Picking Winners? Candidate Selection and Representatives’ Performance in the Southern Baptist Conservative Movement

Movements frequently seek to exert influence by securing official positions for supporters within target organizations (whether legislatures, state bureaucracies, or private entities). However, reliance on representatives leaves movements vulnerable. Prior to selection, prospective representatives may exaggerate alignment with activists. Once in place, representatives are susceptible to cooptive pressures to moderate movement objectives. Using the Southern Baptist conservative movement as a strategic case, this article advances social movement scholarship by centering candidate selection—the process of selecting between alternative potential representatives—as a key setting that conditions activists’ ability to translate political access into movement gains. Operating with incomplete information, movement leaders must estimate the ex ante loyalty of prospective candidates. Their ability to do so depends on the movement’s organizational infrastructure—including resource allocation and management of information asymmetries—as well as its ability to form alliances with actors with institutional knowledge of the target. By demonstrating how the activation of religious categories is embedded within, and inextricable from, organizational infrastructure, the article also deepens the sociology of religion’s turn toward practice theory and advances the integration of social movement scholarship into research on the Christian Right.