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AbstractThe political practice of consociational democracies to take religion off the political agenda has led to the idea that religious issues only play a marginal role in the left-right ideological framework. This study demonstrates that religion has more than a marginal effect on the left-right placement of parties and thus on the space of competition. The analysis shows that voters for secular parties and voters for religious parties have different motives and beliefs on which they base the orderings of parties on the left-right scale. In other words, each group of voters defines its own left-right scale. These different left-right scales are individually single-peaked but there is no collective transitivity of orderings of parties. The intransitivity is a clear violation of Downs' condition for placing all parties on a single line in a manner agreed upon by all voters. Instead of having one left-right dimension as some sort of "super issue," there are at least two left-right scales, one for voters for secular parties and one for voters for religious parties.

Rational-choice theory is the economic study of nonmarket decision making. The methodology of rational-choice is that of economics: methodological individualism, rationality, & Pareto efficiency. Rational-choice theory is a generic title for four different decision-making theories: collective action, public choice, social choice, & game theory. The distinction between these decision-making theories is the result of the development of the concept of rationality in classical & neoclassical economic theory. For nonmarket decisions (in contrast to market decisions), the economic criterion of Pareto efficiency is not attainable if individuals are behaving as rational utility maximizers. This is one of the main problems for rational-choice theory, described by the prisoner's dilemma game. Several solutions of this dilemma have been suggested, but none can be accepted as conclusive. It is asserted here that the methodological point of departure of rational-choice theory prohibits a solution for the dilemma, because the crux of the economic approach consists in the realization that it is impossible to attain the Pareto optimal. 3 Figures, 1 Schema, 48 References. Modified HA

This research note extends the confrontational approach to estimating party policy positions by providing a way to estimate uncertainty associated with the measurements. The confrontational approach is a flexible method of determining party policy positions, which is ideally suited to measure parties' positions on issues that are specific to a country or period in time. We introduce a method of estimating the uncertainty of confrontational estimates by restating the approach as a special case of an item response theory, opening up the possibility of using the confrontational approach not only as a descriptive tool but also as a means of testing hypotheses on party policy preferences. We illustrate our model using analysis of the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election and the 2009 European elections.