10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC Schmidt, Eric Eric Schmidt Indiana University Harvard Dataverse 2017 Social Sciences Religion and politics; American politics; public opinion; sophistication; Evangelical Protestants; Roman Catholics Schmidt, Eric Eric Schmidt Indiana University 2017-01-30 2017-01-31 10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC/BXROJI 10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC/IZWT13 10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC/XMBIXQ 10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC/OZE7B9 10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC/K7PPIR 10.7910/DVN/BEQRZC/UDVIBK 16555 74997 16457 33706 16580 16482 type/x-r-syntax text/tab-separated-values type/x-r-syntax type/x-r-syntax type/x-r-syntax type/x-r-syntax 1.0 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Scholarly accounts of elite-mass communication often suggest that political sophistication is a necessary condition for adopting the attitudes of partisan elites. Some have also suggested that political knowledge promotes religious-political issue constraint among religious identifiers. This paper contributes to the political sophistication literature by piloting and testing a new measure, religious-political sophistication (RPS), assessing knowledge of church teaching on particular political issues. Using original measures launched on the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I show that for evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics, RPS (in conjunction with frequent church attendance) depresses support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Moreover, I argue that assessing RPS this way is not fatally contaminated by unsophisticated respondents interpolating that their clergy must share their political positions. Results suggest religion-and-politics scholars should adopt RPS measures to gain a greater understanding of the unique sources of political communication upon which religious identifiers draw. Dataset and code for reproducing (in R) all tables and figures in the published article. Please contact errschmi@indiana.edu for any questions/clarifications.