Perhaps what I wrote wasn't clear. I suggested that new immigrants are more likely than others to have a religion.…
Dear Mette Thanks very much for your observation, which I have posted online. Unfortunately, we have had no national censuses…
Net migration to the UK has added at least two million people over the past decade, most of whom will…
I have read a 10 year old article about the positive effect of immigrant communities on Church attendance in the…
Eddie You can email them to c.d.field@bham.ac.uk Best wishes. Clive
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One response to “Religiosity and Party Choice”
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This is very interesting. Also, thanks for the links.
As far as I have read, the literature that suggests a link between religiosity in general (religious belief as well as religious observance) and political conservatism is large. In this realm there are also contributions that claim a statistically significant, positive relationship between being religious (no matter what denomination) and authoritarianism. In my opinion, the most interesting articles in this field come from psychologists (just one example I recently read but there is a lot more: Bouchard (2009): Authoritarianism, Religiousness, and Conservatism. In: Voland, E, Schiefenhoefel, W. (eds): The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior). In this context, Haidt et al. are also noteworthy. I’m currently studying Haidt’s moral foundations theory. Haidt claims that the human personality is built on 5 underlying moral foundations (harm/care; fairness/justice; authority/respect; ingroup/loyalty, purity/sanctity). He and his colleagues developed these foundations on the basis of extensive quantitative research, carried out lots of psychological studies with questionnaires that were specifically developed for the purpose.
The interesting thing about Haidt’s theory is that he and his co-authors point out that Liberals and Conservatives have different moral foundations. One provocative claim is that Liberals are somewhat less balanced in their moral foundations than Conservatives because they only emphasize two of them (Fairness/Justice and Harm/Care) whereas Conservatives emphasize all five. It has to be said that the operationalization of Haidt’s moral foundations can (and should) be questioned. I suspect that this concept is biased towards conservatism because of the scaling they use. But it is still interesting. I aim to link my own (similar) concept, inspired by Haidt’s moral foundations, to religious socialization and to further investigate the relationship between religion/ religious socialization and conservative vs. liberal civic values in my thesis. Just in case, someone is interested, here is a link: Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007): When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98-116. A number of papers can be obtained directly from their homepage —>
http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php?t=publications )But I think it is also important to distinguish between denominations: some denominations are known to be more conservative than others. There is an argument about the extent to which the Catholic Church fosters conservatism and authoritarianism. Some, Uslaner for example, stress that the Catholic Church is more hierarchical than Protestant Churches and thus fosters authoritarianism and intolerance. But one could also argue the same for small, protestant sects (Max Weber’s Calvinists), since they have a much better chance to exert social control over the individual. In large churches like Catholicism, social control is low, the hierarchy is far to high above the congregation’s heads to have significance for the individual. Some authors present empirical evidence for the argument that the Catholic Church and Mainline Protestant denominations are more conductive to social trust, tolerance and a general openness towards others than Evangelical Churches and small sects (Coreno, 2002, Wuthnow, 1999: Traunmueller, 2008). But there are others who found the opposite. Kim, using WVS-data, interestingly found that Muslim affiliation has a positive, statistically significant impact on support for democracy in industrialized countries but not in developing countries. Protestant and Catholic affiliation, on the other hand, according to Kim, don’t have a significant impact on support for democracy in industrialized countries but in developing countries they have (Kim 2008).
In any case, the empirically interesting question is: do religious congregations and denominations in Britain and other industrialized, highly secularized countries still have an impact on people’s civic values, on conservative versus liberal attitudes and therefore on people’s political preferences, choices and behaviour? (I suspect that through socialization they still do, but decreasingly so). It is, however interesting that you found a correlation here.
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