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

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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

Arceneaux and Nickerson: Who is Mobilized to Vote? A Re-Analysis of 11 Field Experiments (3 shared tags)
Burnham: The Current Crisis in American Politics (3 shared tags)
Clinton and Lapinski: "Targeted" advertising and voter turnout (3 shared tags)
Gerber, Green, and Larimer: Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment (3 shared tags)
Larocca and Klemanski: U.S. State Election Reform and Turnout in Presidential Elections (3 shared tags)
Mann: Is There Backlash to Social Pressure? A Large-scale Field Experiment on Voter Mobilization (3 shared tags)
McDonald and Popkin: The myth of the vanishing voter (3 shared tags)
Mondak et al: Personality and Civic Engagement: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Trait Effects on Political Behavior (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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