Faith-Based Organisations and Political Parties in Welfare Politics: Between Religious-Secular and Socio-Economic Cleavage

Political scientists have traditionally perceived cooperative relationships between religious organizations and Christian democratic parties locating both at the ‘religious side’ of the secular-religious cleavage. However, this assessment has increasingly been contested against the background of three main considerations. First, relations between Christian parties and organizations have lost in relevance given the declining significance of the religious-secular cleavage resulting from ongoing secularization processes. Second, the perception of links between the two actors reflects a limited focus on Western (European) countries neglecting the situation, for instance, in Eastern Europe where both the religious-secular cleavage and Christian democratic parties have rather played a subordinate role. Finally, political positions held by faith-based organizations do not always correspond with Christian democratic stances particularly considering their disagreement in welfare politics. This paper analyses relations between faith-based organizations and political parties in welfare politics in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland. The question is to what extent these relations differ due to diverging national context factors with regard to the role of cleavages within the respective party systems. Against the background of results deriving from a qualitative discourse analysis, the paper argues that in Western Europe the religious-secular cleavage is still of some relevance for relations between faith-based organizations and parties; however, the cleavage is increasingly overlapped by the socio-economic cleavage. Due to similar socio-political positions, faith-based organizations in Germany and the UK more and more connect with (religiously oriented) Social Democrats. In contrast, in Poland faith-based actors increasingly look for contacts with the right-wing populist PiS party which tries to combine conservative views in moral policy and traditionally social democratic positions in welfare policy.