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Race/Ethnicity, Religion and Partisan Leanings

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Using the 2004–2008 national politics studies, our work suggests that race/ethnicity matters to our understanding of religion and partisan leanings. Among Whites, the association between religious faith and partisan leanings are, in part, explained by contrasting social–political attitudes held by Evangelical and Non-Evangelical Protestants. Similarly, the degree to which White attendees of congregations that encourage political discourse maintain more liberal partisan leanings than other Whites is partly explained by their lower scores on our measures of state power, patriotic symbols, and structural understanding of racial inequality. Even when these views are accounted for, attending worship services, on average, is associated with conservative partisan leanings among Whites. In contrast, worship attendance maintains a fairly negligible relationship with the partisan leanings of Hispanic and African Americans. Similarly, religious faith and attending political congregations maintains a relatively inconsistent relationship with the partisan leanings of racial/ethnic minorities. And, the extent to which these forms of religion are associated with their partisan leanings, their views on state power, patriotism, and race and opportunities play a fairly marginal and inconsistent role in explaining these relationships.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this text, we interchangeably utilize the racial/ethnic identifiers of Black and African American.

  2. This measure maintains alpha scores of 0.8982 for Whites, 0.8039 for Hispanics, and 0.7081 for African Americans.

  3. The Republican Affect Index Variable maintains alpha scores of 0.7617 for Whites, 0.6863 for Hispanics, and 0.6564 for Blacks.

  4. The Democratic Affect Index Variable maintains alpha scores of 0.6918 for Hispanics, 0.6863 for Whites, and 0.632 for African Americans.

  5. Because the Republican and Democratic Affect Measures were only asked of respondents in 2008, we utilize both the new 2008 cross-sectional sample as well as respondents that were originally interviewed in the 2004 cross-section and then again in 2008.

  6. See Steensland et al. (2000) for a more detailed explanation of the denominational groupings in RELTRAD.

  7. This index has a 0.678 alpha score for Whites, a 0.660 alpha score for African Americans, and a 0.649 alpha score for Hispanic Americans.

  8. We attempted to create a single index for these measures. However, we were precluded from doing so given the alpha scores for these measures were well below 0.5 for all three racial/ethnic groups.

  9. Because of the low percentage of African Americans (2.6 %: N = 25) and Non-Hispanic Whites (6.65 %: N = 75) that are foreign born, immigration status serves as control variable for Hispanic Americans only.

  10. Missing values for the partisan leaning variables, save partisan vote choice, worship attendance, age, and income are replaced by the imputation by Chained equations multiple imputation method on STATA 10. The imputed variables do not substantively or significantly change the outcomes of these analyses.

  11. See, StataCorp (2013).

  12. The treatment effect analyses, which are available upon request, between religion and partisanship among African Americans, Hispanics, and the race × worship attendance interactions are consistent with our logit regression findings presented in Tables 3, 4 and 5.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

    R. Khari Brown

  2. Department of Political Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

    Ronald E. Brown

  3. Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    R. Khari Brown

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Correspondence to R. Khari Brown.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Table 6 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and voting republican among Non-Hispanic Whites: Sobel mediation test
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Table 7 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and bush approval among Non-Hispanic Whites: Sobel mediation test
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Table 8 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and belief that Republican Party best serve black and Hispanic interests
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Table 9 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and belief that Republican Party best serve White interests
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Table 10 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and Republican Party affect
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Table 11 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and Democratic Party affect
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Table 12 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and bush approval among African Americans: Sobel mediation test
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Table 13 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and voting republican among Hispanic Americans: Sobel mediation test
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Table 14 Statistically significant mediating effects of race, state power, and patriotism variables on the relationship between religion and bush approval among Hispanic Americans: Sobel mediation test
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Brown, R.K., Brown, R.E. Race/Ethnicity, Religion and Partisan Leanings. Rev Relig Res 57, 469–505 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-014-0206-x

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