Does Religion Still Matter? Religious Cleavages and the Politics of Integration in Europe.

The past decade and a half has seen a proliferation of studies on the determinants of public support for the European Union among its national publics. Scholars have analyzed economic, political, informational, and identity factors as influences. There has been considerably less exploration of cultural factors, most notably religion, in these analyses. In this paper, we follow up on our previous work exploring the impact of confessional culture and religious commitment on support for the EU, expanding the purview from the early member states to the more recent accessions and candidate countries. Using Eurobarometer 65.2 (2006), we examine the role that religion plays in shaping public attitudes, while simultaneously controlling for factors identified by other theories. We conclude that religion still shapes attitudes toward European integration, but in different ways and to different degrees in various parts of the Union. Among the early member states, Catholics—especially committed ones—are still more supportive of the Union than Protestants, a result confirming our earlier findings. In more recent accessions to the EU, however, the influence of religion is weaker and assumes different configurations. Finally, age cohort analysis reveals that even in the early member nations, religion is losing its ability to shape public attitudes on European integration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]