Comparative religious voting: mechanisms of politicization in post-cleavage elections

Abstract

The country chapetrs included in this volume provide a rich narrative of the controversies about morality policies and their consequences on electoral politics. In this chapter, we undertake a different task. It concerns the analysis of how religion and religiosity, at the basis of the moral issues divide, intervene in the vote calculus across national elections held in seventeen Western European countries between 1989 and 2014. Our aim in theory-driven since we hope to accumulate enough evidence supporting the notion of religious voting as a different concept from the religious cleavage firstly examined by Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967b).