Political Science Commons^™

Orthodoxy And Loyalty: An Exploration Of Electoral Volatility As Experienced By Religious Political Parties In Israel And The Netherlands, Bryant Donner

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Religious political parties have been mainstays of the Dutch and Israeli political scenes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While each nation possesses exceptionally open and proportional party systems with high degrees of electoral volatility, the Netherlands’ remaining orthodox Protestant parties and Israel’s Haredi parties have weathered this volatility better than other parties have.

Using the Dutch Christian Union, the Dutch Reformed Political Party, the Israeli Shas, and the Israeli United Torah Judaism as examples of religious parties in the twenty-first century, this paper examines sociological and political dimensions on which religious parties of different political alignments and faiths and …