Voting Patterns, Social Context, and Religious Affiliation in Southwest Germany

Extract

In elections that offer genuine choices the individual eligible voter is confronted with having to make decisions. But such decisions are rarely based on a dispassionate weighing of all relevant issues and circumstances; on the contrary, most decisions result largely from the socioeconomic and cultural influences of the milieu in which the individual moves, and most people are content to vote with those of their fellow citizens with whom they share basic social and ideational orientations (cf. Jaros and Grant 1974:177; Parsons 1967:239). So far, the most reliable predictors of voting behavior appear to be structural factors such as group affiliation and its concomitant sharing of values and, although there is no compelling need to restrict explanations of voting behavior to factors of group affiliation and social structure (Iwand 1972:14), attempts to broaden the base underlying voting theory by including psychological processes seem to suffer from fundamental inconsistencies (Abrams 1973:47). It need hardly be mentioned that even at the “safer” level of social processes, any study that hopes to explain voting behavior must deal with a number of methodological problems such as the reliability of questionnaire and interview responses, or the choice of an optimum aggregate level for most fruitful analysis of election returns (see, for example, Feist 1976; Hartenstein 1976).