Does church attendance cause people to vote? Using blue laws’ repeal to estimate the effect of religiosity on voter turnout

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity (“blue laws”) to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. The repeal of blue laws caused a 5 percent decrease in church attendance. We measure the effect of blue laws’ repeal on political participation and find that following the repeal turnout falls by approximately 1 percentage point. This turnout decline is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have significant causal effect on voter turnout. We also find that the decline in turnout appears to affect Democratic but not Republican vote shares, and that the effect of blue laws appears to be stronger for Catholics than for others. * We thank Tracy Liu and in particular Gabriel Durazo for assistance in collecting the Blue Laws data, and Shang Ha for research assistance. We also thank seminar participants at Notre Dame for comments. We are grateful to James Snyder, who supplied the election data. This work was supported by the Metanexus Institute and the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies.