Festival
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Then it was a three day event conducted in a venue at the German-Czech boarder. This music festival was conducted for the first time 8 years ago in 2008. This includes the Catholic citizens, but also religiously active Protestants.
In addition to evidence about the individual religious impact, there are also some studies regarding the religious cleavage in a contextual perspective. This locality information is for reference purposes only. The effective threshold of exclusion is derived from Lijphart.
The Impact of Religion on Voting Behaviour - It is equally important to place emphasis on the form of a relationship to derive valid statements regarding voting behaviour. This music festival is conducted on three stages.
The traditional cleavages like social class or religion are often reported to have lost explanatory power for the voting decision. Regarding the religious cleavage, the evidence is ambiguous depending on the choice of cases and indicators used. Additional to the inclusion of individual variables, a special focus lies on contextual effects. The estimated hierarchical linear models confirm a prevailing influence of the simple individual factors and the presence of a significant contextual effect. Statistical evidence is also presented for some of the supposed interaction effects between individual and contextual religious variables. Introduction During the last few decades the focus of electoral research has changed quite significantly. In the 1960s and 70s, the traditional cleavages according to Lipset and Rokkan were in the centre of scholarly interest. At this time religion was one of the most influential factors for the voting decision. More recent studies claim that new cleavages, or rather divisions, are weakening or even replacing the former influential cleavages e. Bornschier ; Brunner and Sciarini ; Inglehart; Kriesi et al. As a consequence, religion is repeatedly disregarded as a prevailing factor. Broughton and ten Selb goldberg : 4 state that religion is often either mentioned only for a historical overview or to highlight its declining impact. Besides the prominent counterexample of the United States, where the religious dealignment between Catholics and Christian Democratic parties is not observable Norris and Inglehartrecently several scholars in Europe state that religion is still or yet again a significant factor worth to analyse. With respect to the religious cleavage, the Swiss case is particularly convenient as the country was built along denominational lines. Consequently, religious differences have always been one of the selb goldberg important factors in defining how individuals will vote Hug and Trechsel ; Lijphart ; Trechsel. Whereas the individual influence of religious characteristics has been studied extensively, there is less known about contextual effects. The authors of the Selb goldberg School see Lazarsfeld et al. However, most studies since then concentrate on the analysis of individual characteristics. In Switzerland selb goldberg are significant differences in the religious composition of the cantons. This offers the opportunity to identify and examine contextual effects. The aim of the paper is thus to analyse the impact of the religious environment regarding the individual and contextual level, with a specific focus on the relationship between both levels. The religious context may show a simple direct effect, but it may also interact with individual factors and condition their influence. These possible interactive contextual impacts are understudied in electoral research. selb goldberg The structure of this article is as follows: The next chapter presents the theoretical significance of the religious cleavage and its empirical importance for Switzerland. Next, I develop the hypotheses of the religious effects. This is followed by selb goldberg data section, which specifies the operationalisations and the used method. I then test the hypotheses using hierarchical models. A brief discussion summarizing the most important findings concludes the study. Frequently it describes any form of political division, although its actual definition is much more restrictive. This definition already contains the empirical element out of the common conceptualisation by Bartolini and Mairyet the normative and organisational element is missing. Bornschier ; Enyedi ; Hug and Sciarini ; Kriesi ; Lachat. A division between opposing social groups may be based on class, religion, status, etc. These groups hold a common set of values and beliefs through selb goldberg they develop a sense of collective identity, the normative element. It comprises the articulation of the group's interest through institutions or organizations, such as political parties Bartolini and Mair : 199; Bornschier : 5; Lachat : 27. When defining a religious cleavage two aspects are central e. On the one hand is the religious community a person belongs to religious denominationand on the other hand, it is also important how religious a person is independent of the denomination religious attendance and belief. The latter is normally measured by church attendance. These two aspects stand for different elements of the above presented definition. Religious denomination denotes the empirical selb goldberg structural element Knutsen and Scarbrough : 499. Lane and Ersson make a slightly different distinction between a latent and manifest part of the cleavage. Denomination represents the latent aspect, which is equal to the structural part of the definition used here. Selb goldberg central selb goldberg in the