Religious Affiliation in Western Europe 1837-1970

The present study is a part of the project HIWED (Historical Indicators of the Western European Democracies; Project leader: Wolfgang Zapf and Peter Flora), funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung. The HIWED main product is a comprehensive data manual on political, social and economic developments in Western Europe for the period between 1815 and 1975. Peter Flora’s study on the development of religious affiliation (´religious homogeneity or heterogeneity´) in selected Western European countries in a historical perspective is based on statistics from population censuses.The data tables are from the second section (´Cultural Heterogeneity´) of the first issue of the above-mentioned data manual. The United Kingdom has not taken into account in the analysis of the development perspective; there were only one census (1851) with information on the number of meetings in churches and the number of church-goers to a certain date. No systematic information is also available about the Protestant minorities in France, Belgium and Italy. Data Tables in histat: Religious affiliation, differentiation of the data tables by countries: A – Tabellen: Deutschland (Germany); B – Tabellen: Skandinavische Länder (Nordic States); C – Tabellen: Niederlande (The Netherlands); D – Tabellen: Schweiz (Switzerland); E – Tabellen: Irland (Italy); F – Tabellen: Österreich (Austria).