The Impact Of Religion On Elections

The impact of religion on elections
A behavioral approach regarding the religious mentality of American voters and the voting of the Republican Party leading to the question: “If America is broadly religious, how come the right-wing party (Republican) doesn’t always win?”

Alejandro Oria Lombardía
Introduction to Governments and Politics
Grado en Economía y Negocios InternacionalesIntroduction.
To introduce the essay I’ll start by talking about choosing the concept of the research question, and how is it related to political science.
First of all, the research question: How come Republicans don’t always win? This is a question I wonder because it’s broadly known that America is mostly conservative, plus the amount of religious population is higher than in any other wealthycountry.
“Religion and Politics have been inextricably interrelated since the dawn of human culture and civilization.” (Aronoff, Myron 1984: 1).  Consequently, those topics are inherently important for a society and hence, my research question is relevant to political science. The research question itself was chosen due to the dilemmas and controversy regarding the mixture of politics and religion.For the essay, political science will be used to analyze the contemporary situation of religion in the society matters. The case study, a specific situation to exemplify the general, global idea, will mostly concern the US elections (2008 and 2010). To clarify, I won’t write a general essay on religion and politics but the investigation of religion regarding the politics topic and how it makes animpact on elections.
The case study is the USA, because of the high amount of religious population, 95% in the 1990-2000 decade (Ostling, Richard N. 1995: 729) and around 83% in 2000-2010 decade (usatoday.com).
“I hope that no American will waste his franchise and throw away his vote by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant.” This areJohn Kennedy’s idealistic thoughts about how, from his point of view (and form an objective perspective), elections should be.

To conclude this introduction, I’ll finish by summing up the ideas. The impact of religion in politics is obvious but what I want to do is to study how one affects on the other. To do so, I will analyze different points, focusing on the effect of religious ideologiesof voters during elections using the behavioral approach and then, how religion-centered is the society and how this religious society is relevant to the research question.
Chapter 1.
To commence, I will explain some theoretical information important for further reading. The concepts explained in this chapter are necessary for the relation of sociological concepts to political science. Therefore,after describing each concept I will briefly state how this is relevant and useful to the research question. Moreover, there will be in this chapter a brief examination of the situation of the case, including the introduction to the religions.
Firstly, I’ll begin with a society related concept, the behaviouralism.
Behaviouralism was a school of thought in political science which emphasized thestudy of individuals rather than institutions. The focus was on voters rather than elections, legislators rather than legislatures and judges rather than the judiciary. The aim was to use statistical techniques to discover scientific generalizations about individual political attitudes and behaviour (Hague, Rod & Harrop, Martin 2004: 78). As seen in the definition, behaviouralism focuses theobject of study anthropocentrically, meaning that here mankind is the protagonist. The study of human beings individually, rather than institutions helps us to understand their way of thinking, in a kind of psychological manner. It could be said that behavioursalism is a part of what sociology studies. According to Weber (1994), sociology is indeed important to political studies and therefore,...