Abstract
Recent research in American political behavior has examined at length the link between evangelical Protestants and the Republican Party. These works however do not consider the idiosyncratic nature of religiosity in the US, and insist on treating religion as an ‘unmoved mover’ with respect to political contexts. The question posed herein is: during the participation of religious communities in partisan politics, should we expect politics to eventually constrain religious behavior? Motivated by a political social identity approach, I use American National Election Study panel data and structural equation modeling techniques to explore the untested possibility that religious and political factors are linked through reciprocal causation. Conditional upon religious and temporal context, findings highlight the causal impact of ideology and partisanship in shaping religious behavior.
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Notes
This stereotyping might seem a simplification of reality—for example, not all Republicans or conservatives are evangelicals. SIT stresses the point that members perceive in- and out-groups as homogenous, and not that they actually embody these stereotypes (Huddy 2003).
Data used in the present study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The author holds sole responsibility for their analysis and interpretation. Results from supplementary analyses mentioned in the text are available from the author. Throughout the study, I avoid using the 1956–1960 ANES panel, since the detailed measure that differentiates among Protestant denominations and is required for sub-group analysis had not yet been introduced in 1956. Also, in the examination of the reciprocal link between ideology and attendance, the 2000–2004 panel is dropped, since there is no repeated measure of ideological self-placement in 2004.
Note that the item may be subject to misreporting due to social desirability effects, a problem however that cannot be corrected with ANES data (e.g. Hadaway et al. 1993).
Establishment of causal precedence is possible with cross-sectional data, when simultaneous effects are assumed between two variables (Finkel 1995). This however requires the use of unrealistic modeling options in the form of instrumental variables. According to theory, instruments should be very strong predictors of one endogenous variable, but not related to the second endogenous variable. Instrumental variables are difficult to locate in social surveys, unless designers had planned ahead and included such indicators in the questionnaire.
FIML does not exclude missing cases from analysis for respondents included in the models. Under the assumption of data missing at random, the procedure produces superior estimates to either listwise or pairwise deletion, or mean imputation (Arbuckle 2005). Regarding panel effects, Bartels’ study (1999) shows that the ANES design does not suffer from serious panel attrition and conditioning, with the exception of campaign interest and turnout variables.
Steensland et al. classify nondenominational Protestants as evangelicals according to their church attendance (frequent attendance suggests evangelicalism) (2000, p. 316). Since the present analysis is built on the church attendance variable, adopting the above practice would have introduced a biased logic: religiosity would feature both as an independent/dependent variable within religious groups and as a stratification criterion across groups. Facing the risk of introducing an amount of unwanted variability in the groupings, nondenominational Protestants were assigned to the evangelical group in recent decades, irrespective of their observance.
The effects reported in this paper hold even with more homogenous stratifications. For instance, if models are estimated within born-again evangelicals (measure not available in 1972–1976), the ‘partisan religion’ effect is intensified. I do not emphasize this result however, for two main reasons. First, subsample size further decreases. Second, the ‘born-again’ item is a subjective measure, less reliable than denominational membership. Estimates are insensitive to an additional test: the successive dropping of each control variable from the analysis.
In an earlier stage of the analysis, I used three-wave models with the 1972–1976 and 2000–2004 datasets, which employed a Wiley-Wiley specification with single-indicator latent variables. These produced a similar picture of causal relationships as the one presented in this study. However, in some cases AMOS returned inadmissible figures, such as negative variances. I attribute this to small and homogenous subsamples, which possibly hindered the efficient estimation of complex models with latent variables.
Goodness-of-fit is assessed with the following criteria (Arbuckle 2005): the χ2 test/degrees of freedom ratio, in which values less than 5 are desirable (or 3 for stricter evaluations); Bollen’s incremental fit index (IFI), which makes adjustments for sample size and the complexity of the model, taking into account degrees of freedom, should score close to 90 and above (or .95 and above for more conservative evaluations); Bentler’s comparative fit index (CFI), which again accounts for small sample sizes and should be greater than .90 (or .95 for stricter evaluations); finally, the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), where values should be lower than .08 (or .05 for more conservative evaluations). All models tested—feedback and unidirectional, for all groups, during all periods—had an acceptable fit to the variances/covariances encountered in the data.
According to the test in Table 4, a partisan religion also emerges among mainline Protestants in the 1970s, whereby partisanship appears to constrain church attendance. One explanation of this could lie with the political mobilization of mainline churches during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, as defined by the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War (e.g. Wald and Calhoun-Brown 2007). Yet, due to methodological problems in model estimation for this subsample in the 1970s, I choose instead to emphasize the absence of the political religion effect from the evangelical subsample, which is the focus of the present study. Specifically, the cross-effects have different signs for mainline Protestants in the 1972–1976 model: lagged partisanship has a positive effect on changing attendance, while lagged attendance has a counter-intuitive, negative effect on changing partisanship (see Supplementary electronic material, Table C). This is a suppressor effect, whereby two variables are positively correlated, but direct effects are negative or vice versa. Suppression occurs for two main reasons (Smith et al. 1992). First, suppression happens when an additional predictor is entered in the model, i.e. the true relationship between the variables is in the opposite direction than the one indicated by their correlation. If the difference in sign can be explained theoretically, the effect can be retained. Second, suppression can be the result of multicollinearity, an inherent problem in cross-lagged models, which use repeated measures of often very stables variables. The problem is aggravated here by the stratification of the sample into homogenous subsamples. I find the second explanation more plausible. This justifies my concern in reading too much into this result.
Note that the detection of significant effects especially post-1990s obtains greater leverage due to small subsample sizes (higher probability for a Type II Error).
To test whether interactions are significant, i.e. whether effects differ across religious communities, I fit two models for each panel: first I allow all parameters to differ across groups. In the second case, I constrain cross-lagged effects to be equal across groups. The relative validity of the two assumptions can be evaluated with a χ2 difference test, i.e. the difference in χ2 values between the two hypotheses. This will indicate which model fits the data better (Bollen 1989, p. 292). Results show that the intergroup differences observed in Tables 2 and 4 are significant.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research (Workshop: Politicizing Socio-Cultural Structures), Helsinki, May 2007, and the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Tampa, November 2007. I am indebted to Mark Shephard, John Curtice, Robert Johns, the editors and two anonymous reviewers for advice and comments. I also want to thank Christopher J. Carman and Wouter van der Brug for helpful suggestions.
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With apologies to Alexis de Tocqueville.
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Patrikios, S. American Republican Religion? Disentangling the Causal Link Between Religion and Politics in the US. Polit Behav 30, 367–389 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9053-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9053-1