had to depend on their social networks and religious institutions for services like education. Perhaps most importantly, the elites who had once sustained the pillars began to lose the will to fight for them. In 1967, a Catholic bishop took the revolutionary step of announcing on tele vision that party choice should be a matter of individual conscience, not religious denomination. The result was a sea change in the way the Netherlands was run. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, the proportion of practising Catholics who voted for a Catholic party almost halved. Three successive general elections
...more
