Sixty years of democratic representation in Germany allow us to study the working of a specific type of electoral system, namely a mixed system combining proportional and majoritarian rules, in great detail.

For many years women tended to vote more conservative than men, but since the 1980s this gap has shifted direction: women in many countries are more likely than men to support left parties. The literature largely agrees on a set of political-economic factors explaining the change in women’s political orientation. In this article we demonstrate that these conventional factors fall short in explaining the gender vote gap. We highlight the importance of a religious cleavage in the party system across Western (...) European countries, restricting the free flow of religious voters between left and right parties. Given that surveys show us a constantly higher degree of religiosity among women and a persistent impact of religion on vote choice, religion explains a substantial part of the temporal as well as cross-country variation in the transition from the more conservative to the more progressive voting behavior of women. (shrink)

The article addresses the relationship between party systems and welfare state regimes in Europe. It argues that the European party systems show a systematic variation with respect to the electoral success of communist parties – which is argued to be related to the intensity of past conflicts between the nation-state and the Catholic Church in the mono-confessional countries of Europe's south. The article presents empirical evidence for the manifestation of the pro-clerical/anti-clerical cleavage in the party systems of Southern Europe and (...) sketches the consequences for the political economy of these countries. The article demonstrates the impact of religious cleavages on the shape of social policy in a country. The Southern European variety of the welfare state differs markedly from the Continental and Northern European varieties, with fragmented and particularistic provisions, decentralized occupation-based social security, strong insider-outsider cleavages and a weak state. This testifies to the broad range of meanings the "social" may assume. (shrink)