How Politics can Matter: Transformation and Fading of Religious Cleavage in Italy 1972 − 2008

This paper analyses the changing links between religion, politics and voting behaviour in the last thirty years from an Italian perspective. We contrast two theories of electoral change. The first theory, called here Partisan Dealignment theory (Dalton et al. 1984, Norris and Inglehart 2004), proposes an exclusively sociological explanation of these changes , while the second theory, called here Politics Matters theory (Thomassen 2005, Evans and de Graaf, 2013 ), underlines the fact that the political and institutional context can interact with social change in defining and constraining the political behaviour of citizens. The test of the different hypotheses derived from the two theories is based on the empirical evidence from four Italian electoral surveys (1972, 1985, 2001, 2006,2008). The finding suggests that, similarly to what happened in the other countries, as Netherlands, in Italy the relation between religiosity, ideology and party choice was mainly influenced by changes in the political-institutional sphere, namely, the almost complete change of the political alternatives -parties and coalitions - available and the reform of the electoral law at the beginning of the 90s. The earthquake of the 2013 election maybe a test to show once again how change of the political offer may impact again the vote choice of both secularized or non secularized voters. Therefore, the strong process of secularization of Italian society only warrants that, after its disappearance, the religious cleavage will not come back to life in the same form it had before, even if political entrepreneurs or parties will try to mobilize voters using religious appeals. They also suggest that the weakening of social anchors of the vote does not mean the disappearance of any vote anchors, and other lines of divisions may emerge..