The populist breeding ground and religion

Abstract

This article examines whether the decade preceding the financial crisis fuelled a culture of political resentment in Greece, and the role of religion in this development. To this end, it explores empirically how religiosity affected mainstream and Radical Right attitudes and voting in the period 2000–2010, and to what extent political resentment might have worked as a reinforcing or moderating factor to this relationship. The article primarily demonstrates that religiosity fosters both mainstream and Radical Right attitudes and voting; religiosity is negatively correlated with political resentment; and political resentment reinforces the positive effect of religiosity on mainstream Right attitudes, but mitigates the positive effect of religiosity on Radical Right attitudes.