Explaining the Breakdown of the Religion–Vote Relationship in The Netherlands, 1971–2006

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which changes in the effect of religion on voting in The Netherlands since the 1970s can be explained by ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches. The first includes religious integration and education. The latter category encompasses the restructuring of the party system and changes in party positions. Hypotheses are tested employing logistic and conditional logistic regression analyses of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies (1971–2006) supplemented by data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Weakening religious integration largely explains the decline of political boundaries between non-religious voters and Catholics and Calvinists. In line with earlier research, the article finds that the creation of a single Christian Democratic Party (CDA) has reduced the religion–vote relationship. However, this merger effect largely disappears after taking into account party positions. Moreover, party positions influence the religion–vote association: the effect of religion on voting increases as religious parties emphasise traditional moral issues in their manifestos.

View correction statement:

Erratum

Notes

1. We may also expect that conservative religious values are of decreasing relevance for party choice. Aarts and Thomassen (2008), for example, have shown that value orientations over euthanasia were strongly associated with voting for the CDA in 1989, but that this association virtually disappeared in 2006. Questions on euthanasia and abortion are, unfortunately, not consistently available in the full range of DPES surveys. We therefore cannot test with this data-set whether changes in the impact of religious beliefs could interpret the decline of the denomination–vote relationship between 1971 and 2006.

2. We excluded the 2003 survey because after the 2002 election the government survived for only a short period and researchers had to organise a new election survey quickly and the respondents partly overlapped between the 2002 and 2003 surveys.

3. PvdA = Labour Party; DS70 = Democratic Socialists ‘70; CPN = Communist Party of The Netherlands; SP = Socialist Party; D66 = Democrats ‘66; PPR = Political Party Radicals; PSP = Pacifist Political Party; EVP = Evangelical Peoples Party; VVD = People's Party for Freedom and Democracy; BP = Farmers Party; MNP = New Middle Party; RKPN = Roman Catholic Party Netherlands.

4. For the 2002 elections the Christian Union is included in calculating the mean value of the religious party group. The CU only modestly affects the weighted value of the combined scores, because it attracted 2.54 per cent of the votes compared to 27.93 per cent that went to the CDA.

5. A logistic regression of voting LPF in 2002 controlled for age, gender, education and church attendance (N=1556) shows no significant (p < 0.1) differences between denominations. With the non-religious as the reference group the parameter estimates (b, se) are: Catholics (0.25, 0.23), Protestants (−0.22, 0.33) Calvinists (−0.37, 0.48), other religions (0.05, 0.46). Church attendance has a significant negative effect (−0.345, 0.08). People who attend church more often were less likely to cast a vote for the LPF in 2002.

6. When we use the emphasis in the manifesto placed on negative statements about ‘traditional morality’ there is only a slight variation among the other political party groups, and only in the first elections. The overall variation among all party groups is much less pronounced than reported in Figure 3a.