literature is the reservation of the notion of cleavage for relationships with a certain durability. The links between social groups and political parties persist over selb goldberg generations of voters, even if the conflict which led to the formation of a given party is no longer present. This might be especially true for the religious cleavage, since lately no major religious issues have entered into political discussion. As Lane and Ersson : 52 show, there is a strong relationship between religious denomination and religious awareness church attendance. This is especially pronounced when church attendance is considered in relation to the size of the Catholic population, which will be examined in the selb goldberg analysis. Like in most other European countries, the religious and the class cleavage were highly important during this time. They continue to show considerable effects nowadays, even if a certain decline has been observed since the 1970s Lijphart ; Linder and Steffen ; Trechsel. Earlier studies showed that in comparison to the other important cleavages of class and language, religion was the main determinant of electoral behaviour in Switzerland Lijphart ; Kerr. On the one hand, this can be seen as a result of the nation's history. The formation of the Swiss Confederation was selb goldberg influenced by and loaded with religious tensions Geser : 6; Kriesi and Trechsel : 6. On the other hand, the significance of the religious cleavage remained higher than in many other countries in Europe due to a comparatively low intensity of the class conflict Geser. More recent studies accept a certain decline of the religious cleavage, but argue that it is still strong enough to compete with the linguistic or class division Trechsel : 32. A development which the early study by Lijphart already revealed is the growing influence of religiosity. Traditionally, the denominational divide between Catholics and Protestants was the most important factor. The latter group is consistently rising in the last years. This speaks of a significant change in the structure of the religious cleavage. A recent study by Nicolet and Tresch reveals additionally that the substantial decline in people attending and belonging to a church institutionalized religion does not necessarily lead to a decline in religious beliefs. The authors selb goldberg that around one quarter of the Swiss population in 2007 belongs to this group of believers without belonging to a church ibid. In addition to evidence about the individual religious impact, there are also some studies regarding the religious cleavage in a contextual perspective. Following the classification of Switzerland in three types of cantons by Klöti and Kriesithe latter argues that the religious cleavage is especially important for traditional Catholic cantons. To further this argument, Kriesi and Trechsel and Lachat add that in Catholic regions the conflict prevails between practising Catholics and selb goldberg people, whereas in the other cantons a denominational division between Catholics and Protestants is present. Two studies present evidence of significant effects by the religious environment. Geser reports a strong impact of the confessional culture on the political ideology and issue positions. This opposition was mainly based on the historical division of the state vs. However, this party is not specifically centred on the religious cleavage. This strong Catholic base, however, is also a danger in times of religious decline. In the last decades the party tried to position itself in the centre of the political spectrum with a modernistic and Christian, not solely Selb goldberg, perspective Linder. In a second step the focus lies on the insufficiently examined contextual effect and the interaction with individual impacts. Individual effect As many scholars have already theorized and tested the individual religious effect e. Dalton; Elff ; Knutsen ; Lijphart ; Norris and Inglehart ; van der Brug et al. Formerly, political topics directly related to specific religious concerns and the strong tensions between Catholics selb goldberg Protestants have been responsible for the religious impact. Today there are other reasons why religion still plays a significant selb goldberg in explaining voting behaviour. One explanation is the strong link between religious values and a wide array of general political and social beliefs, which in turn are connected to party choice Knutsen : 99. Selb goldberg second explanation highlights the background of a person to determine its political standpoint. The church has lost its significance in directly influencing the voting decision. Nowadays internalized value systems, the identification with Catholicism as a social group selb goldberg simply the customization to vote Christian Democratic parties are responsible for the continuing effect of religion Schmitt : 49. In the past, the difference between Catholics and Protestants was at the centre of the conflict. Many people are identifying less and less with the institution church. However, selb goldberg ones who still do and especially those who frequently attend church services differ strongly to atheists or other secularized persons. In this context, the more religious people could take offence at the modern and secular selb goldberg, which deepens the division Elff : 279. One development responsible for the growing importance of religiosity compared to denomination is certainly the process of secularization. This can be observed in most countries throughout Europe. The result is the observable shrinking of the Catholic and Protestant population. On