Party competition on Muslims and Islam in Western Europe in times of religious pluralization: The religious-secular cleavage revisited

This paper deals with the revival of the religious-secular cleavage in Western European party politics during the 21st century. The paper relates to the concept of issue attention analysing the amount of statements referring to religious topics in parliamentary plenary debates in Western European democracies. The aim is to uncover cross-national differences in the politicisation and problematisation of religion that possibly derive from divergent national contextual factors such as the degree of secularization or specifics of party systems, for instance, the existence of strong Christian Democratic parties or of successful right-wing populist parties. We use quantitative content analysis to examine the amount of debates and party statements referring to religious topics and uncover possible development of party positions.