Religion is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that informs politics in various ways. This article examines the effects of religious affiliation, religious salience, and religious group advocacy on roll‐call voting in the Wisconsin state legislature. Various studies have demonstrated the impact of religious affiliation on legislative politics, but our use of additional religious indicators allows us to model the religious effect in a more accurate and nuanced manner. Using data from an original survey of state legislators, we utilized structural equation modeling to measure the direct and indirect effects of these religious factors on both the general pattern of roll‐call voting and voting on a high‐salience issue, abortion. Ultimately, the findings indicate that, even when we control for political party affiliation, which is a dominant influence on roll‐call voting, conservative Protestant religious affiliation and high religious salience influence legislative voting. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future studies of religion in the legislative arena.
Objective. This article explores the politics of cultural conflict in the U.S. House of Representatives (1993Representatives ( -1998 by analyzing legislator decision making on reproductive issues. Because reproductive policies represent a major contemporary cultural cleavage between feminists and religious traditionalists, decision making should be influenced by elite-and district-level variables reflective of culture. Methods. Prochoice support scores are derived and, using OLS, are regressed on elite-and district-level cultural and noncultural variables. Results. Republican partisanship and elite ideological and religious conservatism produce low levels of support for prochoice reproductive policies. Conclusions. Cultural theory is a useful lens through which to view congressional politics. In the area of reproductive policy, legislator decision making is influenced by an array of cultural considerations.
We assess clergy political activism dynamics using data from a national survey of Roman Catholic priests. Like their elite counterparts in interest groups and other secular political institutions, clergy encounter expectations and demands from competing principals when determining how to publicly act on key political issues. Building on insights from decades of clergy politics scholarship, we leverage new perspectives of principal-based influence by examining how Catholic priest perception of both local parish finances and diocesan bishop expectations affect their reported political actions. Our findings are consistent with the notion that parish and bishop principals condition priest political behavior, controlling for priest ideology. However, priest political action proves more sensitive to parish financial concerns than bishop encouragement.
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