Essays on Social Contexts and Individual Politics: The Political Influence of Religious Institutions and Ethno-Racial Neighborhood Contexts

Citizens regularly encounter social contexts that have important consequences for political behavior. This dissertation evaluates the political influence of two such environments: religious institutions and ethno-racial neighborhood contexts.;The first two essays consider the role of political cue-giving as a mechanism of influence in religious institutions. Essay one examines the content of political messages disseminated at church using an original collection of more than 21,000 sermons from over 2,100 U.S. Christian clergy. It evaluates the extent to which clergy messages include explicitly political commentary, such as overt critiques or praises of political institutions, policies and officials and direct calls to political action. It demonstrates that most sermons do not contain explicitly political cues, and that the explicitness of sermons varies by theological ideology and levels of political engagement.;Essay two uses an experiment to evaluate the impact of political cues in religious messages on political behavior. It demonstrates that while political content in Christian religious messages does influence Christians' political behavior, implicitly political cues are more effective than explicitly political appeals at priming Christians' religious orientations and impacting Christians' political attitudes, moral issue evaluations, political engagement and political participation. The implication of essays one and two is clear: the greater frequency and efficacy of cues received at church that avoid direct references to politics helps explain the politicization of Christianity in contemporary American politics.;Essay three focuses on the influence of neighborhood interactions with businesses owned by ethno-racial out-groups. It argues that local exchanges with businesses owned by out-groups are fundamental in shaping out-group attitudes; they facilitate inter-group contact and provide salient indicators of the ethno-racial distribution of local economic power. Using a novel data set that relies on U.S. Census data on minority business ownership, this essay demonstrates that blacks, Latinos and whites respond differently to out-group economic empowerment. While blacks and Latinos become less hostile towards each other as Hispanic and black business ownership increases, respectively, whites become more antagonistic towards out-groups as out-group business ownership increases. These findings have important implications for the political challenges and opportunities posed by an increasingly diverse society.