Comparing Religious Voting across time and countries: A Preliminary Analysis.

JOSÉ RAMÓN MONTERO; IGNACIO LAGO PEÑAS; MARÍA CELESTE RATTO

Salamanca, España

Congreso; III Congreso Internacional de Estudios Electorales: partidos, elecciones y calidad de la democracia en la globalización,; 2009

Sociedad Mexicana de Estudios Electorales (SOMEE); Instituto de Iberoamérica, Universidad de Salamanca

This paper is a first attempt for systematically analysing religious voting in Western countries. Given the looseness with which generally the terms religious voting has been used in electoral studies, our main goal is, as Merton (1987) put it, to establish the phenomenon, i.e., to be ascertain that such behavior as religious voting does exist and is worth to examine it. In a very tentative way, we propose a new measure of religious voting that, in spite of its simplicity, aims at improving some of the shortcomings manifested in the standard approach to multivariate analysis. Finally, what we have labelled as congruent, or consistent, religious voting is applied to the countries included in the first round of the European Social Survey (2002-3) as an empirical ground for literally discussing both the criteria used for operationalising this new measure and the relevance of its results. Further research would expand the number of surveys for allowing us to more rigorously assess the validity of this new measure along time and across countries.