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 say who wrote them.
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
Research on similar subjects
- Brady, Verba, and Schlozman: Beyond SES (3 shared tags)
- Feddersen, Gailmard, and Sandroni: Moral Bias in Large Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence (3 shared tags)
- Gerber, Green, and Larimer: Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment (3 shared tags)
- Gerber, Green, and Shachar: Voting may be habit-forming (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)
- Nickerson: Is Voting Contagious? Evidence from Two Field Experiments (3 shared tags)
- Rosenstone and Hansen: Mobilization, participation, and American democracy (3 shared tags)
- Wolfinger and Rosenstone: Who votes (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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