RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION, INCOME STRATIFICATION, AND POLITICAL-PARTY PREFERENCE IN THE NETHERLANDS, 1964 TO 1992

Data from 1,098 independent, national Dutch surveys (N=814,912) are used to track trends in the impact of religious affiliation and income position on political party preference in the Netherlands from 1964 to 1992. The broad question is whether their efficacy declined over this 29-year period; the narrow issue is whether the declines paralleled changes in modernization. Multinomial logit analysis of the overall effects shows a marginal decrease for income but a massive fall for religious affiliation. The secular movement was not uniform across denomination, income group, and time, however. The most spectular decreases occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when the relatively minor gaps between low and high-income groups weakened and the once massive differentials between Catholics, Calvinists, and people with no religious affiliation faded. Many of the widespread shifts slowed down appreciably in the late 1970s and subsequently abated in the mid-1980s. These trends coincided with macro-level socio-economic changes, and this finding lends credibility to the thesis that modernization contributed to deconfessionalization and that income effects represent, in part, feedback to political interventions in the income distribution.