Religion, neighborhood environments and partisan behavior: A contextual analysis

Abstract

By far the dominant approach in the study of religious characteristics and political behavior has been to analyze different denominations and the varying ways in which each denomination affects the political behavior of its members. Using a unique data set collected in South Bend, Indiana, during the 1984 presidential campaign, this paper replicates one such analysis (Segal and Meyer, 1974) based on neighborhood influences and further tests its major hypotheses concerning the effects of religion. This paper measures and considers the effects of church context as well as neighborhood contexts, thus addressing two questions: how does the neighborhood environment affect members of different denominations and religions; and to what extent are individuals influenced by church environments as opposed to neighborhood environments? The structure of the South Bend data allows for neighborhoods and individual churches to be utilized as the primary units of analysis, and for contextual measures to be calculated as well. The results indicate that the neighborhood environment does have differential effects for different denominations, especially in regard to partisanship, and further shows that church environments play an important role in influencing individual political behavior (voting), even after controlling for other individual-level variables. These findings strengthen the argument for considering churches and other religious institutions as significant units of political influence.