the one hand, this opened a gap between the two denominational and the growing secular group. On the other hand, it narrowed the gap between Catholics and Protestants, as they realize that in the end both of them stand for many equal religious values. The difference which influences the political attitudes is their active religious involvement. The environment shows influence on voting behaviour through basic societal conflicts, class consciousness, membership in certain groups and the corresponding background variables like social class, urban rural differences or denomination. The authors of the Columbia School see Lazarsfeld et al. In doing so they laid the foundation of contextual analysis and the multilevel understanding of politics Huckfeldt and Sprague. When defining a contextual effect, one very important point is the consideration of it as exogenous to the individual. Huckfeldt and Sprague : 286 define a contextual effect to be operating when the behaviour depends on some external factor after all individual level determinants have been considered. Something not intrinsic to the individual is responsible for systematic variations across contexts. Although a context is not necessarily to be defined in geographical terms, most studies follow this selb goldberg. In the literature normally characteristics of local geographical areas, ranging from neighbourhoods up to whole countries, are used to explain individual political behaviour Books and Prysby. For the Swiss case the cantons serve as the contextual level. The characteristics of a context can include a wide range of aspects. Huckfeldt and Sprague : 293 even argue that in general many individual factors are better understood as indicators of a collective social characteristic. In the literature we find two main explanations as to how the compositional effect influences individual electoral decisions. Social interaction being the most common one. It posits that communication with another person influences and modifies individual attitudes through the transmission of the political opinions of the interaction selb goldberg Books and Prysby. The size of the context and the intimacy of the person with whom the interaction selb goldberg place should be irrelevant. Huckfeldt and Sprague argue that selb goldberg interaction among friends is politically not more relevant than involuntary contact. The same is true for the contextual size, where smaller units do not have to be more important than larger ones ibid. A selb goldberg explanation for contextual effects is the conformity reaction. The mechanism behind this assumes that a selb goldberg perceives the composition of its environment and reacts according to it. This reaction is normally a desire to conform to one's community and to agree with its dominant political norms. According to Books and Prysby : 63 religion belongs to the properties of an environment most people are aware of and thus are in some way sensitive to. For religion, the contextual effect in general and the social interaction in particular seems to play an especially important role. It is, however, very decisive how the selb goldberg religiousness is ratified by the social environment Stark and Bainbridge. A similar idea is shown in Olson. In Switzerland the religious context might be especially crucial. The early denominational divisions are still observable today, particularly in terms of Catholic strongholds in the centre of the country. Geser : 6 reports that the intranational migration between Catholic and Protestant locations has been quite low. Consequently, a lot of communities and selb goldberg are still rather homogeneous in terms of denominational belonging. Besides the Catholic strongholds, there are also mainly Protestant cantons. A different voting behaviour of the local population might then depend on the denominational structure. Combining the individual effect of religion and the influence of the social context, leads to the assumption of a direct effect of the amount of Catholics living in a canton. The latter is more likely the bigger the group of Catholics in a context is. H1 Interaction effects The idea of a contextual influence dates back to the researchers of the Columbia School Lazarsfeld et al. Nevertheless it took several years until the selb goldberg of the social context on individual voting behaviour were modelled explicitly. They criticized that selb goldberg research dealt with variables related to voting behaviour only in additive and thus linear relationships. In contrast to this, selb goldberg authors argue to focus not only on the substance of a theory. It is equally important to place emphasis on the form of a relationship to derive valid statements regarding voting behaviour. Consequently, their formal model includes interaction terms between individual and contextual variables. A successive study by Huckfeldt delivers empirical evidence of these interactive models. The argument is a change of the contextual effect depending on the individual characteristics. My argument in contrast is a selb goldberg of the individual effects according to the social context. Figure summarizes graphically the link between the contextual and the individual level. More specifically, the religious environment is expected to change the strength of the two individual religious variables denomination and church attendance. Going one step further, I assume that depending on the religious composition of a canton either the effect of denomination or religiosity prevails. In religiously homogeneous contexts with a significant majority of Catholics or Protestants, the difference