusions opposées. Ces interprétations contradictoires appellent des clarifications conceptuelles et terminologiques. L'auteur suggère que les notions-clés de la sociologie des religions telles que la religion elle-même, la foi, la pratique religieuse, l'appartenance communautaire et d'autres encore ont à la base des significations et des implications particulières à chaque contexte socioculturel. Par conséquent, il est nécessaire d'utiliser des méthodes de recherches et des indicateurs adaptés à chacun. En se centrant sur l'opposition qui existe entre les dimensions traditionnelle et post-traditionnelle, ainsi que sur les supposées différences entre les cultures religieuses du christianisme occidental et oriental, l'auteur cherche à isoler des idéaux-types structurels afin de pouvoir identifier les différents types de configurations religieuses et d'en préciser les aspects contextuels et socio-culturels.
Conventional wisdom on party systems in advanced industrial democracies holds that modern electorates are dealigned and that social cleavages no longer structure party politics. Recent work on class cleavages has challenged this stylized fact. The analysis performed here extends this criticism to the religious-secular cleavage. Using path analysis and comparing the current electorates of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain with the early 1960s, this paper demonstrates that the religious-secular cleavage remains or has become a significant predictor of conservative vote choice. While the effects of the religious-secular cleavage on vote choice have become largely indirect, the total of the direct and indirect effects is substantial and equivalent to the effects of class and status.
Die Analyse latenter Klassen ist ein multivariates Verfahren zum Auffinden latenter Klassen. Es wird angenommen, dass den
Daten hinsichtlich ausgewählter Merkmale Y
k – den so genannten Klassifikationsmerkmalen, Indikatoren oder Klassifikationsvariablen – eine bestimmte Anzahl J von unbekannten latenten Klassen j (j = 1, . . . , J) zugrunde liegt. Jede latente Klasse j ist mit einem Anteil von πj in der Stichprobe bzw. Grundgesamtheit vertreten und durch bestimmte Verteilungsparameter Δ
Yjk (z. B. Anteils- oder Mittelwerte) in den Klassifikationsmerkmalen Y
k bzw. im allgemeinen Fall durch unterschiedliche Parameter (funktionale Zusammenhänge, Verteilungsparameter usw.) gekennzeichnet.
Jede Person bzw. jedes Objekt i (i = 1, . . . , n) gehört mit einer bestimmtenWahrscheinlichkeit π
j|i einer latenten Klasse j (j = 1, . . . , J) an. Beim Auffinden von latenten Klassen bzw. beim Lösen einer Klassifikationsaufgabe sind folgende Fragestellungen zu beantworten:
(1.) Wie viele latente Klassen J lassen sich auf Basis der ausgewählten Klassifikationsmerkmale Y
k auffinden? (2.) Durch welche Verteilungsparameter Δ
Yjk in den Klassifikationsmerkmalen sind die latenten Klassen gekennzeichnet? Wie groß sind die Anteilswerte π
j der gefundenen latenten Klassen in der Stichprobe bzw. in der Grundgesamtheit? (3.) Lassen sich die latenten Klassen inhaltlich
sinnvoll interpretieren? (4.) Sind die gefundenen latenten Klassen stabil und valide? Die Lösung dieser Klassifikationsaufgabe
mittels Analyse latenter Klassen wird für ein Beispiel aus der Sozialstrukturanalyse verdeutlicht. Als Statistikprogramm wird
LatentGOLD eingesetzt, das eine breite Palette von Modellen enthält. Besonderer Wert wird auf die Erfordernisse der praktischen
Anwendung gelegt. Ausführlich diskutiert werden daher Probleme der Bestimmung der Zahl der latenten Klassen und die Validierung
der Ergebnisse.
In this article, the impact of religious denomination on party choice is studied in eight western European countries from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. The research problems are (1) to examine the strength of the correlation between party choice and religious denomination over time, and (2) to analyze which political parties those who are affiliated and those who are unaffiliated to a religious community vote for, and how this has changed over time. The denominational cleavage varies considerably in strength in the eight countries. It is strongest in the Catholic and religiously mixed countries of Continental Europe. There is stability in the correlation between party choice and religious denomination in most countries. The main polarization involves, to a large degree, voters for parties on the left versus voters for parties on the right. It varies considerably, however, as to which parties on the left and the right have voters who contribute comparatively to polarization. Green parties are making inroads among the unaffiliated sections of the population. This changes the polarization caused by religious denomination in the sense that denominational differences become smaller for some other parties, first and foremost, the socialist and the communist parties.
