skip to main | skip to sidebar

Scientific Pornography

Interfering with your workday at 14400 kbs

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote?

A new NBER working paper from Alan Gerber, Jonathan Gruber, Daniel M. Hungerman entitled "Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote? Using Blue Laws' Repeal to Estimate the Effect of Religiosity on Voter Turnout." The abstract reads
Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity ("Blue laws") to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. The repeal of Blue Laws caused a 5 percent decrease in church attendance. We measure the effect of Blue Laws' repeal on political participation and find that following the repeal turnout falls by approximately 1 percentage point. This turnout decline, which is statistically significant and fairly robust across model specifications, is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have significant causal influence on voter turnout.
Hungerman and Gruber, as you may remember, had a similar paper to this one recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics examining the impact of religious blue laws on church attendance.
Posted by scott cunningham at 1:33 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Blog Archive

  • November (78)
  • December (77)
  • January (30)
  • February (62)
  • March (59)
  • April (66)
  • May (95)
  • June (159)
  • July (185)
  • August (109)
  • September (111)
  • October (88)
  • November (51)
  • December (13)
  • January (2)

Blogs I read (and so should you)

  • Roger Ebert's Journal
  • Game Politics
  • Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society blog
  • Reason Hit and Run
  • Freakonomics
  • The Superficial
  • Marginal Revolution
  • Chris Blattman
  • EconBrowser