Church Participation and Political Participation

Abstract

The spillover effect postulates that participation in nonpolitical realms of people's lives will affect their political orientations and behavior. Data from the 1987 NORC General Social Survey are used to test these expectations with respect to participation in religious organizations. Results indicate that greater involvement in churches goes with more conservatism and somewhat greater politicization, although there are some variations by race, sex, and denomination.Many Americans are religious, as much evidence testifies (Benson 1981;Erikson, Luttbeg, and Tedin 1988;Niemi, Mueller, and Smith 1989;Neuhaus 1990). This assumes significance because religion has political consequences. In the remainder of this article I focus on just one of these: the spillover effects of individuals' participation in a church on their political orientations and behavior.An important theoretical perspective emerging from the literature on worker participation has been the so-called spillover effect. Pateman (1970) and Dahl (1970) have contended that if workers can meaningfully participate in the workplace, then two significant things can happen: (1) politicization (political interest, issue awareness, participation, political efficacy) might increase; (2) group and community identification might also be enhanced. For the former, simply put, participation in one arena (the workplace) allows the individual to gain certain skills and self-confidence necessary to participate in

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