Religion at the European Parliament: the Italian case

Abstract

Italy is a predominantly Catholic country that developed historically on the basis of a strong, dominant religion and weak state institutions. Yet, openly clerical parties, direct advocates of the interests of the Catholic Church, have nowadays virtually disappeared and the relevance of the religious cleavage is decreasing, in favour of a more indirect support for these interests, mainly among moderate and conservative forces. Although the overall level of secularisation in Italy has increased, the degree of religiosity of Italian society remains one of the highest of the 27 member-states of the European Union (EU) and polarisation over religious issues in domestic politics remains high, particularly regarding moral values and family matters. In our study we explore the role of religion within the Italian political sphere with regard to the functioning of political representation, by taking into account the sub-national, national and European levels of government. We focus on the attitudes and behaviours of Italian political elites at the EU level. We hypothesise a strong influence of religion on the articulation between national and European politics. Our findings consistently show that the degree of religiosity of the Italian delegation to the European Parliament (EP) is high. However, the impact of such a high degree of religiosity among the members of the EP (MEPs) on their political activities appears less direct than one might predict, while the degree of political secularism is higher among Italian MEPs than among their national or regional counterparts. When we discuss a case study, namely the accession of Turkey to the EU, our data show that the religious attitudes of Italian MEPs play a crucial role in their stance on Turkish accession. The picture that emerges is thus nuanced. Religion significantly impacts on Italian MEPs’ ideological, political and moral attitudes, but plays a smaller role in their activities; while their left-right collocation emerges as the most relevant predictor, despite a number of exceptions.

Keywords:

• Religious cleavage
• secularisation
• Italian politics
• European Parliament
• Turkey
• representation

Notes

^1. In the PartiRep survey this variable is measured on the basis of the respondents’ self-placement on a 10-point left-right scale, where 0 means left and 10 means right (the variable has been recorded as a three-point scale for reasons of simplicity).

^2. The latter variable is recoded on the basis of party affiliation of the interviewees and thus according to the ideological positioning of the respective party family.

^3. Unfortunately, the limited variance in this sample – only two out of 19 MEPs do not declare themselves as ‘religious persons’ – does not allow statistically significant considerations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefano Braghiroli

Stefano Braghiroli is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Government and Politics, University of Tartu. His main research interests include politics in the European Parliament, EU enlargement, and party politics in Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey. His most recent publications include articles in the International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies, the Journal of Contemporary European Research and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies and chapters in various published books.

Giulia Sandri

Giulia Sandri is assistant professor in political science at the Université Catholique de Lille, France. She holds a PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Her main research interests are electoral studies, party politics, and electoral behaviour of religious groups, and she has published on these topics in international journals including Politics and Policy, Ethnopolitics, Comparative European Politics, Acta Politica and Regional and Federal Studies.