Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

recent years, however, the stability of the political alignments of mainline Protestants has been questioned. Several analysts have found evidence of a shift of this group away from the Republican Party and toward the political center (e.g., Lopatto 1985; Kellstedt et al. 1994; Manza and Brooks 1997, 2001).

A variety of ways of accounting for these trends has been advanced in the literature on the mainline denominations. One account emphasizes rising levels of social issue liberalism among these groups. The receptivity of many mainline Protestant religious leaders and local congregations to politically liberal messages on such issues, beginning in the 1960s with the Vietnam War and on issues of racial and gender inequality and sexual freedom, suggests one possible explanation for the relative shift away from the Republican Party (cf. Wuthnow and Evans 2001). Second, some analysts have emphasized changes in the demography of the mainline Protestant groups, in which more conservative church members are defecting – or not joining in the first place – in favor of stricter denominations. Left behind is a group of adherents in the mainline churches that is more in tune with the messages of the clergy (e.g., Finke and Stark 1992: Chapter 5). Finally, the relative loss of economic and political power to non-Protestant groups suggests a third possible source for the movement of liberal Protestants away from the Republican Party. A number of scholars have emphasized the relative gains of other religious groups, as we have seen above, that have reduced the power of the established Protestant denominations.

Toward “Culture Wars”? A number of analysts have argued that a religiously rooted set of cultural conflicts have emerged, with religious conservatives of all denominations lined up on one side and religious liberals and seculars on the other (e.g., Wuthnow 1988, 1989, 1993; Hunter 1991; DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson 1996; Layman 1997). Some highly visible conflicts over issues with clear religious content – abortion, school prayer, the teaching of evolutionary biology, public support for controversial works of art, rising divorce rates and the alleged breakdown of “traditional” family values, gay and lesbian rights, and others – have indeed generated considerable public controversy since the 1960s, and appear to have become increasingly important in shaping voters’ political alignments (Brooks 2000). Central to the “culture wars” thesis are two arguments. First, there has been a breakdown of traditional denominational alignments, as intradenominational conflict has grown. Second, these conflicts are not only an “elite” phenomenon, but polarization is increasingly reflected in the political consciousness of the mass public. The growing proportion of Americans with no religious identity – doubling from 7 to 15 percent in the 1990s, according to data from the General Social Survey (Hout and Fischer 2002) – also suggests the possibility of increased political divisions between those with versus those without religious identity.

Systematic empirical tests of the culture wars hypothesis have produced decidedly mixed results. Layman (1997) found evidence using the National Election Study that the political impact of doctrinal conservatism has had an increasing effect in that narrow period on partisanship and vote choice, net of other religious, sociodemographic, and political variables. Whether such findings would hold over a longer historical period is unclear. Bolce and De Maio (1999) find that antipathy toward fundamentalists is very high, even among otherwise tolerant segments of the electorate. Brooks (2000) demonstrated that social issues have become increasingly salient in presidential voting, and that general societal-wide liberalization on these issues has significantly benefitted

the Democratic Party. In other work, Brooks (1999) shows that family values have become an increasingly important social problem, but that it is primarily religious conservatives who express concern about it.

Other analysts have explicitly challenged the model. DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson (1996) examined changes in public attitudes toward a wide array of social issues and found little support for the view that any significant polarization has occurred since the 1970s. Davis and Robinson (1996) found that the gap between religious conservatives and liberals is much smaller than often thought, limited to a handful of social issues, and on economic issues religious conservatives are actually somewhat more supportive of governmental action to secure greater equality than religious liberals.

