Honors Theses
Date of Award
5-2021
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Connor Dowling
Second Advisor
Robert Brown
Third Advisor
Julie Wronski
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The importance of religion, or lack thereof, in determining vote choice has seen a growing body of literature in the last few decades, especially in Europe and the United States. Given the way religion has been ingrained in American society since its inception, it is not surprising that political candidates would use language cues as a way to signal that they share certain beliefs with their voters. These cues do not always have to be uttered by the political candidates themselves as, for example, the spouses of political candidates are often deployed as surrogates for the candidate. The experiment I use is a vignette-style survey experiment that presents participants with one of three scenarios: (1) a brief introduction paragraph to a candidate, (2) the same introduction to a candidate, but with a non-religious quote from a spouse, (3) the same candidate introduction with a religious quote from the spouse. The results of this survey indicate that spousal religious cues can have an effect on ideological and religious perceptions of political candidates, leading to the conclusion that spouses are perceived as extensions of the candidates themselves.
Recommended Citation
Murphy, Joseph III, "The Effects of Spousal Cues on Candidate Religious and Ideological Perceptions" (2021). Honors Theses. 1643.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1643
Accessibility Status
Searchable text
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.