Politics at the Pulpit: Elite Religious Cues and Immigration Attitudes

Previous scholarship has demonstrated a link between religiosity and immigration attitudes, often inferring the effect of cues from religious leaders as the motivating source. This study directly examines the “elite cues” linking mechanism with an experiment embedded in a nationally representative public opinion survey. We improve on previous research designs by introducing a pretest that measures immigration policy attitudes among respondents which can then be directly compared to posttest measures after the introduction of the elite cue stimulus. Multivariate analysis of the survey results reveal no support for the elite cues explanation. We discuss the implications of these findings for elite religious cues as an influential factor on immigration policy attitudes in the United States as well as assess the appropriateness of survey experiments to test the elite cues mechanism in driving immigration attitudes.