Investigating individual and contextual role of religion in British electoral politics

Despite the headlines of the ‘near death of the (Christian) religion’ in the aftermath of the 2021 Census for England and Wales, almost two thirds of British adults still identify with a religious community, participate in religious activity, and/or hold religious beliefs. For example, over 1 in 5 adult Britons self-identify as ‘Anglican’, equating to just over 15 million people, comparable to the number of votes cast for the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election. In short, the presence of religion among the British population is far from trivial. Moreover, an emergent literature shows that these religious characteristics continue to resonate with the political identities, attitudes and behaviours of British voters: religious affiliation by shaping which political party individuals identify with and vote for; religious practice by influencing ideological values and preferences on issues such as EU membership; and religious belief by affecting social values, such as tolerance for migration. Despite all this, religion has long been out of focus of political science research, leading to a lack of useful and usable data and a deficit of understanding in how religion continues to influence British politics. This project puts religion back into the foreground of political science research and enhances our capacity for its analysis with new, much-needed data and methods. We rectify the shortage of usable data by developing the first dataset of individual and constituency level religious data in Britain by combining the individual data from the British Election Study (BES), Understanding Society (USoc) and ESRC/JSPS Covid-19 Study with aggregate level and spatial data from the 2021 Census, places of worship and faith schools for new constituency boundaries. The design of this dataset and the subsequent analyses are informed by a ground-breaking approach to conceptualising and measuring religious influences – both at an individual and community/contextual level, i.e., by introducing four dimensions of religion – identification, practice, belief and community. These innovations and the wealth of secondary survey and spatial data enable robust and comprehensive multi-level analyses of the relationship between all dimensions of religion and voter behaviour and party support in the 2024/25 general election. These substantive and methodological insights will build a new research agenda for the study of religion and British electoral politics in future elections, while taking advantage of cutting-edge data analysis and data linkage techniques. This project and its outputs will be of great value for future research into the contextual role of religions in other aspects of political and social life as well, such as social capital, health and crime. With support from the project’s Advisory Board, they will be disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences, including the House of Commons Library, think tanks (e.g., Theos), educational bodies (e.g., David Ross Education Trust), polling companies, political parties, faith groups and other organisations (such as Humanists UK).