Christian Democratic Party Research Articles

Between Decline and Distress Innovations: The Transformation of the Belgian French-Speaking Christian-democratic Party (cdH)

Between Decline and Distress Innovations: The Transformation of the Belgian French-Speaking Christian-democratic Party (cdH)

Dubbing murder: censorship and manipulation in the Italian dubbing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

ABSTRACT In the Italian context, censorial interventions and film manipulation through the practice of dubbing are not restricted to the Fascist era. In the decades that followed, official organisations continued to oversee film distribution of both domestic and international films, frequently withholding permission for public screenings when films did not conform to the conservative ideas espoused by those in power. In the 1950s, cinema was still regarded as a dangerous medium capable of influencing audiences and causing moral degradation. As a result, dubbing was still actively employed to change the linguistic content of films and make them more consistent with the Christian Democratic Party’s traditional values. This article examines an extreme case of film manipulation achieved through dubbing: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The 1956 dubbed version of the movie can be considered at all effects an adaptation of the original: the suppression of the political and ideological components of the film, deemed immoral and perverse, significantly altered the plot and reduced the subversive nuances of all characters. Through an examination of archival documents preserved at the Ministry of Culture in Rome, I will show how censorship interfered to invisibly rewrite Rope, transforming it into a more reassuring and classic crime story.

The politics of subnational social policy: Social consumption versus social investment in Austria

Country comparisons, often suffering from unobserved heterogeneity and obscuring subnational variation, dominate the social policy literature. However, the subnational level is better suited to reduce the omitted variable bias. This article distinguishes between social consumption and social investment policies and investigates their determinants at the subnational level. Following the literature across countries, we test the role of incumbent parties’ ideology, but for within-country variation in social policy. Austria is a case in point because states have discretion in social policy (e.g., regarding public childcare and social assistance). Panel regressions covering all nine states in Austria for the years 1991 to 2019 reveal that the cabinet share of Social-Democrats increases social investment spending, while the Christian-Democratic party decreases it, and the populist radical right party reduces expenses for social consumption.

Electoral change through generational replacement: An age-period-cohort analysis of vote choice across 21 countries between 1948 and 2021

People’s generation may have become one of the core predictors of their vote choice. This study examines this hypothesis across 21 Western established democracies between 1948 and 2021. An age-period-cohort analysis on 258 national election surveys (N = 462.084) reveals that the most recent generations are much less likely to vote for the major right-wing party in two-party systems. In multi-party systems, the gradual decline of Christian democratic parties has been largely driven by the generational replacement of pre-WW2 cohorts. Social democratic and conservative parties may face a challenge in future decades because their support is particularly low among the most recent generations whereas liberal, socialist, and particularly green parties stand to gain from generational replacement. Far-right parties have been least popular among voters who came of age during the 1930s and 1940s. A small life-cycle effect points out that people over the age of 65 vote slightly more conservative.

AN UNEXPECTED ALLIANCE: US POLICY REGARDING FORMATION OF THE CENTER-LEFT COALITION IN ITALY

The Cold War became a significant factor influencing not only the foreign, but also the domestic politics of Italy. The main problem of Italy as a member of NATO in the middle of the 20th century left pro-Soviet parties became popular, and the ruling Christian Democratic Party may lose power. The alliance of Christian Democrats with the Socialists became an unexpected means of solving the current problems, and the US, by supporting this alliance, demonstrated the ability to be flexible in conducting foreign policy towards its allies. The main thesis of the article is that such unexpected alliance between the Christian Democracy Party and the Socialist Party was not an improvised action, but a long-term strategy. The formation of the first center-left government in First Republic of Italy is referred to 1962. However, the idea of such alliance had emerged a few years before, in 1958, and it was discussed between Italian and American governments on numerous occasions. The main shift towards an adoption of coalition between Christian Democrats and Socialists was the failure of Fernando Tambroni’s government in 1960, the last government with the center-right and far-right parties at the power. From this moment for many, and for U.S. government as well, become evident the impossibility of sticking to the old strictly anti-left policy. The Socialist Party itself had gone through a long evolution process. Being a pro-Soviet party immediately after the WW2, it later cut off its ties to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Italy, and even rejected revolution as the way to reform society, preferring the long way of step-by-step changes. A new Socialist approach to the parliamentary democracy allowed it to become a part of ruling coalition soon after the inner reforms of the Socialist Party. It was hard to imagine in the beginning of the Cold War that the U.S. government would ever seek the support from the Socialist Party of Italy. But in the beginning of 1960’s, considering the changes in electoral preferences, the question of Italian Socialists become the focal point in the U.S. policy towards the Italy.

