Religious Dealignment?

The religious cleavage was not sustained by elite rhetoric after the 1960s helps explain why many commentators argue that religious dealignment has occurred amongst the Scots electorate since the 1950s, and that this helps account for the decline of the Scottish Conservative Party. In their study of Scottish electoral behaviour, I. Budge and D. Urwin noted the divergence in religious behaviour between Scotland and England and used their data to emphasise ‘religion’ as a formative influence on Scottish voting. The crucial advantage of the statistic is that it provides a measure of the relative level of religious voting independent of changes in the level of party support or in religious identification. The results provide no support for the claim that the decline of the Conservative Party has been brought about by religious dealignment. The decline in Conservative support has occurred in those of all religions and of none.