Religious Voting in Poland: Belonging versus Believing

• In Event: Memory, Religion, and Conspiracy: The Politics of Narrative in East Europe

Abstract

Is religion still an important factor affecting vote choice in spite of the secularization processes? This study aims at assessing the effects of religiosity on vote choice in Poland, a country of very strong Catholic tradition that entered the path of secularization quite recently and one of the few countries in which religiosity is associated with voting not only for the conservative parties but also for the populist radical right. We argue that, contrary to what is happening in Western Europe, in Poland, the decreasing levels of religiosity in the context of a growing presence of politicized religious and moral issues in the public sphere and high political influence of the Catholic Church amplify the importance of religion as a determinant of voting. Using Polish National Election Study data from 1997 to 2019, we show that the public aspects of religiosity related to feelings of belonging (i.e. church attendance) and the position on conflicts activated by ecclesiastical and political elites affect voting to a greater degree than the more personal dimension of religious belief. We conclude by discussing the implications and generalizability of these findings to other contexts in search of explanations to the paradox of the continuity of the influence of religion on voting regardless of the secularization processes.

Authors

• Piotr Zagórski, SWPS University (Warsaw)

• Radoslaw Markowski