Religion and Political Behavior 305
Analyses of the CR have generally focused on the national level. But the impact
of conservative Christian groups may be less visible but have more impact at local or
state level. Independent of the trajectory of certain of the more visible national organi-
zations, the CR has remained consistently strong in terms of subcultural institutional
infrastructure over the past couple of decades at least. This extensive institutional in-
frastructure exists as a powerful force for political activism on certain social issues and
around local and state elections (Smith 1998). For example, the impact of the CR on
mobilizing voters appears to be more significant at the subnational level (Green et al.
1996: 103–16). In these low-turnout elections, the mobilization of even a few hundred
additional voters can have a significant impact.
Whither Catholics?The possibility that Catholic voters are shifting away from align-
ment with the Democratic Party toward a more centrist position is a second issue de-
bated among analysts of religion and U.S. politics. Most social scientists who have
studied this question have reported evidence of Catholic dealignment from the Demo-
cratic Party (e.g., Reichley 1985: 224–5, 299–300; Petrocik 1987; Kellstedt and Noll
1990; Kenski and Lockwood 1991). Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde (1998: 156) even
characterize the shift among Catholic voters as “precipitous.”
Two explanations for the hypothesized shift among Catholic voters have been pos-
tulated. The most common explanation has been that it is driven by economic interests:
Catholics have become progressively more affluent over time, gaining and even sur-
passing Protestants on a number of measures of socioeconomic attainment (cf. Greeley
1989: Chapter 7), and are hypothesized as swinging to the right as a consequence. The
second explanation hypothesizes that Catholic voters were disproportionately resistant
to the increasingly liberal social issue agenda of the Democratic Party since the 1960s.
However, the thesis that Catholic voters have in fact shifted away from the
Democrats is somewhat controversial. Greeley (1985, 1989, 1999) has argued that a
more careful investigation of the data shows that a lot of the trends emphasized by pro-
ponents of the Catholic dealignment thesis are highly exaggerated because they take
the 1960s (an unquestioned high point of Catholic support for the Democratic Party,
driven in part by the candidacy of Catholic John Kennedy in 1960) as their point of
departure. In this view, Catholics were never as closely tied to the Democratic Party
as the dealignment imagery implied, and thus have not shifted nearly as much as has
been hypothesized. Our own work (Manza and Brooks 1997, 1999) has reached similar
conclusions.
Whither Mainline Protestants?“Mainline” or “liberal” Protestant denominations, es-
pecially Episcopalians, Congregationalists (after 1957, the United Church of Christ),
and Presbyterians, have long been overrepresented among the American political elite
and in business, academe, and the military establishment (e.g., Davidson 1994). Reflect-
ing their social and cultural power in American society, the “Protestant establishment,”
as E. Digby Baltzell (1964) famously characterized them, has thus long been viewed by
many social scientists as a solidly Republican constituency in the postwar period. In
example, Bruce 1988: 101–2; Wilcox 1989; Smidt 1989: 2), although the evidence for such
claims is often anecdotal or fairly limited and more systematic investigation has found no
impact on national elections (e.g., Manza and Brooks 1997).