New Evidence Using Relative Measures of Religious Cleavages

The recent investigations of the first author, in collaboration with Clem Brooks, explicitly sought to reconsider these five issues, as well as to develop some overall estimates of the changing impact of religious groups on U.S. party coalitions (Manza and Brooks 1997, 1999, 2001). We briefly summarize this line of research here. Three advances over earlier research on religion and politics defined the methodological contributions of our research. First, analyses of the relationship between social groups and political behavior that fail to employ statistical models that allow for distinctions between trends influencing all groups from those influencing only some groups neglect important information. Second, research on the social group foundations of political behavior should include analyses of (a) group size and (b) group turnout, alongside group voting patterns. The size of groups and their turnout rates will shape the impact of group-based alignments on major party electoral coalitions, a crucial way in which the interaction between religious groups (who seek influence) and political parties (who seek votes) takes place (see Manza and Brooks [1999: Chapter 7] for further discussion). Finally, research on religious cleavages and political behavior in the United States should employ adequate measures of the cleavage itself. Although considerably less common than twenty years ago, some analysts of religion and politics have persisted in failing to take into account the divisions among Protestants as well as between Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and others.

Employing models embodying these principles, our investigations of the changing contours of religion and political behavior in the United States suggested a number of conclusions, some of which are consistent with the thrust of previous findings, and others that challenge the conventional wisdom:

The religious cleavage as a whole has declined very modestly since 1960. The decline is due solely to the shift toward the center of one group – liberal Protestants – and thus does not reflect any societal-wide trend toward dealignment.

Liberal Protestants have moved from being the most Republican religious group in the 1960s, to an essentially centrist position by the 1990s. This transformation has overwhelmingly been driven by their increased liberalism on social issues.

Conservative Protestants have not realigned toward the Republican Party, in large measure because they have always been Republican partisans in the period (since 1960) for which we have adequate measures. Much of the confusion about the political preferences of conservative Protestants reflects a one-time shift toward

the Democratic Party in 1976 (and to a lesser extent in 1980) in response to the candidacy of the born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter.

Catholic voters have not undergone any significant realignment since the 1950s. The elevated levels of Democratic voting in 1960 and 1964 are not to be found in the 1950s and should properly be understood as reflecting the unusual political context of those elections. While analysts of Catholic dealignment were right to suggest that Catholics were becoming more economically conservative, their Republican shift on economic questions has essentially been offset by increasingly moderate views on social issues.

Significant changes in the impact of the religious cleavage on the Democratic and Republican parties has occurred. Because of their shrinking size and decreasing loyalty to the Republican Party, mainline Protestants have provided a drastically reduced share of Republican votes in recent elections (declining from 30 percent of all Republican voters in 1960 to just 12 percent in 1992). Conservative Protestants have increased their share of votes within the Republican Party primarily because of the reduction in votes from mainline sources, not because of changing partisanship or increased overall size in the electorate. Voters without any religious preference have grown in both parties from very low percentages to about 7 percent of Republican voters and 14 percent of Democratic voters.

To be sure, these findings hardly settle these issues, and debates can be expected to continue in the future (of particular controversy are findings about the lack of a clear shift among conservative Protestants: see, e.g., Kohut et al. 2000; Layman 2001; we respond to these and other challenges in Brooks and Manza 2002). Furthermore, our investigations – along with those of most other analysts of religion and politics – have primarily focused on presidential elections; it may be that in Congressional elections, or in state and local elections, the impact of religious identities on political behavior will have different effects (cf. Layman 2001). These questions deserve further attention. And of course, future changes in the religious marketplace (a perpetual feature of U.S. religion) and the issue of ideological controversies dividing large religious groups ensure a dynamic environment in which new analyses of old questions will be called for.

A Note on Religion and African-American Voters

To this point, our discussion of religion and politics in the United States has focused almost entirely on the impact of religious identities on white voters. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: The strong alliance of black voters with the Republican Party before the New Deal, and the Democratic Party afterward (an alignment that strengthened significantly in the 1960s and the passage of civil and voting rights legislation) has not been significantly shaped by religious differences among blacks in the same way as among whites. For example, recent surveys find that even African Americans who support a socially conservative agenda are still much more likely to vote Democratic (Wilcox 1992).

Black churches tend to be more embedded in political life than their white counterparts. In national surveys, African Americans consistently report that religion is more important in their daily lives than white respondents, as well as reporting more praying, higher levels of attendance at religious services, and higher rates of church membership.

