Legislators, their religiosity, and their parliamentary actions

Drawing on the literature on the individual behavior of legislators, on legislative studies and on the revival of the religious-secular cleavage in Western European party politics, this paper attempts to examine the impact of the individual religiosity of legislators on their legislative behavior. In their legislative work, legislators must constantly balance the interests of external (party group, constituency, interest groups) and internal (own preferences) principals. While in parliamentary democracies with strong party discipline the voting behavior (= reactive behavior, according to Burden [2007]) of legislators in parliaments is strongly impacted by their parliamentary group, legislators have more influence on the selection and the implementation of their specialization topics, on being a spokesperson, of being member of a committee, on the (co-) sponsoring of bills, motions and parliamentary questions, or on giving parliamentary speeches (= proactive behavior). According to Burden (2007), their proactive behavior can be influenced by their preferences which are mainly shaped by four sources: partisan ideology, self-interest, prior knowledge or information and values. The latter are usually formed at an early age and often influenced by religion. Drawing on recent research, I argue that individual religiosity and other personal characteristics shape the proactive legislative behavior of legislators, especially in their parliamentary speeches on recent issues such as morality policy, church-state relations, religion in the public sphere, animal welfare policy, and so on. My research design focuses on parliamentary speeches on such an exemplary issue held in the German _Bundestag_ over the last 20 years. I will use a database of speeches on religion-related issues and combine them with individual characteristics of the legislators who spoke about them. I will then evaluate how strong the effect of the individual religious denomination is on the legislator’s own legislative behavior, by controlling for partisan ideology and constituency-related factors.