The Religious Affiliation of Representatives and Support for Funding the Iraq War

Abstract

In this article, we add to the evolving literature examining the importance of religious orientation and political elite behavior. We use data on the religious affiliations of United States House of Representative members to test the influence of religion on military funding for the “War on Terror.” Our findings indicate that, even after controlling for traditional political factors, such as ideology and partisanship, representatives' religious backgrounds often played a role in support for this bill. Roman Catholics, African-American Protestants, and those of other religions and the non-religious were more strongly opposed to funding for military intervention than mainline Protestants, even after controlling for other factors. This article provides a further look at the influence of religion and suggests that factors outside the traditional political dynamics may also be important in examining elite behaviors.

Religion and American Public Attitudes on War and Peace

“…American presidents have often taken into account and attempted to mobilize the forces of religion on behalf of their foreign policy objectives (Inboden 2008;Preston 2012). Their decisions may also be shaped by the fact that the foreign policy views of political activists and legislators appear to be influenced by religion in much the same way that public views are (Aguilar, Fordham and Lynch 1997;Green and Jackson 2007;Guth 2007;Collins et al 2011). All this suggests that public attitudes present both constraints and opportunities for presidential leadership, directly and indirectly through influence on other political elites.…”

Personification of Religious Elite, Political Behavior and Identity Politics: A Profile of Regional Elections in Indonesia

“…All this shows that belief in religious elites is firm. The arguments given by religious elites vary widely in interpretation, cues the process of political behavior do influence beliefs and ambivalence of attitudes, but in a way that challenges some broad assumptions about the integrity and importance of religious groups in politics (Calfano, 2010;Collins et al, 2011;Hasenclever & Rittberger, 2000;E. Jung, 2014).…”

Securitization, Normalization, and Representations of Islam in Senate Discourse

“…Negative binominal regressions were conducted to explore factors influencing which senators spoke about Islam across both periods, with the number of speeches pertaining to Islam as the dependent variable. A growing literature demonstrates the effect of religious affiliation on aspects of legislative decision-making (Collins et al 2011; Guth 2014; Oldmixon 2009; Yamane and Oldmixon 2006), and recent work suggests religious identities like “Christian Nationalism” matter in the formation of anti-Muslim prejudice (Shortle and Gaddie 2015). Data on senator religious affiliation for the 106 th and 111 th Congresses was obtained from an original dataset created by McTague and Pearson-Merkowitz (2013) to explore the impact of religion as a possible factor in shaping who spoke about Islam.…”