Christian Democrats in Germany on Ensuring Environmental Security Through International Cooperation

The aim of the article is to present the position of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) on ensuring environmental security through international cooperation within the European Union and the United Nations. The election platforms published by the German Christian Democratic parties from 1990 to 2021 for the elections to the Bundestag and the European Parliament are analyzed.

Can the party family approach explain Polish partisan positions? A case study on the policy field of higher education in post-socialist Poland

ABSTRACT Research on partisan positions on higher education policies has focused to date mainly on parties in sustained democratic regimes in Western Europe. This study compares these findings with Polish parties’ positioning and investigates the extent to which parties’ preferences in post-socialist Poland can be explained by their party family affiliations. Poland provides an interesting case because of its socialist heritage of strong government control in the higher education sector and the rather fluid party system with a comparatively large share of populist right parties. By means of a qualitative content analysis of 41 party manifestos from 1989–2019, partisan positions of Christian democratic, social democratic, liberal, agrarian, and populist right parties are categorized along the re-distributive and control dimension of higher education policies. While party families can explain Polish parties’ positioning on the control dimension, there is a cross-party consensus to expand the sector and increase public funding due to strong popular demand after the transformation which contrasts with the positions of West European parties. Key results are a rising salience of this policy field in party manifestos and a detailed description of populist right parties’ preferences for government control of higher education institutions and expansion of this sector.

Nostalgia in European Party Politics: A Text-Based Measurement Approach

Abstract Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of communication. It usually concentrates on promises, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. This article presents a novel dataset, PolNos, which contains six text-based measures of nostalgic rhetoric in 1,648 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 1946 to 2018. The measures combine dictionaries, word embeddings, sentiment approaches, and supervised machine learning. Our analysis yields a consistent result: nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of culturally conservative parties, notably Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. However, substantial variation remains regarding regional differences and whether nostalgia concerns the economy or culture. We discuss the implications and use of our dataset for studying political parties, party competition, and elections.

Riconversione e Ricostruzione

Abstract This article focuses on German-Vatican debates on the Reichskonkordat after 1945. For this purpose, it explores newly available documents in the Vatican Apostolic Archive from the West German Nunciature in Bonn. Thereby, this essay retraces how the Catholic Church followed German political discourses and how it sought to influence public debates. While Konrad Adenauer and the Christian-Democratic Party aimed to preserve the Reichskonkordat, which had been negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli in 1933, an inner-German opposition began to question the role that the Church had played in the Nazi regime. Already in the 1950s, a diverse alliance of Social Democrats, liberals and Protestant intellectuals accused both the Vatican and members of Adenauer’s government to have supported Nazism in order to establish a form of ‚clerical fascism‘. While these accusations were often of polemical nature, they initiated a profound re-calibration of church-state relations, showing the limits of both Adenauer’s political ambitions and the visions of Pius XII to re-establish a Catholic dominance in postwar culture.

For God, Queen, Country and Israel

The Christian Democratic Party was formed in 1977 with the aim of ensuring that Australian laws, institutions and mass media were consistent with Christian values. This article considers whether the strong support and practical aid that the party provided to the state of Israel from 2002 were relevant to its stated concerns. It is argued that the immediate cause of its enthusiasm for Israel was hostility towards Islam, which it came to see as a threat to Australian ‘Christian Nationhood’. The party subsequently adopted, but also adapted, Christian Zionist ideas and language, and incorporated support for Israel into its longstanding beliefs about and conduct of ‘spiritual warfare’.

The Influence of Government Ideology on Renewable Energy Consumption in the European Union Countries

By utilizing the panel quantile regression method and employing unbalanced panel data covering the years between 1972 and 2020, this study examines the impact of government ideology on renewable energy consumption for 26 EU member countries. The estimation results indicated that an increase in the relative power position of right-wing parties in government was correlated with a decrease in renewable energy consumption, whereas a rise in the relative power position of left-wing or center-wing parties in government was associated with an increase in renewable energy consumption across all quantiles evaluated. The estimation results were robust to different indicators of renewable energy consumption and government ideology. The estimation results of this study also indicated statistically significant positive associations between the share of seats in parliament for political parties classified as green and renewable energy consumption, and between the total Christian democratic governing party seats as a percentage of all legislative seats and renewable energy consumption. This result suggests that green parties and Christian democratic parties may be the key driving forces behind the positive coefficients for variables representing left-wing and center-wing parties in our study.