between the two denominations should be less important. This is due to the absence of a significant opposing group. Geser reports evidence of this fact for the Catholic population, which lacks the stimulus of forming a denominational culture once they selb goldberg in an overwhelming majority. Instead of focusing on denominational differences, in religiously homogeneous cantons the difference in religiosity should have significant impact. In these cantons the denominational difference should still play a major role. The incentive to focus on one of the two religious variables is also expected to be displayed in terms of party competition to mobilize the voters. In a canton, where almost solely Catholics live, all competing parties have to represent the attitudes and opinions of the Catholic population in a certain way. However, mobilizing purely around Catholic values and issues in a positive or negative way will not give them an advantage in winning parliamentary seats. In contrast, the main focus of the parties lies on other factors like the level of active religious participation. This includes the Catholic citizens, but also religiously active Protestants. In homogeneous Protestant cantons a slightly different effect may be at work. The Protestant cantons are not as religiously homogeneous as the Catholic ones. Hence, the exclusive concentration on Catholic values can lead to the gain of a small number of seats by receiving the Catholic votes, however this depends on the amount of seats to be allocated. To gain additional votes from Protestants, the party should again rather focus on general religious values which are shared by the two denominational groups. H2 The expectation for an interactive effect of the denominational difference is the exact opposite relation. As argued in the former hypothesis, in homogeneous cantons the denominational difference is less important than other religious factors. The last two rounds aimed to include at least 100 respondents for each canton. These numbers are sufficiently large to allow the later presented method of multilevel modelling, as for each canton enough respondents are included. Due to some missings on the dependent and the religious independent variables, the number of interviews finally used for this paper is 4125 in 2007 and 4189 selb goldberg 2011. Additional information required for the contextual factor is derived from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office BfS. Thus, only 25 cantons are included in the final sample for 2007. Voting probability Traditionally, studies analysing voting behaviour regard discrete party choice of the electorate as the dependent variable. However, in the 1990s another method that used voting preferences emerged. These improved survey measurements enable more sophisticated analyses of current electoral behaviour cf. Van der Eijk et al. This leads to difficulties in analysing voter choice. These studies focus on the determinants of utilities for parties and at the same time imply that the electorate selects the party with the highest utility. Empirical evidence of the strong relationship between the voting probability and party choice has been provided in the literature. For the Dutch case van der Eijk et al. Sciarini : 122 found for the same data the slightly different number of 88 per cent, which still stands for a very strong link. Therefore, the authors come to the conclusion that the relationship between voting propensities and actual choice is almost deterministic. Respondents were asked to indicate the probability that they would ever vote for the party. Answers range from a very low value of 0 to a very high probability value of 10. Religious denomination In Switzerland the two main groups are Catholics and Protestants. Additionally, there are some minor Christian groups, Jews and a growing community of Muslims. Today there is also a large third group, which consists of people who do not belong to any religious community. A dummy Catholic is used with the value of selb goldberg for respondents who indicated they belong to the Catholic church. Religiosity The second religious variable measures religiosity in terms of church attendance. Here, respondents have been asked how often they attend church services or other events of their church. This scale was reversed, so that high numbers represent regular attendance. In the original variable, around 1000 respondents have been coded as missings. The majority of them do not belong to any church and therefore have not been asked about their church attendance. If this coding would be maintained, almost a selb goldberg of the overall sample would be lost. Context The contextual effect of religion is measured by the number of Catholics living in a canton. Corresponding numbers are retrieved from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office and originate from the year 2000 see table in the appendix. A further decrease in people belonging to the Catholic church is very likely, however the differences should be rather small and therefore negligible. Threshold of exclusion The National Council in Switzerland consists of 200 seats, which are distributed according to proportional representation. Constituencies are considered at the cantonal level and not on the national level. Thus, in smaller cantons there is a de facto majoritarian voting system. Selb goldberg is due to the distribution of seats to the cantons according to their population. This fact can have consequences for the individual voter, because some of them might vote strategically for their second or third preference in order not to waste their