ABSTRACT
Introduction Our journey across the relationship between religiosity and electoral behaviour tells us a story of decline in Spain, a Catholic country par excellence. The saliency of religious factors as an ‘identity maker’ is increasingly vanishing, and hence, the power of this variable to explain how Spaniards vote is becoming almost irrelevant. The main aim of this chapter is to show evidence of this decline, making extensive use of multivariate analysis of survey data.1 We attempt to demonstrate here that the capacity of the religious factor to explain the vote for the two major competing parties on the left and the right has become steadily weaker during the 1980s and 1990s. Our analysis focuses upon three points in time (1982, 1993 and 1996), and discusses the influence of the religious variable for the explanation of the vote for the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and for the Partido Popular (PP) (Alianza Popular (AP) in 1982), separately, and in relation to one another.
