Replication data for: The growing gap between churches and Christian democratic parties: evidence from Germany
| Item Type: | Dataset |
|---|---|
| Title: | Replication data for: The growing gap between churches and Christian democratic parties: evidence from Germany |
| Date: | 2026 |
| Creator: |
Debus, Marc  ORCID: 0000-0002-7151-7942
|
| Divisions: | School of Social Sciences > Politikwissenschaft, Vergleichende Regierungslehre (Debus 2012-) |
| Publisher: | Harvard Dataverse |
| DDC Classification: |
320 Political science |
|---|---|
| Abstract: | For decades, Christian churches formed powerful alliances with political parties representing their interests, most notably the alliance between the Roman Catholic Church and Catholic political parties that later evolved into Christian Democratic parties seeking to represent all Christians. These parties and churches long adopted similar positions on societal and family policy—including abortion, euthanasia, and women's rights—creating a stable alliance between religious institutions and Christian Democracy. This alliance is now fracturing. A major fault line has emerged over migration policy, where churches increasingly call for permissive and liberal asylum policies while Christian Democratic parties adopt restrictive positions in response to electoral pressure from radical right parties. We examine the degree to which church and Christian Democratic positions have deviated over time, whether Christian Democrats increasingly overlap with other ideological party families, and what impact these patterns have on voting behavior. We focus on Germany, where both the religious-secular cleavage and a historically dominant Christian Democratic party make this conflict particularly salient. Our analysis reveals growing divergence between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, particularly on the highly salient issue of migration. Using survey data, we demonstrate the electoral consequences of this shift: Catholics and Protestants show a declining probability of supporting CDU and her Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union (CSU) over time. Our findings suggest that the strategic repositioning of the CDU/CSU on migration is eroding its traditional religious base, with profound implications for the future of religious politics in Europe. (English) |
| External Identifier for Data: | https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LEEPGF |
| URL: | https://madata.bib.uni-mannheim.de/1213/ |
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| Access (Controlled): | Only Metadata |
| License (Controlled): | Creative Commons: CC0 | Universal 1.0 (recommended) |
| Related Publication(s) in MADOC: | Debus, Marc und Tosun, Jale und Schütz, Nils und Maikranz, Elisabeth und Nüssel, Friederike (2026), The growing gap between churches and Christian democratic parties: evidence from Germany |
Full text not available from this repository.
| Date Deposited: | 16 Sep 2026 09:00 |
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| Last Modified: | 16 Sep 2026 09:00 |
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