Church services more often feature political addresses from public officials, and civic political meetings more often feature prayers, hymns, call-and-response-style oratories, and even the passing of offering plates for political contributions, than would be found in comparable white churches and communities (cf. Harris 1999; Pattillo-McCoy 1998; see also McRoberts, Chapter 28, this volume). And African-American religious theology and practice is often characterized by being distinctively concerned with collective political issues. African-American churches are dominated by the key themes of oppression and deliverance, expressed as collective properties that require collective efforts to provide increased opportunities (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). The powerful and central institutional presence of African-American churches allowed them to be central players in the mobilization of political protests in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Morris 1984). Many African-American churches have made and continue to make explicit efforts to register voters and mobilize them to vote for Democratic candidates (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; Harris 1994, 1999; Calhoun-Brown 1996).

Given such evidence, however, only small impacts of religion have been found among African-American voters. There is some very modest evidence that religious involvement promotes political participation among African Americans (cf. Harris 1994, 1999). Data from the 1984 Black Election Study indicate that although church attendance is not a strong predictor of voting rates, going to a “political church” strongly influenced the likelihood of voting in a positive direction (Calhoun-Brown 1996). Finally, some analysts have found that both voter turnout and interest in politics are lowest among African Americans with no religious affiliation (Kellstedt et al. 1994).

In short, the existing evidence suggests that the political impact of black churches is strongest in arenas other than voting behavior – for example, on local, community, or neighborhood politics (see McRoberts, Chapter 28, this volume), recruitment to social movements, or as a direct voice through lobbying or other political activities.

RELIGION AND POLITICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: WESTERN EUROPE

Two peculiarities of the American electoral system and religious landscape potentially make the relationship between religion and political behavior unique: the electoral system and the high degree of pluralism in the religious marketplace. The electoral system, in which legislative candidates compete in single-member districts and in which two political parties have been invariably dominant at the national level for over 130 years, has precluded the emergence of religious parties. In other democratic countries, religious parties have not been so hobbled, and in many cases they have thrived alongside secular parties of the right and left. In the United States, no such party ever developed. The second important difference is that the high level of religious pluralism in the United States opens the possibility of multiple lines of religious cleavage in comparison to polities with one or two main denominational groupings. In this section, we highlight some of these differences from the American model by considering some features of West European party systems.

The comparison between Western Europe and the United States is additionally informative because of the historical origins of the religious cleavage, and significant variation in the religious landscape across Europe. Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) landmark theoretical overview of the sources of social cleavages in democratic societies outlined a

complex set of historical processes triggered by two revolutions, a “national” revolution and an “industrial” revolution. The resulting social divisions produced by these twin revolutions were viewed as having produced stable patterns of group-based political conflict, expressed through modern party systems. The most important of these cleavages included those based on class divisions (triggered by the industrial revolution), religion, ethnicity, and language (triggered by the national revolution). The precise articulation and relative magnitude of each of these cleavages varied from country to country, often depending on the sequencing of party formation and democratization (cf. Mann 1993). In some countries, a religious cleavage came to be embedded in the party system, through the formation of political parties with strong ties to dominant religious institutions.

The European religious landscape also varies. Three distinct patterns of religious identity can be found in Western Europe: Countries that are mostly Catholic (e.g., Italy, Ireland, France, Austria, Belgium, Spain); countries that are mostly Protestant (in particular the Scandinavian countries, but also Britain); and countries with more equal proportions of Protestants and Catholics (Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland). The magnitude and form of the religious cleavages found in different countries can be expected to vary depending on the structure of the religious field (cf. Dalton 1988, 1990). For example, analysts generally find that Catholic countries, religiously divided countries, or countries without a state church, have higher levels of religious division in voting behavior than countries with a state-sanctioned church which claims the allegiance of most citizens.7 But important exceptions also have been noted: Levels of religious voting in Britain have sometimes been said to be as large as those of class divisions (cf. Miller and Raab 1977; Rogowski 1981), and among the Scandinavian countries (with state churches) religious-based political divisions also can be found (Stephens 1979).

