A Secularization of Cultural Politics? Changing Patterns of Cultural-Political Polarization and Voting Behavior in Western Europe, 1981-2008

Despite claims about religion reasserting itself in the political realm, conflicts about non-religious issues like immigration and law and order appear to have superseded conflicts about religious issues like sexual freedom, abortion, and women’s roles. It is for instance telling that despite their major disagreements, today’s new-leftist and new-rightist political parties agree that religion should be banned from politics. It is also telling that clashes about immigration and law and order appear most severe in the by now massively non-religious Northwestern-European countries. This suggests that Western Europe has not witnessed a resurgence of religion in politics, but that declines in the number of religious people have stimulated the political marginalization of religion. This project studies whether this is indeed what has happened in the period 1981-2008. It does so by analyzing survey data for 21 Western-European countries to test 3 hypotheses: 1) that conflicts between the religious and the secular about moral traditionalism has given way to all-out non-religious conflicts between the highly and the lowly educated about immigration and law and order; 2) that this shift has decreased the tendency to vote for either Christian-democratic or secular parties and has increased the tendency to vote for either new-leftist or new-rightist parties; and 3) that both of these shifts can be explained from declining numbers of religious people.