TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gerber,Alan
AU  - Gruber,Jonathan
AU  - Hungerman,Daniel M.
TI  - Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote? Using Blue Laws' Repeal to Estimate the Effect of Religiosity on Voter Turnout
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14303
PY  - 2008
Y2  - September 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14303
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14303.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan S. Gerber
Yale University
Institution for Social and Policy Studies
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06520
Tel: 203/432-5232
E-Mail: alan.gerber@yale.edu

Jonathan Gruber
MIT Department of Economics
E52-355
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-8892
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: gruberj@mit.edu

Daniel M. Hungerman
Department of Economics
University of Notre Dame
439 Flanner Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556-5602
Tel: 574/631-4495
Fax: 574/631-4783
E-Mail: dhungerm@nd.edu
AB  - 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, which is statistically significant and fairly robust across model specifications, is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have significant causal influence on voter turnout.
ER  -