Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties
نویسنده
چکیده
This article examines the relationship between Christian religiosity and the support for radical right parties in Western Europe. Drawing on theories of electoral choice and on sociopsychological literature largely ignored by scholars of electoral behaviour, it suggests and tests a number of competing hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that while religiosity has few direct effects, and while religious people are neither more nor less hostile towards ethnic minorities and thereby neither more nor less prone to vote for a radical right party, they are not ‘available’ to these parties because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or conservative parties. However, given increasing de-alignment, this ‘vaccine effect’ is likely to become weaker with time. Kai Arzheimer (University of Essex) & Elisabeth Carter (University of Keele) Preprint. Final Version will appear in West European Politics 2009 PDF version of this paper / HTML version of this paper
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