Finally, and again in contrast to the United States, arguments about the importance of secularization processes in the European context have long and repeatedly been asserted. Economic prosperity and rising levels of educational attainment have long been viewed as factors eroding religious cues for voting behavior (see, e.g., Baker, Dalton, and Hildebrandt [1975] on West Germany; Sundberg and Berglund [1984] on the Scandinavian countries; Eisenga, Felling, and Lammers [1994] on the Netherlands; and the various country-specific studies in Franklin, Mackie, and Valen [1992]). Other analysts have argued that the decline in church attendance across many European countries is weakening the salience of religion for voters (see, e.g., Books [1980] on Italy and West Germany; Mendras [1991] on France; and comparatively on a number of countries, Dogan [1995]).

Macro Factors: The Fate of Religious Parties

Most significant religious parties in European polities are located on the center-right of the political spectrum, and are usually known as Christian Democratic parties (for overviews, see Berger 1982; Hanley 1994; Lane and Erson 1994; Gallagher, Laver, and

7This point can be related to the larger finding in sociology, by now well established, that religious pluralism leads to higher levels of religious practice, belief, and salience than are found under conditions of religious monopoly (Warner 1993; Stark and Finke 2000).

Mair 1995: Chapter 8). The largest of these parties are Catholic in origin, such as those in Italy, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. (The Italian Christian Democratic Party has recently collapsed because of scandal, but governed, or was part of the governing coalition, for most of the postwar period.) The German Christian Democratic Party, which has governed the Federal Republic (West) Germany between World War II and the late 1960s, and again from 1983 until 1998, has been a “biconfessional” party with roots in both Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Christian Democratic Appeal in the Netherlands is another biconfessional party (formed in a merger in the late 1970s between the Catholic People’s Party and two smaller Protestant parties). Purely Protestant parties are mostly limited to Scandinavia, where Christian Democratic parties with ties to Protestant churches emerged in the 1950s and 1960s to contest elections in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (albeit with relatively little success). The only major country in Western Europe without a significant religious party is Britain, and Ireland is a complicated case.8 In France, a Catholic party in the Fourth Republic (1946–58), the Popular Republican Movement, evolved into the two major conservative parties of the Fifth Republic, the Gaullist, and (to a lesser extent) the Union for French Democracy blocs. Although the direct connection to major religious bodies has largely been broken, there is continuing evidence of a strong association between church attendance and/or religiosity and support for one of the major conservative parties (Heath et al. 1993; Lewis-Beck 1998).

The electoral performance of these parties has traditionally been strong, although declining in most countries in recent years. In those countries where a religious party has been the dominant party on the center-right of the political spectrum, such as in Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, vote shares averaged over 30 percent, and in Germany over 45 percent, from the 1950s through the early 1990s (see Gallagher et al. 1995: 194). In all of these countries, secular parties of the right (or sometimes the center, such as in Germany) compete for votes and often become governing coalition partners. The rise of new right-wing parties, and declining rates of church attendance across most European countries (discussed later), have combined to put considerable pressure on religious parties (van Kersbergen 1999). In such an environment, to remain electorally competitive, many of the religious parties have tended to become more secular in their appeals over time, a pattern not unlike that of social democratic parties in these same countries (Przeworski and Sprague 1986). Nonetheless, the persistence and continuing strengths of religious parties across Europe (and their distinctive impact on policy outputs) suggest an important difference with the American model.9

8In overwhelming Catholic Ireland, with very high rates of religiosity, neither of the two major parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fail) have organized linkages to religion, and both parties are plausibly classified as center-right parties (Gallagher 1985). Yet Fine Gael has affiliated itself with the Christian Democratic parties in the European Parliament and in cross-national bodies. Not coincidentally, the British political system has important parallels to the United States, in that members of Parliament are elected in a first-past-the-post system, which discourages the formation of major third parties (although not to the same degree as in the United States).

9In the comparative welfare-state literature, the “conservative” welfare states of continental Europe that have been built or consolidated under governments controlled by religious parties, some unique policy outcomes are visible. Perhaps the most notable are the strong forms of social provision for citizens, especially mothers, outside the labor market. See, for example, Esping-Andersen 1990; Castles 1994.

