Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Clements, G. A. (2020). Faith Matters : Towards a Group Theory of Evangelicals’ Role in American Politics. Retrieved from http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_libsubv1_scholarship_submission_1607004336_bc2dfcd7
While scholars’ interest in the connection between white Evangelicals and conservative politics is far from new, political science as a discipline has insufficiently determined the role that religious identification has on political behavior. Because of this, I attempt to reorient scholarship on the subject by applying recent advances in political behavior, specifically Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster’s Theory of Negative Partisanship and Larry Bartels and Christopher Achens’ Group Theory of politics towards the end of developing a working theory of Evangelicals’ Group identity concerning politics. Additionally, this project draws literature from religious history alongside sociology and psychology to better determine the correlation between Evangelicals’ religious and political identities. Therefore, this project seeks to better define the American Evangelical’s effect on political behavior by examining their perceptions of the political out-group and how this informs political determinations. To accomplish this goal, this project uses the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Politics Survey from 1994-1995, 1996, 2011, 2014, and 2016 to create a time series, with which I observe the effect of Evangelical religious identification on political views over time. The project’s central hypothesis is that as religious embeddedness (attendance, affiliation, and socialization) increases, so do negative perceptions of the political out-group, leading to solidifying religious identity with conservative political identity.
Keywords
political behavior, political psychology, religion and politics, evangelicalism
Clements, G. A. (2020). Faith Matters : Towards a Group Theory of Evangelicals’ Role in American Politics. Retrieved from http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_libsubv1_scholarship_submission_1607004336_bc2dfcd7