The response of the European parties to the transformation of the socio-political cleavages

ABSTRACT From a bottom-up perspective, cleavage theory links the socio-economic trends existing in the political community with the shape acquired by party politics. Globalization and European integration impacted European society, creating novel socio-economic divides and bringing new social, cultural and economic issues into the political discussion. The impact of the novel cleavage over the pre-existent societal socio-political fractures acquires a central role in the study of European Union politicization. Deploying critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse-historical approach (DHA), this study aims to comprehend how the emergence of a novel cleavage has influenced the discourse of the mainstream European parties. The manifestos of the European Christian democratic, socialist and liberal parties from the last three European Parliament elections are analyzed to assess the contemporary relevance of the left-right political competition in a scenario characterized by the salience gained by transnational issues and the electoral success of populist elites.

Christian Democracy, Labor, and the Postwar Politics of Old-Age Pension Reform

AbstractChristian-democratic parties not only constituted the most successful political force in much of Western Europe during most of the twentieth century; their attitudes toward solidaristic welfare reform have arguably also been more diverse than have those of most other major political groupings during this period. Whereas existing studies have mostly attributed this variation to electoral or strategic considerations, this article emphasizes the importance of interest group involvement. It analyzes and compares postwar old-age pension reform in three important Christian-democratic-ruled societies, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, and shows how the very different attitudes of the main Christian-democratic parties toward solidaristic welfare reform in these countries related to the strength and unity of the Christian-democratic labor union movements there.

Why Are Conservative Young Evangelicals in Norway Avoiding Right-Wing Politics?

Drawing on new survey data, this article elaborates on how young evangelicals in Norway navigate between a secular majority and evangelical subgroups. It shows how they combine pro-fertility norms with liberal attitudes towards migration. Explaining why they avoid both left- and right-wing politics, the article elaborates on the central role the Christian Democratic party plays for young evangelicals in Norway.

Islam, opinion climates, and immigrant party loyalties in Western Europe

This article examines how religion – particularly Islam – and anti-immigrant opinion climates influence the patterns of partisanship among first-generation immigrants in Western Europe. It suggests that Muslim propensity to become partisans and identify with Christian democratic parties depends on anti-immigrant opinion climate in their host country. The analyses based on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002–2019 in 19 West European democracies reveal that while Muslims are indeed less likely to become partisans in anti-immigrant host societies, the opposite is true in hospitable opinion climates. Moreover, compared to other immigrants, Muslims are less likely to identify with Christian democratic parties, but this relationship is substantively small and limited to highly anti-immigrant countries. In contrast, Muslims are more likely to align with socialist parties at all levels of anti-immigrant sentiment. These findings have important implications for debates on immigrant political integration and the future of electoral alignments in Western Europe.

A Shadow Party System: The Political Activities of Cold War Polish Exiles

Abstract Polish émigrés were an important feature of the Cold War landscape in Europe, as were exiles from other Central European countries. In addition to opposing the Communist systems in their countries of origin, they tried to pursue independent policies in the West. Émigrés were active in political parties—including Christian Democratic, Socialist, and agrarian parties—but at the same time they attempted to create new forms, such as new political and social movements and transnational organizations. With active international agendas, they also worked to influence their own societies, both in the countries in which they had settled and in their countries of origin. This mixture of social and political dimensions was a specific phenomenon of Cold War intellectual history in Europe. The article draws on archival materials from Poland, Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States and builds on concepts developed by scholars such as Maurice Duverger, Giovanni Sartori, V. O. Key, Jr., Yossi Shain, and Idesbald Goddeeris.

Vaccine or catalyst? Christian religion and populism in Europe: A rejoinder to Inglehart's “Religion's sudden decline”

The strength and direction of the association between Christian religion and support for radical right-wing parties is strongly debated. On the one hand, there is work that shows that in Western European countries with a strong Christian democratic party, the relationship between church attendance and voting for populist radical right (PRR) parties is negative (Marcinkiewicz and Dassonneville 2022). Such findings contradict with the conclusions reached by Inglehart (2021), who reported that adherence to religious norms correlates positively with support for PRR parties. In this research note we shed light on the reasons for these contrasting conclusions, by systematically assessing the role of empirical choices in terms of the operationalizations of the dependent and the key independent variables, and how heterogeneity is dealt with.