Individual-Level Factors: Religion and the Alignment of Voters and Parties in Western Europe

The persistence of religious parties in Europe suggests an avenue for political expression of religiosity that is more explicitly connected to the party system than in the United States. At the same time, there is a much wider consensus that secularization processes at the individual level that are weak or nonexistent in the United States have proceeded much farther in Europe (Dobbelaere and Jagodzinski 1995; Jagodzinski and Dobbelaere 1995; Berger 1999). Yet secularization need not imply declining levels of religious voting: New cleavages, such as those between secular and religious voters, may replace older Catholic/Protestant divides; and voters with religious identities may be more likely to act on the basis of those identities even if there are fewer of them. The robustness of the religious cleavage, in those countries where one exists, has frequently been proclaimed (as we noted earlier). So what has been the impact of these factors for individual voting behavior?

The existing literature suggests two paradoxical findings. First, where a religious cleavage has been embedded in the political system, religious identities continue to exert a significant impact on individual voting behavior; at the same time, there has been a general (but not universal) weakening of the religion-vote association in Europe. The most carefully studied case by far is the Netherlands, and we consider some of the evidence from that country first. Dutch society has long been characterized by what have come to be known as “pillars,” reflecting stable, lasting, and loyal connections between religion and voting. The four pillars consisted of Catholics, Protestants, and nonconfessionals divided into Labour and Liberal constituents. Each pillar developed its own political organization, with the Catholic and Protestant parties consisting of their followers regardless of their social class, the Liberal party consisting of middleand upper-class nonconfessionals, and the Labour party consisting of workingand lower- middle-class nonconfessionals (Eisenga et al. 1994). Party loyalty was fierce among all four pillars, particularly among Catholics and Calvinists. From 1922 to the 1960s, Dutch Catholics were considered among the most loyal voting bloc in the world, consistently giving more than 85 percent of their votes to the Catholic party. By 1973, however, Catholics were giving less than half (48 percent) of their votes to the Catholic party, and shortly thereafter the Catholic party merged with the two largest Protestant parties to form the Christian Democratic CDA. This new combined party’s first electoral showing in 1977 was a mere 31.9 percent of the overall popular vote in the Netherlands, less than what the Catholic party alone had received in 1963, and it has declined further since then (Eisenga et al. 1994). The breakdown of pillarization has largely been attributed to the forces of modernization and secularization, and these forces are widely believed to have completely eroded what was once the strongest religious voting cleavage in the world (Eisenga et al. 1994; Andeweg 1982; Becker and Vink 1994; Irwin and Dittrich 1984; Miller and Stouthard 1975). The emerging party system has been characterized a number of different ways: As a new left-right political ideological continuum (van der Eijk and Niemoller 1987), as reflecting a postmaterialist cleavage (van Deth and Geurtx 1989), or along new political party lines united by ideological views rather than class and religious makeup (Middendorp 1991).

Yet changes in class structures and secularization processes do not necessarily produce a decline in the actual religious (or class) cleavages. Studies that have focused

explicitly on the stability of the religious cleavage have usually found that while attendance 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 religion 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 middleor upper-class persons 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 positions 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 remained 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 central political cleavages at the founding of the modern party system and democratic

institutions. The classical secularization model produced a picture of declining religious influences on the vote, but the evidence we have considered in this chapter suggests only modest declines in the association between religion and partisan preference and vote choice. In the United States, most of the change since the 1950s has occurred among mainline Protestants; other major denominational families remain more or less in the same political alignment as before, with the usual election-specific fluctuations (most notably that prompted by born-again Democrat Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980). In Europe, secularization has proceeded further, and there has been declining support for religious parties in many countries and, in some countries an overall weakening of the religion/vote association. But even here, the amount of change has frequently been overstated or misunderstood. Religious identities and involvements persist in shaping the way voters make political choices, and we expect that this will continue to be the case in the new century.