A person’s beliefs about race can influence whether they vote on Election Day, but how this dynamic plays out depends largely on a person’s religious and cultural background. A recent study published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics found that holding conservative racial attitudes was associated with higher turnout among white, Asian American, and Latino evangelicals, while the very same attitudes were associated with lower turnout among black evangelicals. These results suggest that the overlapping social communities to which people belong can completely change the way individual biases motivate political behavior.
Nathan K. Chan, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University, initiated this study to understand differences in voting participation among religious Americans. Although white evangelicals now represent a declining share of the total U.S. population, they consistently represent a unified and active voting bloc. Their share of the electorate is consistently higher than the actual population.
Previous research has demonstrated that people often make political choices based on their feelings toward different social groups. Political scientists track a concept known as racial resentment and map these feelings in national surveys.
This concept refers to certain conservative racial attitudes. Those who score high on racial resentment generally believe that Black Americans face little societal discrimination and must overcome challenges without structural or government support. People who score low on racial resentment generally recognize systemic obstacles created by a history of slavery and discrimination.
Chan wanted to investigate whether this particular type of racial hostility actively influences people to vote. He reasoned that overlapping social identities can collide to shape human behavior at the voting booth. In other words, an individual’s religious community and racial background can determine whether personal bias is a reason for voting or abstaining.
To understand this, Chan turned to a psychological framework known as conflict decision theory. People experience internal friction when faced with complex choices where no single option perfectly matches all of their personal values. This cognitive strain can lead to abandoning the decision altogether and taking no action.
Chan suggested that individuals’ religious identities and racial backgrounds can cause just this kind of friction during elections. He expected white evangelicals would experience no such conflict. In recent political cycles, the norms of the white evangelical community have often aligned with conservative political positions and candidates. Chan predicted that high levels of racial resentment would strongly encourage white evangelicals to vote because their political, religious, and racial identities often align in the same direction.
In contrast, black communities have unique social norms centered around racial solidarity. Chan theorized that black people who hold conservative views about their racial group may perceive a severe disconnect between their personal attitudes and the expectations of their peers. Unless these conflicting pressures are overcome, no action may be taken on election day.
Scholars have recently begun to pay close attention to expressions of anti-Black prejudice among non-Black people of color. Research shows that Asian Americans and Latinos may have negative views of Black Americans. Because some evangelical theologies emphasize personal responsibility, Chan predicted that Asian American and Latino evangelicals might feel spiritually and politically empowered to act on conservative racial attitudes when voting.
To evaluate these ideas, Chan analyzed data from the 2020 Post-Election Collaborative Multiracial Survey. This particular survey clearly oversamples minority populations, making it very useful for this kind of political tracking. Standard national polls often lack the statistical power to compare the habits of smaller groups of voters, such as Asian American evangelicals. The study also allowed respondents to complete the survey in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
The survey asked respondents whether they identified as evangelical, fundamentalist, or mainstream Christian. We also asked if the state’s official voting records show that you voted in the November 2020 election.
To accurately measure racial resentment, the survey asked respondents how strongly they agreed or disagreed with four specific statements. For example, one statement asked whether participants agreed that previous generations of slavery and discrimination had created conditions that made it difficult for Black people to break out of the underclass. Another person asked whether he agreed that black Americans should do the same as other minority groups and work their way up through the ranks without receiving special benefits.
Chan collected all of these responses and categorized the participants by race. And he separated those who identified themselves as evangelicals from those who did not. Finally, he used a statistical model to calculate how different levels of racial resentment relate to a person’s stated likelihood of voting.
He controlled for a wide range of demographic details, including age, income, education level, gender, and whether the respondent was born outside the United States. He also explained the extent of their basic political interests.
This analysis reveals a clear pattern in how racial attitudes correlate with voting. Among white Americans who identified as evangelical, higher levels of racial resentment were strongly associated with significantly higher odds of voting. Statistical models showed that white evangelicals who held the absolute highest levels of racial hostility were approximately 22 percentage points more likely to vote than white evangelicals who held the lowest levels.
For white Americans who did not identify as evangelical, those same racial attitudes had little to do with turnout. The association between racial hostility and increased willingness to vote was completely isolated to evangelical groups.
Chan observed very similar patterns among Asian Americans and Latinos. Asian Americans and Latino evangelicals were much more likely to vote if they felt strongly about racial resentment. The data showed that Latino evangelicals with the highest racial backlash were about 20 percentage points more likely to vote than those with the lowest racial backlash.
Similar to white respondents, Asian Americans and Latinos who do not adhere to evangelical beliefs also showed no such behavioral association. Their racial attitudes did not act as a force for electoral participation.
When we check the data for black Americans, the consequences of our actions have completely changed. Among black evangelicals, high levels of racial resentment were associated with steep and dramatic declines in voter turnout.
Black evangelicals with the most racially conservative views were about 23 points less likely to vote than those with the most racially liberal views. Black respondents who did not identify as evangelical also showed a decline in turnout when they felt high levels of racial resentment, but the decline was slightly less pronounced than in the evangelical group.
These different effects are consistent with the expectations proposed by competitive decision theory. For whites, Asian Americans, and Latino evangelicals, conservative racial attitudes served as a positive trigger to vote in the 2020 election.
For black evangelicals, maintaining exactly the same attitude seemed to create a psychological blockade. To overcome the friction between their personal racial animosity and expectations of racial group solidarity, they may have come to avoid the political process altogether. In an attempt to minimize internal conflict, these voters simply stayed home.
As with all survey-based studies, this study has some analytical limitations. The data rely heavily on self-reported religious identity. If participants were taking the survey at home, the definition of the term evangelicalism might be different.
Some respondents may choose the term based entirely on the particular theology they espouse, while others may choose the term because they see it as a cultural or political label. Future research could introduce other indicators to measure a person’s religious identity. For example, researchers can categorize people by specific church denominations rather than by open-ended labels. Doing so allows us to examine whether these patterns of voter behavior hold across different methodological choices.
Additional research could also examine how frequency of attendance at religious services alters these social dynamics. The first numbers in the regression model suggested that frequent church attendance may actually reduce voter turnout among Latino evangelicals. This unusual detail provides another specific angle for political scientists to consider moving forward.
Ultimately, this finding highlights how a single psychological trait can produce diametrically opposed behaviors in the real world, depending on citizens’ overlapping community ties. Recognizing all of these identity layers can help researchers build more accurate models of political participation.
The study, “Racial Attitudes, Voter Turnout, and Evangelical Politics Across the Racial Divide” was authored by Nathan K. Chan.
