ABSTRACT
In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars appeared to be in agreement that democracy is alien to catholic countries. One of these scholars, Lipset, contended that a link existed between democratic instability and Catholicism. Lipset’s argument was that in Catholic countries, government was not secular; church and state were closely knit resulting in a political environment in which new issues of conflict became superimposed on the dominant schism between secularists and clericals. As a consequence, Lipset (1960: 72-3) maintained, secularists came to ally with the pro-democratic/anti-regime parties on the left of the political spectrum due to their shared opposition to the amalgamation of church and state, thereby creating polarizing, cumulative social cleavages rather than cross-cutting ones, leading effectively to diminished chances of compromise, one of the basic characteristics of democracy.
