Summary of Guth, Kellstedt, Smidt, and Green: Religious mobilization in the 2004 presidential election -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

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Guth, Kellstedt, Smidt, and Green: Religious mobilization in the 2004 presidential election

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I even say who wrote them. If you have more recent summaries to add to this collection, send them my way I guess. Sorry for the ads; they cover the costs of keeping this online.

Guth, Kellstedt, Smidt, and Green. 2005. Religious mobilization in the 2004 presidential election. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the APSA, September 1-4, 2005..

Main Point

It's not just a Protestant/Catholic or Religious/Nonreligious divide. You need to sort people properly based not only on Evangelical vs Mainline Protestant and Catholic, but also based on whether they belong to a Modernist, Traditionalist, or Centrist faction of those traditions.

When classified properly, religion has strong predictive power.

Two ways of looking at religion

Ethnoreligious perspective: stresses religious identity and long-term conflicts among these traditions
Religious restructuring perspective: emphasizes divisions within religious traditions (traditionalists, modernists, and centrists; e.g. Modernist ecumenical churches vs Traditionalist evangelicals)

The major religious traditions have been polarized into liberal and conservative factions (based on theological, social, and cultural conflicts) Three ways of differing:

Behavior: Traditionalists attend services more frequently
Belief: Whether you think moral authority is "supernatural or conventional in origin"
Movement affiliations:

Findings

Traditionalists are far more conservative than Modernists, with Centrists in the middle (but still conservative). This is true for Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, and Catholic factions of Traditionalists, Modernists, and Centrists.
You need to sort people into their proper religious classifications to see these effects (see Table 2).

Research by the same authors

Campbell, Green, and Layman: The Party Faithful: Partisan Images, Candidate Religion, and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

Research on similar subjects

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Gerber, Green, and Larimer: An Experiment Testing the Relative Effectiveness of Encouraging Voter Participation by Inducing Feelings of Pride or Shame (3 shared tags)
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Green and Gerber: Introduction to Social Pressure and Voting: New Experimental Evidence (3 shared tags)
Green and Shachar: Habit formation and political behaviour (3 shared tags)
Nickerson: Is Voting Contagious? Evidence from Two Field Experiments (3 shared tags)

Tags

Guth, James (author) • Kellstedt, Lyman (author) • Smidt, Corwin (author) • Green, John (author) • American Politics • Religion and Politics • Turnout • Voting

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