Melissa Deckman

Holy ABCs! The Impact of Religion on Attitudes about Education Policies

Objective. To examine the impact of religion on attitudes about three controversial education policies: creationism, school prayer, and vouchers. Methods. Using a unique, national survey of school board candidates that I undertook in 1998, I use regression analysis to examine which factors, especially religion, explain support for these three policies. Results. This study finds that conservative Christians are more likely to support such policies than mainline Protestants. Additionally, church attendance appears to have an amplifying effect on evangelicals with respect to support for these issues. By contract, those candidates with non-Judeo-Christian religious identifications have much lower levels of support for creationism and school prayer. However, conservative political ideology remains the strongest predictor of support for creationism, prayer in school, and vouchers. Conclusion. Religious beliefs, sometimes enhanced by church attendance, can have a powerful, direct effect on attitudes about creationism, school prayer, and vouchers among school board candidates. Demonstrating such a link becomes important when considering that school board members play a large role in shaping local education policy.

Gender Differences in the Decision to Run for School Board

Proponents of the political pipeline theory argue that when more women fill the ranks of locally elected positions, the number of qualified female candidates will increase and more women will eventually be elected statewide and nationally. Given that women are elected at the school board level at higher rates than any other political office, do women run for school board in hopes of using it as a stepping stone for a larger career in politics? This article analyzes whether there are gender differences among school board members with respect to the reasons they run for office. Men are more likely than women to be motivated to run to shape education policy and for religious or moral reasons. However, relatively few school board members run with the express purpose of gaining political experience, regardless of gender.

Did the “War on Women” Work? Women, Men, and the Birth Control Mandate in the 2012 Presidential Election

Using a nationally representative data set (N = 3,000), the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, we conduct multivariate regression analysis to determine the empirical impact of attitudes regarding the birth control mandate and abortion on presidential vote choice. We also conduct factor analysis to determine whether voters conceptualized the birth control mandate and abortion similarly. We find that support for the Obama administration’s birth control mandate was significantly related to voting for Obama for both women and men voters, although the impact was stronger for women. However, the impact of the “War on Women” rhetoric on voters’ choices was limited to the issue of insurance coverage for birth control rather than extending to the issue of abortion. Unlike attitudes about abortion, we find that voters conceptualized the birth control mandate less as a “culture war” issue and more as a “role of government” issue. Given this conceptualization of the mandate by voters, our findings reaffirm previous research that suggests that the gender gap in voting is largely driven by attitudinal differences regarding the role of government in providing social welfare benefits and equal opportunity for women.

School Board Candidates and Gender: Ideology, Party, and Policy Concerns

ABSTRACT Using a unique national survey of school board candidates, this article examines the political orientations, policy viewpoints, and candidate platforms of female and male candidates. There are significant partisan and ideological differences between women and men candidates, with women being more politically liberal than men (even after additional controls are considered) and more likely to be Democrats. However, women who run for school board are more likely to be Republicans and are more likely to rate themselves as moderate-to-conservative ideologically. Women and men school board candidates also significantly differ on their views about many (but not all) education policies, especially controversial issues such as multiculturalism, the discussion of homosexuality in public classes, school prayer, and creationism-with women having less conservative views on these matters. Fewer differences emerge between women and men candidates with respect to campaign platforms. Moreover, their policy stances and their campaign platforms showcase women whose views on education policies are clearly moderate and mainstream.

Understanding the Mobilization of Professionals

This article develops a Professional Mobilization Framework to guide research and discussion of the mobilization of nonprofit professionals in issue politics. We use the framework, together with literature on women clergy, to develop expectations about the issue interests and political mobilization of women clergy. We use qualitative interview data and aggregate survey data from 54 women clergy to test the expectations developed in the framework. The results of the study show that the women’s issue agendas focus on racism and intolerance, poverty, and gay rights, while their action agendas stress poverty, community organizing, and reproductive rights. Organizational mobilization and ease of entry appear to push women clergy into far more poverty and community-organizing activities than would be expected based on their interest in these issues alone. Meanwhile, organizational demobilization appears to result in less activity than interest on issues such as gay rights, women’s rights, and racism.

The Politics of Gay Rights and the Gender Gap: A Perspective on the Clergy

In this article, we explore the nexus of gender, religious leadership, and attitudes toward homosexuality and gay rights. Homosexuality has become a frontline issue in American politics, as illustrated most recently by gay marriage battles in the courts and state legislatures as well as state referenda campaigns designed to define marriage legally as the union of a man and a woman. Using survey data from a national random sample of 3,208 clergy who serve in six mainline Protestant denominations, we analyze the extent to which gender operates as a significant predictor of public speech on gay rights issues. Ordinal logistic regression allows us to demonstrate that women clergy are substantially more likely than their male counterparts to speak publicly on gay rights, as well as to model more generally the factors that compel clergy to take action to address this controversial issue in public.

A Gender Gap among Evangelicals? An Examination of Vote Choice by Gender and Religion in the 2008 Presidential Elections

Barack Obama appeared poised to capture more votes among Evangelical women than Evangelical men given the prominence that economic and wartime issues played in the 2008 election. However, I find that no gender gap existed among Evangelicals in 2008; instead, religious tradition trumps gender as a predictor of presidential vote choice. While Obama fared similarly to John Kerry, Evangelical women were significantly more likely to vote for Al Gore than Evangelical men, demonstrating that there may be circumstances in which Democratic presidential candidates can mitigate some of their voting losses to Evangelical women.

Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right by Michelle Nickerson

Long before Sarah Palin’s call for Mama Grizzlies to engage in conservative politics, Michelle Nickerson’s book, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, reminds us that the women active in today’s Tea Party have important antecedents. Nickerson analyzes the role of women as Cold Warriors in postwar America. Applying a gendered lens to grassroots anticommunism efforts in suburban Los Angeles, California, Nickerson’s work joins a growing body of scholarly literature that examines women’s conservative political activism in the 1950s and early 1960s, all of which challenge our notions of the iconic housewife model that celebrated women as domesticated, stay-at-home mothers in Eisenhower-era America. Nickerson paints a vivid picture of self-appointed, “vigilant housewives” who formed study groups and watch dog organizations to monitor the work of locally elected officials and boards of education for subversive activity, which for such activists included school desegregation efforts, promotion of mental health initiatives, and curricular changes that broadened discussions of world politics and the United Nations (UN) in public schools. Such women, whose political writings and speeches emphasized their motherly, even sacred duty as the ultimate protectors of the family, cultivated “a gender consciousness that valorized the local community as the fountainhead of American democracy” (viii). Although Orange County has long been recognized as an important epicenter of the modern conservative movement in America, Nickerson shows that Los Angeles County, which sits just to its north, was also home to a vibrant conservative movement. Nickerson uses the personal histories of five women activists in Los Angeles (LA) to integrate female voices into the larger narrative of anticommunist activity that dominated rightwing politics in the 1950s. Relying on individual histories has limitations regarding the generalizability of her findings, as Nickerson concedes, but her work is at its best when she effectively weaves the personal stories of these housewife activists into the larger rightwing campaigns that united grassroots conservative activists nationwide.