About 30 years after gradually gaining parliamentary representation, Green parties have become established political actors throughout Western Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of 12 countries, this study argues that the stability this party family has achieved is the result of an enduring coalition with groups of voters who not only share a particular set of attitudes but also several specific social characteristics. Such a structural perspective clearly contradicts earlier approaches in the literature that primarily explained the Green vote as being issue- or value-based and sometimes simply as representing political protest. Green voters, by contrast, are young, highly educated, work as social-cultural specialists or are students, are predominantly urban, and less attached to Christian churches. These structural components are connected with environmental, libertarian, and pro-immigration attitudes. With respect to new divides caused by globalization processes, especially the latter issue explicitly distinguishes them from other voter groups.
This paper investigates religiosity in relation to party choice in European Parliament elections. Conventional wisdom tells us that as Europe has secularised, the effect of religion on party choice should also have diminished. Yet, this cross-national and cross-temporal study of religious voting in European elections from 1989 to 2004 paints a more nuanced picture. It shows that a) the effect of religion has been declining, but has increased in recent years, b) religion matters in particular for voting for Christian Democratic parties and Conservative parties, c) while generational replacement reduces the overall effect of religion on electoral decisions, the effect of religion has recently increased within each generation, and d) the impact of religion depends on the religious context in which citizens live so that religion plays a bigger role in fractionalised societies. These findings are discussed in the light of a revived importance of religion for European politics.
This article uses data from the World Values Survey to study the spread of post-Christian spirituality (“New Age”) in 14 Western countries (1981–2000, N = 61,352). It demonstrates that this type of spirituality, characterized by a sacralization of the self, has become more widespread during the period 1981–2000 in most of these countries. It has advanced farthest in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This spiritual turn proves a byproduct of the decline of traditional moral values and hence driven by cohort replacement. Spirituality's popularity among the well educated also emerges from the latter's low levels of traditionalism. These findings confirm the theory of detraditionalization, according to which a weakening of the grip of tradition on individual selves stimulates a spiritual turn to the deeper layers of the self.
Based on Allbus data, stability and change of the impact of social structurally defined interests on party preference in Germany is investigated. We use both traditional cleavage indicators like union membership or frequency of church attendance and further social structural characteristics like class identification, occupation or unemployment experience. We apply a two-level model with varying intercepts for the 16 Allbus surveys from 1980 to 2008.
Beyond the expected results we observe some deviations from the stable relationship between social structural variables and party preference. (1) The younger generation of active Catholics prefers the Christian Democrats less than the older cohorts and the East German working class leaned towards this party immediately after unification. (2) Union members got alienated from the Social Democrats since 2004 due to reforms of unemployment benefits for people being out of work for a longer period of time with the consequence that Die Linke could profit from this trend in West and East Germany. (3) This left socialist party and its forerunner, the PDS, has always been the preferred party of people with unemployment experience. (4) The Greens and the Liberal Party are enduringly supported by specific social groups, the Greens by the social and cultural service class and the FDP by the self-employed, at least since this latter party ended the social liberal coalition with the SPD in 1982.
Mehr als eine Erinnerung an das 19 Jahrhundert? Das sozio€ okonomische und das religi€ os-konfessionelle Cleavage und Wahlverhalten
- K Arzheimer
- H Schoen
Arzheimer, K., Schoen, H., 2007. Mehr als eine Erinnerung an das 19. Jahrhundert?
Das sozio€ okonomische und das religi€ os-konfessionelle Cleavage und Wahlverhalten 1994-2005. In: Rattinger, Hans, Gabriel, Oscar W., Falter, Jürgen W. (Eds.),
Der Gesamtdeutsche W€ ahler. Nomos, Baden-Baden, pp. 89e112.
Analyse latenter klassen
- J Bacher
- J Vermount
Bacher, J., Vermount, J., 2010. Analyse latenter klassen. In: Wolf, C., Best, H. (Eds.),
Handbuch der sozialwissenschaftlichen Datenanalyse. Springer VS, Wiesbaden,
pp. 553e574.