Church-Going and Voting Behavior
My new NYT column, written while voting was still going on, looks at why the parties may have abandoned the center on religious issues. Here's the opening:
Have religious issues become more important in politics because too few Americans go to church?
That is the surprising suggestion of a new working paper by the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser and two doctoral students, Jesse M. Shapiro and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. (The paper, "Strategic Extremism: Why Republicans and Democrats Divide on Religious Values," is online at http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty /glaeser/papers.html.)
The paper starts with a puzzle: In a majoritarian system like ours, political economists generally predict that candidates will converge toward the center of the spectrum, so as to attract as many votes as possible. This is the "median voter theory." But it doesn't seem to describe what's happened in American politics. On divisive religious issues like abortion, the two parties aren't hugging the center. They're abandoning it.
While most people know that the Republican Party has taken an increasingly strong anti-abortion position, the authors note that the Democratic Party has simultaneously moved in the opposite direction.
In 1976, the Democratic platform said, "We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion," while terming a constitutional amendment overturning Roe v. Wade merely "undesirable." In this year's platform, by contrast, Democrats declared that they "stand proudly" for a woman's right to an abortion, "regardless of her ability to pay."
For the explanation of why this is happening (or at least a good theoretical model of why it may be), read the rest here.
There's neither new Great Awakening, the favorite conservative spin, or "a huge fundamentalist Christian revival," Andrew Sullivan's fear (as usual, he omits the hugely influential Catholic element). What's different today is that fewer, not more, Americans go to church.
Here's a chart that didn't make it into the paper. Thanks to reader Mark Draughn for the HTML coding.
State Percent attending church at least monthly Increased probability of voting Republican* California 37.9% 10.7% New York 47.5% 9.6% Illinois 51.2% 6.9% Texas 56.2% -1.3% South Carolina 61.8% 4.2% *in the previous presidential election, given monthly church attendance, holding other factors, e.g., race, constant
The data are from 1972-2000.