Works in Progress

A persistent concern for democratic theorists is the degree to which religious authority trumps democratic authority. This is often assessed using generic measures of religiosity or religious beliefs ill-suited to the task. Moreover, while religion is linked to dogmatism and authoritarianism, this begs the question how much influence religion has independent of psychological dispositions. We attempt to add to these debates with a new measure of religious authority. We draw on data gathered from three samples – a sample of Christian clergy from 2014, a national sample of 1,000 Americans from Spring 2016, and national sample of 1,010 Protestants from 2019. We examine distribution of the religious authority measure and then compare its effects of the measure in the context of authoritarian child rearing values, deliberative values, and democratic norms. The results indicate religious authority values represent a distinct measurement of how people connect to religion in politically salient ways.

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After five decades of research, there is still little consensus about the relation of religious variables to environmental attitudes. Even putting aside variations in sampling and measurement, we still have doubts about where consensus exists – the role of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs, such as mastery over nature, are more unstable than previously considered. Moreover, more importantly, these studies have generally failed to consider the role of secular beliefs about environmental problems and the interaction they may have with religion. Using data from a 2012 PRRI survey, we find religious variables have effects conditional on secular beliefs. Moreover, we draw upon an embedded experiment that shows instability in religious dominionism – the dominant religious effect in previous work. The results suggest previous reports of religious effects are not wrong, but overstated and that eliding secular beliefs is a serious sin of omission.

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The term “Protestant” is used extensively by scholars of religion and has been included in surveys about American religion for decades. Yet it’s possible that many Americans do not have a full understanding of the meaning of this term and it’s inclusion may be introducing measurement error on surveys. Two recent survey efforts provide illumination to this question. The Nationscape question on religion replicates all the options included the Cooperative Congressional Survey, but also includes an option for “Christian.” This provides an ideal opportunity to assess the implications of adding this response choice. When the “Protestant” and “Christian” groups are combined in the Nationscape and compared to the “Protestant” group in the CCES, there is a great deal of similarity between the two samples. But, the results from the Nationscape indicate that the term “Protestant” is becoming increasingly unfamiliar to younger Americans, especially for racial minorities.

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Interparty conflict has long been a source of interest for political science scholars; however, with an increasingly polarized political system, it is important to examine sources of intraparty conflict and discontentment. This article makes the distinction between consistent partisans (partisans who share party-consistent attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors) and conflicted partisans (people who identify as partisan yet fail to resemble the party which with they identify).  Using the Trump administration as a case study, we use 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) data to examine the ways in which conflicted partisans differ from consistent partisans.  We find that conflicted partisans tend to share different demographic characteristics, policy positions, and voting behaviors than their consistent partisan counterparts.

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Public sentiment about abortion rights in the United States has been studied since the 1980s when access to abortion became a salient political topic. Partisanship and religiosity have emerged as the most reliable and significant predictors of abortion support. However, the relationship between age and abortion is less clear. We address how age impacts support for reproductive rights, as well as how age interacts with gender and partisanship. We turn to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES)-one of the few datasets large enough to look at these attitudes at a granular level–and find interesting patterns. The level of support for abortion is curvilinear by age among Republican women. More specifically, 50-year-old GOP women are twice as likely to support abortion rights as GOP women who are 20 or 80 years old. We consider whether this is a life cycle effect- is there something about entering middle age that causes Republican women to become more supportive of abortion? Or, is this simply a cohort effect driving these differences? Only when considering party identification and gender does the relationship between age and abortion attitudes become clear.

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This article analyzes the politics of older Americans in the 21^st Century. Older Americans have been  significantly involved in American politics, relative to younger generations. Political participation typically increases with age, even ramping up during the early period of older adulthood. However, past work has indicated that political participation drops off due to frailty and loss of cognition in the latest years of the life span. And, yet, people are living longer than in previous decades when much of the past research on this relationship was conducted. We want to know whether these relationships remain consistent and want to especially analyze the old-old, a growing age group that has been difficult to study in the past due to their low numbers in traditional surveys. With tens of thousands of respondents, survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies from 2008 to 2018 allow us to analyze these older groups in recent years, across types of participation and party affiliation. We find that there is not much of a dip in political activity among the old-old. They are still quite active, particularly when it comes to donating money to campaigns and voting. Additionally, we control for physical capability and education to understand what factors that may shape which and why older Americans participate.

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For decades one of the most difficult problems facing scholars of religion is how to classify individuals into simplified, yet meaningful categories. Over time a number of classification schemes have been proposed with RELTRAD being the most popular of these methods. However, in recent years the explosion of machine learning has allowed researchers the ability to use algorithms that have no pre-conceived notions or inherent biases to help illuminate problems in the social sciences. Using the technique of k-means clustering to sort individuals into six religious categories, this note offers a slightly different way for scholars to think about religious classification. In the end, the algorithm sees five religious categories, and believes that the distinction between mainline Protestants and Catholics as largely non-existent, while evangelical Protestants are a much more heterogeneous group than has previously been described.

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Exit polls reported by various news organizations provide a snapshot of LGBT voters, which indicates they are generally solid Democrats in the ballot box. However, exit polling does not provide the nuance necessary to describe the full range of how the LGBT community votes and how they perceive social and economic issues. Using the largest random sample survey of LGBT voters ever made publicly available, this research describes a group that is decidedly to the left of the political spectrum, but distinct from self-identified Democrats in several ways. Most notably, people who are both pro-life and LGBT were much more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 than pro-life Democrats. These results indicate that there is a need to better understand the relationship between the LGBT community and abortion opinion, both theoretically and analytically.

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Under Review