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Public Opinion and Obama’s Religion

- August 19, 2010

The “Pew Research Center for People and the Press”:http://people-press.org/about/ has “a new report out”:http://people-press.org/report/645/ with a fairly perplexing finding. The percentage of people who think President Obama is a Christian has declined sharply over the past year. In three studies from March 2008, October 2008, and March 2009, the percentage thinking he was a Christian stayed between 47-51%. Then, in the most recent study, it dropped to only 34%. The study was in the field from July 21-August 5th, so I think much of this predates the recent “Ground Zero Mosque” flap. Also, everything at follows is with the caveat that any one survey can always produce a result from the tails of a distribution, so we’ll want to see other surveys replicating this result before we can confidently conclude that public opinion in this regard has indeed shifted. But this is a blog, so let’s just posit for the moment that it indeed has shifted and continue with the discussion.

My question for those of you who study public opinion is the following: don’t we normally expect that factual knowledge about individuals _increases_ over time as that person spends more time in the public eye? And it’s not like this issue wasn’t politicized from the start – opponents of Obama tried to make an issue of his religion during the campaign. So why would we expect fewer people now to know that he is a Christian?

Here’s the best answer I can come up with, and it’s a bit troubling. If we take a Bayesian perspective on the whole thing – people start with a prior, and then update as they get more information – here is the one stylized fact we actually know: Obama’s “approval rating”:http://polltracker.talkingpointsmemo.com/contests/us-approval-obama?ref=fpb has dropped over the past year. So if we imagine that people start with a prior that Obama is a Christian, but it’s not particularly strong. Then time passes and they like him less – that’s the new piece of information. So then they have to update their belief as to whether Obama is a Christian, and lo and behold, fewer people think he’s a Christian. From this perspective, it suggests that – given enough initial uncertainty about a person’s religion – liking that person less makes one less likely to think he is a Christian. Interestingly, the drop in “Obama is a Christian” seems to be evenly split between thinking he is a Muslim and not knowing (other holds steady at 2%).

I’m open to other suggestions, explanations, etc. Also interested in whether readers have any other good examples of knowledge of factual information about a person _declining_ as the person gets better known by the public?