Partisanship and openness to nonreligious candidates for elective office in the United States

Abstract Scholarly interest in the evaluation of atheist candidates for office has been growing. In the aggregate, atheists are a political pariah. However, aggregate effects conceal a wide partisan gulf, with Democrats more open and Republicans more averse to atheist candidates for office. Less is known about biases that nonreligious candidates with less stridently secular views might encounter in political evaluation. Focusing on broadly conceptualized nonreligion, I make several contributions to the literature: 1) I partially replicate the findings on the links between nonreligion and political appraisal using a conjoint experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey; 2) I assess the relative importance of nonreligion and other factors that influence candidate appraisal; 3) I investigate how partisanship and religiosity interact to affect receptivity to candidate nonreligion; and 4) I examine how age and religiosity interact to influence Democrats’ and Republicans’ openness to candidate nonreligion.