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Does Religious Attendance Increase Immigrant Political Participation?: A Case Study in Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2017

Liang Jiang
Liang Jiang*
Affiliation:
University of Technology Sydney
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Liang Jiang, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. E-mail: Liang.Jiang-3@student.uts.edu.au.
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Abstract

The relationship between religion and immigrant political participation has not been rigorously investigated in the literature set in Australia. In this study, I test whether religious attendance influences electoral and non-electoral participation among immigrants. Drawing on data from the 2013 Australian Election Study, I demonstrate that the impact of religious attendance on political participation may be overstated. I find that religious attendance is not significantly related to electoral and non-electoral participation among immigrants in Australia. This result may relate to three factors: the ability of religious attendance to affect immigrants’ key political resources; competition between religious and secular organizations; and the political salience of particular religious denominations within the Australian context. This study does not provide the much sought-after empirical confirmation to associational theories of political participation, but instead sounds a note of caution about the universal applicability of such theories.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 440 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 2015 Conference of the Australian Political Science Association, and I would like to thank the participants on our panels at that conference. Thanks to Clive Bean, Christina Ho, and Paul Djupe for very helpful comments. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful comments and suggestions on the paper.

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