RELIGION AND POLITICS IN AUSTRALIA LECTURE 15 (September 17 2005) VOTING BEHAVIOUR AND POLITICAL ATTITUDES 1. The Story So Far • Major party support by denomination historically: Catholics and Labor, Protestants and Coalition. • Democratic Labor Party: contributes to breakup of traditional alignments. • Family First Party: some suggestion of AOG and evangelical support. • The impact of religiosity on voting behaviour: those who attend church are, all other things being equal, more conservative in their party support. • Judith Brett’s argument that class has been overplayed, vis-a-vis other factors such as religion, by political scientists. 2. Clive Bean on Religion and Voting Behaviour • Bean agrees with Brett that religion is an undervalued influence (pp. 2-3). • “while there is good evidence to suggest that the major social cleavage in Australia, class, has weakened as an influence on political behaviour in the latter part of the twentieth century, the same cannot be said of religion…with the class cleavage declining over this period and the religious cleavage remaining steady, there is now very little between religion and class in their relative importance as socio-political cleavages. Thus, far from being in decline, the impact of religion on political choice remains clear and distinct in contemporary Australia” (p.13). • Changing distribution of religious groups in Australia (Tables 1 and 2); Anglicans/other Protestants down, Catholic steady; people no religion up. • Church attendance (Table 3): religious denomination and religiosity represent cross-cutting cleavages”. • Church attendance and Party Support by Denomination (Figures 1, 2.3). “In each case, however, two things are clear: support for the Coalition parties is greater among frequent church attenders than it is among infrequent or non-church attenders and, in broad terms, this pattern is replicated in each of the denominational groups” (p.7). • The Overall Impact of Religion and Class (Figure 4). 3. Rodney Smith on “Searching for Meaning” in Bean’s Analysis • Smith doesn’t dispute Bean’s numbers but his interpretation. “My purpose here is not to contest Bean’s empirical findings. It is rather to show that Australian political scientists are not much closer to answering the question “Why does religion effect electoral behaviour?” than they were three or four decades ago when Robert Alford, Hans Mol and Don Aitkin first used national survey data to explore connections between the two phenomena” (p. 19). Bean asks whether churches are a “magnet” or a “catalyst” for political behaviour. Do they attract/produce certain people? • Bean’s two arguments: religion as a social context and the conservatism of church messages. Supported by a third argument about “the effects of growing secularization on the decreasing minority who remain faithful”. 1
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The social context of religious life: “The key factor that seems to have diverted researchers away from the importance of religion as social context is the paradox…that the most involved Catholics have shown a diminished rather than a magnified commitment to the dominant partisan tendency of their group”. • Churches as messengers four types of messages: “open messages of support for parties, specific messages concerning policy, religious doctrinal messages, messages support for general status quo” (pp. 23-24). • Bean and Smith disagree about the content of church messages: “virtually all churches’ teachings, Catholic and Protestant alike, are essentially conservative” (Bean); “A number of the messages of Australian church leaders and bodies have been anything but conservative” (Smith). Deciding whether Christianity is a conservative or radicalizing influence allows no easy answer. • Smith is also skeptical about the power of church messages, especially where irregular attendance is concerned: “Messages received for an hour or so once or twice every year must be extraordinarily powerful to consistently affect electoral behaviour”. See the differences in Bean’s tables between never, hardly ever, sometimes and regular church attendance. They are quite large. • Conceptual under-development, implausibility, partial contradiction. • Smith criticizes the reliance by political scientists on the two variables of denomination and attendance. He says people will differ on other dimensions of religiosity “such as style or religious community, beliefs, religious practices outside the church context, religious knowledge and direct experiences of the sacred”. Who are the Church Attenders? • P. Kaldor et al, Taking Stock: A Profile of Church Attenders, Open Book Publishers, 1999 (1996 Church Life Surveys). • Age: Older. Over 40s are clearly over-represented and under 20s especially under-represented. Anglicans and Uniting Church are particularly older, Catholic too but less so. Pentecostals and Baptists are younger. Pentecostals are younger than community at large. • Gender: more women. Men (39%) are under-represented. Apart from the number or older women, the reasons are not clear, but may include socialization or workforce experience. • Education: more highly educated. University degree (19%) compared to community (10%). Middle class? Big differences between denominations (Anglicans 23%; Salvation Army 9%). What church attenders think about social issues? • Abortion:33% negative compared with community (7%) • Euthanasia: 32% agree compared with community (78%) • Death penalty: 53% opposed compared with community (26%) • Native title: clearly more supportive (72%) 2004 Election Voting Behaviour (Bean and McAllister, 2005) Religion in Howard’s Success, 1993-2004 (Goot and Watson, 2007) 2
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