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Religious Influence on Wisconsin Voting, 1928–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Andrew R. Baggaley
Andrew R. Baggaley
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

The extent of religious influence on the closely contested presidential election of 1960 has been much debated. Many have claimed that the Wisconsin primary revealed a religious split which then became one of the main issues of the campaign. This paper reports the results of an analysis of religious influence on voting in that state for several elections since the campaign of 1928, when Alfred E. Smith was the first major-party presidential candidate of the Roman Catholic faith. The thesis which will be defended is that religious influences on voting in Wisconsin, although much reduced from 1928, were still considerable enough to have been critical in an election as close as that of 1960. Several independent types of evidence from voting returns will be presented to bolster this argument.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1962 , pp. 66 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1962

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References

1 Ogburn, William F. and Talbot, Nell, “A Measurement of the Factors in the Presidential Election of 1928,” Social Forces, Vol. 8 (1929), pp. 175–183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Robinson, W. S., “Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 15 (1950), pp. 351–357CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Goodman, Leo A., “Ecological Regressions and Behavior of Individuals,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 18 (1953), pp. 663–664CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Churches and Church Membership in the United States, Series C, Numbers 18 & 19, Bureau of Research and Survey, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (1957).

5 Lewis, Don, Quantitative Methods in Psychology (New York, 1960), pp. 100–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York, 1960), p. 306Google Scholar.

7 Two other villages, Frederic in Polk County and Stockholm in Pepin County, were recorded as more than 80 percent in favor of the school bus issue. However, their vote in other recent elections was so consistently in contradiction to this vote that the author suspected these figures had been inadvertently reversed in reporting. In personal correspondence with the author, the Polk County Clerk suggested that the election inspectors may have committed such an error. These two villages accordingly were excluded both from the “high school-bus” group and the “low school-bus” group.

8 In Wisconsin “towns” are highly rural areas which correspond to the townships of most other states.

9 Newspaper reports during the campaign lead one to believe that Vice-Presidential candidate Kefauver attracted the Wisconsin farmers more than Presidential candidate Stevenson did.

10 Lubell, Samuel, Revolt of the Moderates (New York, 1956), pp. 64–74Google Scholar.

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