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The “New” Cultural Cleavage in Western Europe: A Coalescence of Religious and Secular Value Divides?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2020

Anna Pless Open the ORCID record for Anna Pless [Opens in a new window] ,
Paul Tromp Open the ORCID record for Paul Tromp [Opens in a new window]  and
Dick Houtman
Anna Pless*
Affiliation:
Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven
Paul Tromp
Affiliation:
Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven
Dick Houtman
Affiliation:
Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Anna Pless, Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, box 3601, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Moral traditionalism versus progressiveness and secular authoritarianism versus libertarianism are often understood as central to the same “new” cultural cleavage in politics. Despite the often-found sizable correlations between these two cultural value divides, the present paper theorizes that this relationship is not a cross-contextual constant, but rather a specific feature of secularized contexts where moral traditionalism is relatively marginal. We test this theory by means of a two-stage statistical analysis of the data from the four waves of the European Values Study (1981–2008) for 17 Western European countries. Our findings confirm that the two value divides are most strongly connected in the most secularized contexts because the latter are least morally traditionalist. While the two cultural divides hence tend to be distinct in more religious Western-European countries, they tend to coalesce into one single “new” cultural divide in more secular ones.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 445 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

*

Dick Houtman's address was incorrectly listed in the original online version of this article. It has been corrected here and an erratum has been published.

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