Abstract
This paper explains changes in partisanship among Catholics in the last quarter of the 20th Century using a theory of partisan change centered on the contexts in which Catholics lived. Catholics were part of the post-New Deal Democratic coalition, but they have become a swing demographic group. We argue that these changes in partisanship are best explained by changes in elite messages that are filtered through an individual’s social network. Those Catholics who lived or moved into the increasingly Republican suburbs and South were the Catholics who were most likely to adopt a non-Democratic partisan identity. Changes in context better explain Catholic partisanship than party abortion policy post Roe v. Wade or ideological sorting. We demonstrate evidence in support of our argument using the ANES cumulative file from 1972 through 2000.
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Notes
In the 1970 s, 23.7 % of all NES respondents identified as Catholic. In the 1990 s, that number had risen to 25.2 %. While this increase is small, the difference is statistically significant (F = 5.90; p < .02).
For an example of a similar argument in the British context see Milazzo et al. (2012).
Gray et al. (2006) code the US Conference of Catholic Bishop’s pre-election platform from 2004 called: “Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility”. They code 36 separate political positions from this document. Of those 16 are coded as more aligned with Democratic positions and 7 as more aligned with Republican positions. The remaining positions are not clearly associated with either party according to the authors. Among the positions coded as Democratic are “welfare reform that reduces poverty and dependence and not cutting of benefits,” “[addressing a] ‘culture of violence,’ [through] gun safety measures, reasonable restrictions on assault weapons and handguns,” and protecting the environment.
Social identity theory predicts that individuals will show in-group favoritism, out-group derogation, or both (Brewer and Brown 1998). An alternative measure would be to take the difference between the feeling thermometer rating for Catholics and an out-group. For this reason, we also took the difference between the feeling thermometer rating for Catholics and the rating for Protestant. This does change over the years with the difference between the two ratings getting larger. The result in Fig. 2 suggests this change is more the result of more out-group derogation over the decades than any change in in-group favoritism. The other problem with this measure is that the feeling thermometer rating for Protestants was only asked in 1972, 1976, and 2000.
The sharp drop seen in 1980 could be the result of a question wording change. After 1980, the ANES added the words “by law” to the question. It is possible that individuals were making a distinction between what the law should allow and their own personal morals. In 1980, they asked both forms of the question and more than three quarters of respondents had the same position on both questions. However, individuals were eight percent less likely to take the pro-life position when asked the question in the “by law” form. The ANES also added language about rape and incest that year. One would expect that this change could result in more pro-life respondents because it allows for more situations in which abortions would be allowed and have the respondent still coded as “pro-life”.
South is defined as a respondent who lives in a state that was a member of the Confederacy.
Among all ANES respondents, the percentage of Southerners identifying as Democratic dropped 7.9 percentage points from the 1970 s to the 1990 s. Over that same time period the percentage of Southerners identifying as Republican increased by 11.4 percentage points. Among all ANES respondents, 48.7 % of people living in the suburbs identified as Democratic in the 1990 s. That number fell 3.3 percentage points by the 1990 s. The more dramatic change came in Republican identification. About 34.7 % of ANES respondents who lived in the suburbs identified as Republican in the 1970 s. In the 1990 s, 43.6 % of suburban ANES respondents identified as Republican.
We do not include the feeling thermometer variable from Fig. 2 in this analysis because it is not available in all years. We did perform some analyses using that variable. We discuss those analyses in the Further Analyses section.
We ran the same model on non-Catholics and in that specification ideology clearly plays a larger role in determining partisanship in later years with larger effects for the ideology variables in 2000.
Please note, there are 50 data sets for each of the three sets of variables (religiosity, ideology, context). Hence, we created 150 data sets total for the simulations.
This does not necessarily demonstrate causality (Fowler et al. 2011). For example, it is possible that those who are in disagreeable networks selected into those networks in part because they were most likely to change. Further, the partisanship of the social network is measured using the respondents’ perceptions of their network which could lead to error. Huckfeldt et al. (2000) demonstrate that perceptions of partisanship are typically correct. Further, as Sinclair points out in Fowler et al. (2011), the respondent’s perception of his or her discussion partners is the key variable since the respondent is reacting to his or her interactions with the social network and not the actual party attachments of the social network.
We conducted the same analysis using all ANES respondents. The effect in that analysis is larger—about 1 point on the scale—with a statistically significant effect for both the Gore Discussants and Bush Discussant variables. Those results are also available in the online appendix.
These models are available in the online appendix.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Robert Huckfeldt, Sean Richey, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Ryan, J.B., Milazzo, C. The South, the Suburbs, and the Vatican Too: Explaining Partisan Change Among Catholics. Polit Behav 37, 441–463 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9276-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9276-2