Suchergebnisse

This article examines the viewpoints and policy perspectives of leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States concerning immigration. We find that over time they tend to hold moderate to liberal views and recommend policies that tend to mimic those of the Democratic Party rather than those of the Republican Party. We contrast these views with those of Catholic laity and find that there is a disconnect. In particular, White Catholics tend to hold more conservative views than church leaders and differ widely in their views from the perspectives of Latino, Asian, and African-American Catholics. Perhaps partly because of the disparate cues emanating from Catholic leadership (e.g., liberal on immigration, conservative on abortion) it appears that the Catholic laity turn to political cues to develop their views on immigration. Political forces like partisanship, ideology, attitudes toward Donald Trump, and viewing Fox News are the strongest predictors of Catholics' immigration attitudes.

Although the rise of right-wing populism in Western democracies has received enormous attention from social scientists, there has been much less research directed at the role of religion in creating support for populist movements. In this paper, we consider the influence of religious factors in the development of conservative populism in the United States. We find that ethnoreligious traditions have very different responses to populist themes, with Evangelical Protestants quite supportive of most populist attitudes and atheists and agnostics spearheading the opposition. Many, but not all, of these differences are explained by theological traditionalism, with the religiously orthodox in almost all ethnoreligious groups more prone to take populist stances.

Scholars of American electoral politics have documented the recent partisan realignment of religious groups. Indeed, careful analysts often find that religious variables are better predictors of partisan choice than classic socioeconomic divisions. Still, there has been relatively little effort to put this religious realignment in both theoretical and historical perspective. In this article, we update our previous work on the historical evolution of religious partisanship, demonstrating the continued relevance of ethnocultural (or ethnoreligious) theory, utilized by political historians, and restructuring theory, an important sociological perspective. Both viewpoints help us understand presidential elections since the 1930s, as we demonstrate with data from a wide range of surveys. After utilizing the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to examine the contemporary voting of ethnoreligious groups in greater detail, we test the impact of religious variables controlling for other demographic, attitudinal, and partisan influences and find that religious identities and orientations often retain independent influence even under stringent controls for other factors shaping the presidential vote.

AbstractCatholics have long been an important force in American electoral politics. Once a vital and loyal component of the New Deal Democratic coalition, Catholics in recent decades have shifted their political loyalties away from the Democratic Party to more of a partisan equilibrium. Indeed, by 2012, the White Catholic vote had become predominantly Republican, even in a year in which a Democrat was re-elected to the White House, and on balance party identification among these voters showed a slight Republican edge. Only the growing contingent of Latino Catholics kept the national vote of the entire religious community closely balanced. Despite widespread agreement among scholars that the partisan behavior of Catholics has changed, there is much less consensus on the nature of that change, its permanence, and its causes. We review the historic patterns of Catholic partisanship and voting behavior, discuss three major perspectives on electoral change among Catholics, and test these perspectives with data drawn from the 2012 National Survey of Religion and Politics, with a rich battery of religious measures. We find that socioeconomic factors, religious perspectives, and issue preferences among Catholics all influence partisanship and vote choice, reducing any true "distinctiveness" of the "Catholic vote."