Legacies of the Reformation: How Religious Identity Shapes Political Preferences in Germany

Erik Ortiz-Covarrubias

Working Papers from CEMFI

Abstract: This paper investigates whether Germany’s historical confessional divides continue to influence contemporary political behavior by exploiting persistent geographic variation between historically Catholic and Protestant areas through a Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design. Integrating historical and geospatial data with modern electoral and census sources, I find that historically Catholic municipalities show systematically higher support for the center-right Union parties than their counterparts in every federal election from 1990 to 2025, while historically Protestant areas are more likely to support parties on the center-left and left of the political spectrum. Individual-level survey data covering all Federal Elections since 1953 and the German General Social Survey provide suggestive evidence that voting behavior is shaped by confessional affiliation.

Keywords: Religion; voting behavior; Germany. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 N33 O18 Z12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cemfi.es/ftp/wp/2604.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cmf:wpaper:wp2026_2604

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CEMFI Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Araceli Requerey ().