Religious Affiliation as a Descriptive Voting Cue

Does the religious affiliation of candidates act as a voting cue? Prior research suggests that voters choose which candidate to support under low-information circumstances where the media chooses to report the “horse-race” of politics and candidates choose to maximize votes by keeping their political positions ambiguous (Downs 1957; Page1976). Therefore, voters use candidate characteristics as a means of placing candidate’s positions. I offer a theoretical model where religion is an informative voting cue, which reaps both substantive and descriptive representation. I argue that when the religious affiliation of a candidate matches the religious affiliation of the voter, the voter should be more likely to vote for “one of their own” when all other variables are controlled. I test these hypotheses by analyzing the vote choice of respondents to the ANES 2004 election survey to ascertain whether the religion of candidates, both challengers and incumbents, affects respondents’ electoral decisions. Using logistic regression, I find that a candidate’s religious affiliation influences a respondent’s vote choice and is useful to voters as an electoral cue with descriptive representational qualities.