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How does religion shape the way people vote?

How does religion shape the way people vote?

The next hundred days will divide the nation most woefully. I speak not of the cracks-become-chasms that have opened up within the Coalition, or between Labour and Tory, or Tory and UKIP, or Labour and Green, but of that painful divide already visible between those who are excited by the General Election and those who are already sick of soundbites and evasion.

I vacillate, though if pushed would join the former camp. The absorbing difference with this election is not that more marginals are up for grabs (the best that a first-part-the-post system usually has to offer) or even that a few minor parties might win a few more seats than expected, but that the support for major parties risks being eaten up from the inside. UKIP, for example, are unlikely to make the same kind of electoral breakthrough, as, say, Labour did in 1906, but they might take 5,000 Tory voters here, and 2,000 Labour voters there, thereby making the result of even more seats even less predictable. And not just UKIP: the Greens in England and the SNP in Scotland threaten to do the same unto Labour. All that, plus the possibility of an early political death for the Liberal Democrats, makes 2015 unusual, unpredictable and – at this stage at least – exciting.

The reason I dwell on these particular electoral peculiarities is that they offer a good model for understanding the way in which religious affiliation now affects voting behaviour; that is subtly, quietly and from the inside. Every now and then – more frequently of late – someone brings up the question of what religion has to do with politics, which invariably leads to questions of how the former affects the latter at election time. The usual clichés – hardly less true for being clichés – are rolled out: the Anglican-Tory party at prayer, Labour Catholics, Labour Muslims, Liberal Democrat Atheists, etc. And then someone makes the undeniable and party-stopping point that religious affiliation doesn’t actually affect voting anyway so we might as well all move on and talk about something relevant.

All that is largely true, as Ben Clements and I discussed in our Theos report examining electoral behaviour, party affiliation and political values in Britain since the 1970s, Voting and Values: Does religion count? It’s true, but after the fashion of this May’s complicated electoral permutations, it’s not the whole truth.

People do not drag themselves into a polling booth, recall that they attended Evensong/ Mass/ Friday Prayers/ a book group dedicated to the collected wit and wisdom of Richard Dawkins last weekend, and then tick the appropriate box. Nobody serious ever thought they did. They do, however, enter a polling booth, wonder about which of the candidates/ parties best reflects their own values and priorities, and then, making all due adjustments for other factors, such as personalities, marginals, tactical voting, etc., make their mark. In other words, religion may not affect voting but it does affect the things that affect voting.

When, once upon a time, the one big thing that affected voting was class – recall Peter Pulzer’s much-quoted line that “class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail” – that led to simple linear connections. Anglicans were wealthier so they voted Conservative, Catholics were poorer to they voted Labour, and so forth.

Today, the link between class (let’s now call it income) and voting behaviour remains but it is weaker than it once was. Similarly, the link between religion and income is there, but much weaker. Hence, we still catch sight of the simple religio-electoral connections of yesteryear, as Voting and Values illustrated.

These, however, are changing. As one voter told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, as it began reporting from 100 constituencies in 100 days, “what people are worried about has changed in the last five years”.  (And  I daresay what people were worried about in 2010 was pretty different from what they were in 2005.) Single issues have risen in salience, and the endlessly contestable issue of immigration has taken up totemic status, adding spice to the already lively nexus of EU membership, deficit reduction, welfare pressure, and public spending cuts. In short, people’s values still decide elections but people's values are not so self-evidently described by their income or class as was once the case.

This is how religious – and other – belief systems may yet shape the electoral landscape. It doesn’t mean we can expect the emergence of ‘values voting’, certainly not in the sense it is understood in the US. For a number of reasons, well analysed by Andy Walton in his report Is there a religious right emerging in Britain? that isn’t going to happen.

It does mean that the supposedly uncomplicated religio-electoral connections of previous generations are now much weaker but that this weakness denotes not so much the end of religious influence on voting but its internalisation, as it operates in (even) more indirect and subtle ways.

Nick Spencer

Image from wikimedia available in the public domain.

 

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