For a political science seminar about identity politics and group behavior, I researched the intersection of race, religion, and politics in the identities of American evangelicals. I engaged heavily with Pew Research Center data from the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study and from surveys regarding evangelical identity and the politics of Donald Trump. Much of my research was facilitated by Pew’s accessible and interactive presentation of the data. Part of my final paper for the class revolved around research design for empirically examining the claim I make, which is that voting behavior for white evangelicals is driven by a social identity that aggregates racial and religious identity, while Black evangelical voting behavior is largely driven by racial identity.
The deepest engagement with digital humanities in this project was interacting with Pew data and designing a hypothetical survey to test my hypotheses, which drew on existing or ongoing research about vote choice heuristics (such as a voter selecting a political candidate based on their racial identity and related conclusions).
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