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Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting: The “Crucial Experiment” of Comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Arend Lijphart
Arend Lijphart*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

For the purpose of determining the relative influence of the three potentially most important social and demographic factors on party choice–social class, religion, and language–a comparison of Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland provides a “crucial experiment,” because these three variables are simultaneously present in all four countries. Building on the major earlier research achievements in comparative electoral behavior, this four-country multivariate analysis compares the indices of voting and the party choice “trees” on the basis of national sample surveys conducted in the 1970s. From this crucial contest among the three determinants of party choice, religion emerges as the victor, language as a strong runner-up, and class as a distant third. The surprising strength of the religious factor can be explained in terms of the “freezing” of past conflict dimensions in the party system and the presence of alternative, regional-federal, structures for the expression of linguistic interests.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 442 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1979

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the scholars and the organizations who made the data collected by them or tabulations based on these data available to me for the purpose of this study. The Belgian data were part of the 1970 and 1973 European Communities Studies of which Ronald Inglehart and Jacques-René Rabier were the principal investigators. The data of the 1974 Canadian national election survey were originally collected by Harold Clarke, Jane Jenson, Lawrence LeDuc, and Jon Pammett. The South African data were collected in 1974 by Market Research Africa (Pty) Ltd. under the guidance of Lawrence Schlemmer. The Swiss national election study of 1972 was organized by the Department of Political Science of the University of Geneva and the Sozialforschungsstelle of the University of Zurich under the direction of Henry H. Kerr, Jr., Dusan Sidjanski, and Gerhard Schmidtchen. The Belgian and Canadian data were obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. I should also like to express my appreciation to Galen A. Irwin and Jan Verhoef for their advice and assistance, to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences in Wassenaar, where I was a Fellow in 1974–75 and where I did part of the research for this article, and to the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Pure Research (Z.W.O.) for its financial support.

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