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Electoral stability and electoral change: the case of the catholic party in the Netherlands

University of British Columbia

Catholics in the Netherlands are unique. For a period of 45 years 85 percent or more of Dutch Catholics continuously voted for a single party—the Catholic party. Then in 1967 support began to decline so that by 1972 only 38 percent of Dutch Catholics were still voting for this party. No other West European country offers a similar example of long term consistency and sudden change on the part of a bloc of voters. The aim of the study is to account for this unusual pattern of electoral stability and decline. Two competing explanatory frameworks are evaluated, the party identification and subcultural influence models. The former is rejected. The evidence suggests that party identification was not important in linking Catholics with the Catholic party. It was found that the loyalties of Catholics lay primarily with the Church and the Catholic subculture—not with the party. Support for the party was a by-product of subcultural cohesion and the drop in support after 1963 was a result of subcultural fragmentation. The importance of subcultures in influencing voting behaviour has long been recognized; however, the internal organization and dynamics of the subcultures themselves have received much less attention. In part this study attempts to redress the balance by examining the factors responsible for both the cohesion and the disintegration of the Dutch Catholic subculture. For data the study relies on material from Catholic party archives, newspapers, interviews and the secondary analysis of aggregate and survey data. The first section of the study outlines the role of the Dutch Church in creating a miniature society within a larger society. Bishops and clergy were affected by an ideology which stressed the importance of insulating Catholics from non-Catholic influences. This insulation was achieved largely through the use of organization and the rigorous application of sanctions. Rank-and-file Catholics obediently joined organizations like Catholic trade unions and the Catholic broadcasting organization, subscribed to Catholic newspapers and at election time voted for the Catholic party. At the same time the Church and Catholic institutions provided their clientele with spiritual, social and economic rewards which were equal to, and often greater than, those provided by competing blocs. The second section is concerned with the changes within the Dutch Church which occurred during the 1960s. The bishops radically altered the boundaries of the subculture, suggesting that Catholics could now decide for themselves questions of religious belief and politics. Many Catholics decided to no longer vote for the Catholic party. The Catholic party in turn, racked by internal conflict and no longer enjoying the blessing of the Church, was incapable of finding an alternative basis of support. In 1976 the party merged with the two major Protestant parties to form a single Christian Democratic party. The theoretical contributions of the study are twofold. One theme in the literature on electoral behaviour argues that party-system stability is a function of the degree to which the sense of identification with the parties is rooted in mass public consciousness. The case of Dutch Catholicism demonstrates that a cohesive subcultural bloc can provide a stable and robust basis of support for a political party, making high levels of party identification, unnecessary. Secondly, the study suggests that in party systems of the kind found in the Netherlands, subcultures can vary greatly in their cohesion. It points to the role of leadership, ideology and organization in sustaining or altering the consistency of blocs over time and by implication the success and stability of political parties.

Text

2010-02-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21149

Political Science

University of British Columbia

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