vote. The same is true for the reported voting probabilities. Some respondents may realize that their first preference will never be able to win a seat, so they score the party lower then actually desired. In return they score their second or third preference highest or at least equal to the first, because these parties have a real chance of winning. The effective threshold of exclusion is derived from Lijphart. It reports the proportion of votes a party can receive without winning a seat. The formula is with m as district magnitude. This magnitude ranges from 1 representing the six smallest cantons to 34 in Zürich. Resulting values do not represent the highest possible thresholds, but shall be more realistic representing the average between high and low values. As the distribution of the variable is heavily skewed, following Lachat : 652 the natural logarithm of it is used. Method In order to analyse the simultaneous impact of individual and contextual variables, hierarchical multilevel models are calculated. This multilevel method enables the estimation of the effects in appropriate statistical ways. Additionally, the contextual factors are included. These are the religious context γ 1the two control variables their estimates γ respectively and a cantonal variation. In order to see a possible curvilinear relationship, the individual variables do not only interact with the simple Catholic proportion, but also with the quadratic term of it. According to the authors, a more appropriate handling and interpretation is possible by looking at marginal effects of the independent variables and especially a graphical presentation of them. Consequently, to ensure a proper analysis, the marginal effects for both selb goldberg religious variables are calculated. Analysis The results of the estimated models are displayed in table. To check the proposed hypotheses, five different models have been calculated. selb goldberg Individual differences are responsible for the majority of the variance. When considering the contextual level it becomes clear why a separate display of the two election years is necessary. In both years the Catholic proportion shows the hypothesized positive impact. In 2011, however, the strength of the effect is heavily influenced by the inclusion of the threshold of exclusion. The threshold itself shows a significantly positive effect in 2011, in contrast to an insignificant effect in 2007. Selb goldberg the same time it lowered the impact of the Catholic proportion in each canton. Despite the difference in the contextual religious impact when including the threshold of exclusion in 2011, the first hypothesis assuming a positive contextual impact is confirmed. Additionally, the control variable for West Swiss cantons shows a negative influence, which is significant in 2007, but lost in strength and is no longer significant four years later. Models 4 and 5 analyse the relationship in an even more sophisticated way now including additionally interactions with the contextual variable s. In the fourth model the two individual religious variables are interacted only with the simple Catholic population. The actual interesting model, though, is the fifth one including also the quadratic term of the contextual variable and its interactions. At first glance, the results are disappointing because none of the religious variables or their interaction terms are statistically significant. However, as discussed in the method section, a simple consideration of the single coefficients does not allow an appropriate interpretation of the results. A visual illustration of the results is helpful in this case. The graphical evidence in figure displays significantly positive effects for both religious variables in both election years. Especially interesting though is not the positive impact, but the form of it. This relationship figures a and c is not supported by the graphs. Instead, the point estimates of the marginal effect display a slightly positive tendency. Consequently, the effect of church attendance is, at best, influenced somewhat positively by the higher Catholic proportion living in a canton. Due to the wide confidence intervals, however, there might be also no influence of the context on individual religiosity. Hence, the null hypothesis of no context effect cannot be rejected. The pattern itself though is much more striking. Additionally one can observe a slight selb goldberg trend for strongly Protestant cantons towards more mixed ones. The 2011 data shows exactly the expected pattern. A rising impact up to Catholic proportions selb goldberg around 50 to 60 per cent is observable before a decrease of the effect begins. In cantons with a majority denomination, either Catholic or Protestant, the denominational influence is smaller compared to religiously heterogeneous cantons. Consequently, hypothesis 3 seems to be confirmed, albeit not very strongly. When interpreting the graphs one minor limitation of the data has to be mentioned. Due to the limited number of cantons, the estimations of marginal effects sometimes heavily depend on just a few cases. Table in the appendix shows descriptive numbers of the Catholic selb goldberg per canton. This is less a problem on the other side. Unfortunately, this issue is often present when working with rather small numbers of cases, but should still be mentioned in the interpretation of the results. In contrast selb goldberg many other studies, the focus was not purely selb goldberg the individual religious variables of denomination and religiosity. The main interest was rather the influence of the religious context and its