The persistence of confessional political cultures in switzerland: Some puzzling empirical evidence from local parties

Abstract

A comprehensive comparative study of Swiss local parties (1990) shows that ideological positions and attitudes toward political issues still differ considerably in catholic and protestant settings. Catholic parties are more likely to define themselves as “centrist”, while protestant groupings show more dispersion on the right as well as the left wing of the ideological spectrum. Among catholic parties, positions on the left-right scale and attitudes toward specific political issues are weakly associated, while in protestant settings, the coupling between ideology and concrete issues is rather strong. In protestant populations, it is found that specific occupational and class segments differ significantly by their selective preferences for either leftist or rightist parties, while in catholic settings, such differences are attenuated. Astonishingly, most of these regularities persist or get even more pronounced in communities with a highly modernized occupational structure and in groupings with a younger membership. Following Greeley (1989), it is speculated that confessional traditions survive in the “sedimented” form of implicit folks traditions and habitualizations, and that they function as “semantic codes” which find additional ways of expression in the course of societal development. © 1997 The Swiss Political Science Review.