Italy: From the religious cleavege to the politics of religious voting

This chapter documents three lines of historical development of the Church/State compound divide. First, it analyses the over-time unchurching of the Italians that shrunk the pool of DC voters. Secondly, it shows how this process affected dramatically the vote for DC. Finally, it indicates the extent to which the remaining core Catholics were still highly likely to vote for DC until its disappearance during the party system reshuffle in the early 1990s. The Italian case clearly shows that disruption of a cleavage is more likely to occur when the political supply changes than when the voters’ outlooks do. More recently, however, and contrariwise to the elections that took place between the late 1940s and the early 1990s, Catholics never concentrated their vote in one or other of the two coalitions which emerged as the main political actors, notwithstanding the intense conflict on moral issues which characterized some electoral campaigns.