Moral Politics: The Religious Factor in Referenda Voting

Abstract

This article combines the research strands of moral politics and political behavior by focusing on the effect of individual and contextual religiosity on individual vote decisions in popular initiatives and public referenda concerning morally charged issues. We rely on a total of 13 surveys with 1,000 respondents each conducted after every referendum on moral policies in Switzerland between 1992 and 2012. Results based on cross-classified multilevel models show that religious behaving instead of nominal religious belonging plays a crucial role in decision making on moral issues. This supports the idea that the traditional confessional cleavage is replaced by a new religious cleavage that divides the religious from the secular. This newer cleavage is characterized by party alignments that extend from electoral to direct democratic voting behavior. Overall, our study lends support to previous findings drawn from American research on moral politics, direct democracies, and the public role of religion.

Turning Liberal: Legislators’ Individual Preferences and the Regulation of Pre‐Implantation Genetic Diagnosis in Switzerland

“…The indicator reflecting constituents' preferences follows the previous findings by Rapp et al. () who show that the relevant dividing line in Swiss moral policy referenda is between religious (church attending) and secular (non‐church attending) voters rather than between voters of different religious denominations. Building on the Swiss Federal Statistical Office's Language, Religion and Culture Survey , the share of inhabitants who stated that they attend church at least six times per year is calculated at the constituency level.…”

“…) and the importance of religious values at the voter level (e.g., Rapp et al. ). Policy issues involving a morality dimension have been identified as distinct from the classical policy conflicts over, for instance, economic issues in several respects (Engeli and Varone ; Tavits ).…”

“…First, since cultural and religious cleavages play an important role in the Swiss political system and are not congruent to territorial distinctions (Rapp et al. ; Vatter ), one may expect that the morality issue of regulating PGD should lead to pronounced conflict between religious and secular societal groups. Second, this heightened potential for conflict is accompanied with an uneven geographical distribution of societal pressure groups across constituencies that is reflected by different levels of competition on the religious cleavage across cantons (Kriesi and Trechsel ).…”

“…; Rapp et al. ; Rothmayr and Varone ) by asking what drove individual MPs’ positioning and legislative behavior in the Swiss legislative process to regulate PGD in 2014. This case‐specific research design provides two advantages: First, by focusing on a single legislative process, it allows assessing to what extent MPs adhere to their individual moral principles and demands from their constituents.…”

Dropping the Curtain: The Religious-Secular Party Cleavage in German Morality Politics

“…More specifically, we ask whether the cleavage between Christian Democrats and secular parties still exists in German morality policy and, if so, in what form? Is the denominational divide between Catholics and non-Catholics originally proposed by Lipset and Rokkan (1967) still relevant today or do we find mainly a divide between religious and secular actors in accordance with transformations in citizens' voting behavior (Rapp et al 2014)?…”