Rethinking Religion and Political Participation: The Case of Voting Among Religiously Unaffiliated Americans
Is civic disengagement correlated across institutions? One case of this question is a long-observed “secular voting gap” where religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to vote than their affiliated counterparts. This work often uses self-reports or exit polls that cannot measure variation...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2024
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| In: |
Sociology of religion
Year: 2024, Volume: 85, Issue: 2, Pages: 146-175 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Is civic disengagement correlated across institutions? One case of this question is a long-observed “secular voting gap” where religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to vote than their affiliated counterparts. This work often uses self-reports or exit polls that cannot measure variation within the unaffiliated. Using an improved measure of validated voter turnout in four presidential election years (2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020), I find estimates of the secular voting gap are attenuated by demographic controls. More importantly, the mechanism that explains this finding is that more frequent church attendance associates with a lower probability of turnout among respondents who are unaffiliated, and results vary by voting method. These results support a theory of civic disengagement as a domain-specific process and demonstrate the substantive value of revisiting classic findings about religion and political behavior amid social change. |
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| ISSN: | 1759-8818 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Sociology of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srad018 |