Whereas cultural issues have come to dominate political agendas of Western-European democracies in recent decades, comparatively religious and secular societies tend to feature very different cultural conflicts. On the one hand, religious societies, best exemplified by Ireland or Northern Ireland, have witnessed decades-long battles over same-sex marriage and abortion. On the other hand, the most secularized Western-European countries rather appear to be divided over secular issues of immigration, law and order. This secular cultural cleavage refers to the authoritarianism-libertarianism divide between the high- and low-educated. Higher educated individuals tend to hold libertarian views and are more likely to support the progressive New Left. Their lower educated counterparts, in contrast, rather tend to hold authoritarian views and to vote for the New Right.

While most studies hold that this education-based cleavage has been growing in recent decades in Western Europe, in this paper we rather seek to explain why it happens. To do this, we develop a theory of how secularization in the West inspires the rise of this secular cultural cleavage and test it by means of multilevel regression modeling. Using the data from to the four waves of the European Values Study data (1981-2008) for 17 Western-European democracies, we study (1) whether the effect of education on voting for the New Right is stronger in more secular societies compared to more religious ones and (2) whether the (expectedly growing) effect of education on voting for the New Right is not direct but is mediated by values, namely by authoritarianism-libertarianism.