Introducing the parliamentary deployment votes database

The Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database provides data on the voting behaviour of 301 political parties in 1,022 parliamentary votes on military missions between 1990 and 2019 in 21 countries of the Global North. This special data feature introduces the database and presents descriptive statistics and basic patterns on some of its key variables: general, political, and regional characteristics of missions and votes themselves; the level of agreement; and party-political contestation. The number of deployment votes has increased over the course of the 1990s and then fluctuated around a stable annual average of 40 to 50 votes. At the same time, legislative–executive relations in security and defence policy and, as a consequence, the number of deployment votes, continue to differ substantially between countries. Whereas support for military missions has increased over time, the degree of contestation, as measured by an agreement index, differs considerably across the countries under study. Whether a political party supports a military mission depends not only on it being part of a governing coalition or in opposition but also on its political ideology: support is lowest among parties of the Radical Left, increases among green and social-democratic parties and peaks among liberal, conservative and Christian-democratic parties. Radical-right parties are less supportive than centrist parties but more supportive than radical-left parties. Regional peculiarities notwithstanding, this pattern can be found in Western and Eastern Europe, East Asia and North America. The database will be interesting for scholars of the democratic politics of military missions and particularly legislative–executive relations and political parties in security and defence policy, providing the foundations for a comparative analysis of different missions, the ideological foundations of contestation, government–opposition dynamics and legislative–executive relations in security and defence policy.

Udział duchowieństwa katolickiego w życiu politycznym i społecznym Polski w latach 1918–1939 na przykładzie diecezji włocławskiej

When Poland regained its independence, the catholic clergy actively took part in shaping social and political life of the country. They called for unity, harmony and the need to build a country based on catholic teaching of the Church. The clergy from Włocławek sympathized with the National Democracy – that was the party which had a great deal of support from all bishops of Włocławek. Polish Christian Democratic Party had also a lot of supporters in those days, the Party existed under this name until 1937, when it united with the National Worker’s Party forming Labour Party. You could say that the clergy were in favor of social solidarity, whose realization was a corporate system, which should be understood as an authentic socio-economic autonomy, created with the help of the country but the initiative itself came from society. An important external factor, which ordered priests to engage in political affairs, was the social radicalism among the urban and rural population. A peasant movement played a significant role here. The clergy relatively favorable referred to the polish parties such as “Piast” and “Stronnictwo Ludowe”. The priests worked for many organizations, associations, trade unions or school. A great deal of efforts had to be put into the functioning of agricultural circles or fire brigades. The priests were also involved in the activities of local government, the development of cooperative movement. They performed various functions in educational and cultural organizations. Those working in industrial factories were involved in trade union movement, whose ideology was based on principles of Christian ethic and the existing social order.

ФЕНОМЕН РЕЛИГИОЗНЫХ ПАРТИЙ НА ПОСТСОВЕТСКОМ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ

The article analyzes the phenomenon of religious parties in the post-Soviet space. It is shown that they were formed either in the formats of Islamic parties or Christian-democratic. There are States that impose a ban on the creation of parties on religious grounds, and those that allow their existence. The prerequisites for the appearance of such restrictions are shown. The article especially analyzes the case of Tadjikistan, where approaches to the possibilities of the legal existence of religious parties have fundamentally changed. Other criteria related to the religious sphere and limiting the activities of parties (propaganda of religious discord and enmity, financing of parties by religious structures, etc.) are also analyzed. The results of the analysis are presented in the summary table 1. The article shows that Islamic and Christian Democratic parties manifest themselves in the post-Soviet space as oppositional. There is an analysis of the prerequisites and factors, the value bases of such a situation. It is shown that Islamic proto-parties and movements offering an alternative project of statehood can exist only in an illegal format, and Christian Democratic parties acquiring national-state specifics can be both oppositional and supporting the current government, depending on its political course. The author also analyzes the reasons for the institutional weakness of religious parties. The conclusion is made about the negative result of projects to create religious parties in the post-Soviet space