interactions with the individual characteristics. Furthermore, I assumed that the two factors of denomination and religiosity differ in their importance depending on the religious context. Whereas religiously homogeneous contexts should favour the strength of an effect of religiosity, denomination was expected to be especially important in heterogeneous cantons. This idea was not completely new, as authors such as Kriesi and Trechsel assume a similar relationship for the Swiss case. Innovative for the present study was the detailed statistical analysis of these effects. So far contextual influences have been conducted in a very rudimentary manner with only a few studies assessing the possible effects. The results of the present study lead to a partly confirmation of the hypothesized influences. The hypothesized varying strength of the individual religious aspects according to the context could be weakly confirmed only for the denominational impact. Only the relatively wide confidence intervals prevent a stronger confirmation of the expected pattern. In addition to simple linear effects for the individual and contextual selb goldberg, some evidence for an interplay between both levels could be presented. Besides the already mentioned limitations of the data, the results are furthermore limited as the effects were not controlled for other cleavages. The additional analysis of other cleavages also provides an opportunity to examine the contextual effect in further detail. In some cases, there may also be relationships between individual and contextual variables from two different cleavages. For the latter, religious values still represent the main determinants for their electoral behaviour. In the other parties the proportion of Catholic voters is significantly smaller. The same holds for the religiosity measured by church attendance. Altermatt ; Berger ; Inglehart and Baker. Only in a few cases contextual factors are regarded as well, but mostly just in rather basic terms e. However, his database only consisted of 13 instead of 26 cantons, which weakens the reliability of his results. The authors can show that religion plays a more important role in influencing party choice, the selb goldberg the degree of religious fractionalisation. The latter measure is different to the here used dichotomy between Catholics and Protestants. However, it argues in the same direction of a bigger importance of individual religious factors the tighter the religious competition is. Especially in the whole dataset 2007, however, the numbers are much closer to the desired 100 cases or even above. Authors such as Wolf and Broughton and ten Napel selb goldberg that for the many dimensions of religious life more specific measurements are necessary e. According to Steenbergen : 403 it is normal to consider variations between cantons when regarding vote choice in Switzerland, as the electoral system is mainly defined at the cantonal level. In a combined analysis some of the effects would have been blurred. In 2011 the latter is the best model, pointing towards a stronger interaction effect in 2011. Since these often lead to collinearities, the corresponding confidence intervals become bigger, which then result in insignificant coefficients. This is due to the few cases left with corresponding numbers of Catholic citizens. It also narrows the confidence intervals, but still not to the extent that no other pattern would be possible. For reasons of simplicity, the coefficients of the other covariates and interaction terms not necessary for the calculation are not displayed. The used values, however, are the ones estimated in the fifth model of tablewhere the coefficients are controlled by all religious and control variables. The church attendance variable shows the mean location of parties' voters selb goldberg a scale from 1 never to 6 several times a week. His research focuses on electoral behaviour in Switzerland, particularly linked to cleavages. Social Structure, Collective Identities, and Patterns of Conflict in Party Systems: Conceptualizing the Formation and Perpetuation of Cleavages. Stabilität und Wandel von Parteiensystemen und die Konfliktlinie zwischen Öffnung und Abgrenzung: der theoretische Ansatz. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zürich 11—40.
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To gain additional votes from Protestants, the party should again rather focus on general religious values which are shared by the two denominational groups. The same is true for the contextual size, where smaller units do not have to be more important than larger ones ibid. The authors report that around one quarter of the Swiss population in 2007 belongs to this group of believers without belonging to a church ibid. More specifically, the religious environment is expected to change the strength of the two individual religious variables denomination and church attendance. Lane and Ersson make a slightly different distinction between a latent and manifest part of the cleavage. This is an extremely populous and popular music festival in which a large number of musical genres are performed. In contrast to many other studies, the focus was not purely on the individual religious variables of denomination and religiosity. On the one hand is the religious community a person belongs to religious denomination , and on the other hand, it is also important how religious a person is independent of the denomination religious attendance and belief. The religious context may show a simple direct effect, but it may also interact with individual factors and condition their influence.
