The Effects of Religious Identity and Race on Political Participation and Voter Registration

The relationship between religion and political participation and voter registration has not been investigated through the lens of Identity Theory. In this thesis, I utilize measures of religious affiliation and race to examine their influence on political participation and voter registration. Using data from the American National Elections Study, I run a variety of models to test my hypotheses that political participation levels and voter registration differs across religious affiliation and race. I find mixed support for the hypotheses that I tested. Overall, different religious affiliations had different levels of political participation and voter registration. Additionally, different races had different levels of political participation and voter registration. For the full models for political participation and voter registration, adding the control variables seemed to impact some of the effects that were seen in previous nested models. Regarding Identity Theory, this could mean that certain religious affiliations are not as salient of an identity in political situations as other religious affiliations. Additionally, it could mean that certain racial identities are more salient than other racial identities in terms of political participation and voter registration.