In this book, Ryan Claassen addresses an interesting, but relatively narrow, research question. He seeks to address the issue of whether or not the major political parties in the United States have been “captured” by unrepresentative activists who are religiously distinctive. As the title suggest, Claassen considers the hypothesis that the contemporary Republican Party is disproportionately responsive to the preferences of religiously motivated evangelical conservatives, while the Democrats have come to be dominated by irreligious agnostics.
Claassen regards this hypothesis as fundamentally flawed, and seeks to supplant it with a “representational” model of partisan activity. He acknowledges, as he must, that something about the issue attitudes of supporters of the U.S. political parties has changed. There are clear, and growing, partisan difference on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as similar distinctions on issues of assistance to African Americans and foreign policy. Nevertheless, Claassen argues that these changes are not attributable to the increased visibility or influence of religiously unrepresentative activists, but rather are occasioned by the “usual suspects” surrounding partisan change: generation replacement, attitude change, changes in partisan affiliation and voter turnout among certain groups (such as white, southern evangelicals), and increased strength of the relationship between issue attitudes and party identification.
Partisan activism clearly does matter in the mobilization of voters, and, perhaps by extension, electoral outcomes. However, Claassen shows that changes in the pool of activists for both parties are generally representative of the religious, attitudinal, and demographic bases of the mass publics affiliated with each party, and that changes in activism are caused less by ideological motivation than by more mundane causes, such as increases in social capital (education, income, leisure time, etc). The issue bases of the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States have changed, but have changed in response to more mundane forces like population replacement and the gradual empowerment of religiously distinctive citizens.
Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans? has a great deal to recommend it. Claassen makes his case carefully and ultimately persuasively, demonstrating an impressive, yet accessible, command of statistical methods. His analysis of diverse religious traditions is sensitive and nuanced. Of particular interest is his analysis of the dynamics of activist recruitment, in which he demonstrates conclusively that changes in the religious composition of the parties’ activist pools are a consequence, rather than a cause, of changes in each party’s religious base (Chapter 6). Further, contrary to the most commonly drawn conclusions of the “capture thesis,” the relationship between religious variables and the composition of the activist pool has changed most noticeably among Democratic activists (especially African American evangelicals). Thus, this work contains a great deal of material that will serve as a starting point for future research on the role of religion in long-term partisan change.
On the other side of the ledger, the book contains a few problems, and they are mostly conceptual in nature. My first reading led me to suspect that the hypothesis that the parties had been “captured” by religiously unrepresentative groups of activists was something of a straw man. The material Claassen uses to document the existence of the capture hypothesis is a mix of journalistic and scholarly sources, with an unfortunate emphasis on the latter. It is interesting to note that Claassen does not reference Morris Fiorina’s Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (2005), which contains a cogent argument that the heated controversies over social issues are in fact an elite-dominated discussion. Fiorina’s analysis would have greatly complemented Claassen’s use of Edward Carmines and James Stimson’s Issue Evolution (1989).
More generally, Claassen’s overall literature review (which will be a valuable resource for other scholars in its own right) suggests that, among academic political scientists, there exists substantial skepticism about the party-capture hypothesis, and that the weight of scholarly evidence seems to reject this idea. While the idea that one party or another has been “captured” by religiously motivated or distinctive activists might make a compelling story for Fox News or MSNBC, most of Claassen’s intended audience (academic political scientists) are likely already sympathetic to his analysis.
This may seem like a small matter, and perhaps it is. However, the focus on the capture hypothesis represents, in my view, something of a missed opportunity. Claassen’s empirical analyses provide a great deal of material for more general theories of partisan change and party realignment. The notion that changes in the demographic and attitudinal bases of America’s political parties come about glacially (e.g., both very gradually and inexorably) would seem to have profound implications for previous partisan changes. This work evokes analyses of secular realignment that date back to V. O. Key, and, slightly more recently, to analyses conducted by Kristi Andersen and John Petrocik. In other words, I suspect that Claassen’s analysis and argument are theoretically much more consequential than the book itself might suggest.
In sum, Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans? is a valuable contribution in its own right, and represents a potentially important contribution to a long-running theoretical conversation in political science. For those of us who still take seriously the notion of “scientific progress” in the social sciences, Claassen’s effort merits our careful attention.
