New journal article conditionally accepted! March 10, 2014 9:43 pm Our paper “Moral Politics: The Religious Factor in Referenda Voting” (together with Carolin Rapp, Markus Freitag & Adrian Vatter) has been conditionally accepted for publication in Politics and Religion. Here is the abstract: This article combines the research strands of moral politics and political behavior by focusing on the effect of individual and contextual religiosity on individual vote decisions in popular initiatives and public referenda concerning morally charged issues, such as abortion or drug abuse. We rely on a total of 13 surveys with approximately 1,000 respondents each conducted after every referendum on moral policies in Switzerland between 1992 and 2012. Results based on cross-classified multilevel models show that religious behaving, but not nominal religious belonging, plays a crucial role in decision making on moral issues. This supports the idea that traditional confessional cleavages are being replaced by a new religious cleavage that divides the religious from the secular and which is characterized by party alignments that extend from electoral to direct democratic voting behavior. Our study also lends support and generalizes some of the previous findings drawn from U.S. American research on moral politics, direct democracies, and the public role of religion.