Non-Religious Identity Salience for Candidate Choice

Abstract

Religion is on the decline in the United States. Americans increasingly report low religiosity, have less attachment to religion, and a rapidly growing number identify as nonreligious. In Congress, the story is different. While a quarter of the public identifies as nonreligious, only one member of Congress does. Why are the nonreligious vastly underrepresented in government? I use a conjoint candidate choice experiment to causally link religious voters’ bias against nonreligious candidates to reduced support for them in electoral settings. I demonstrate that bias against the nonreligious affects electoral decisions and is causally linked to the exclusion of the nonreligious from government. Furthermore, I show that nonreligious voters only exhibit in-group support for candidates who explicitly identify as Atheists, not agnostic or candidates that merely lack a religious identity.