📃 Brother Votes for Brother: The Effects of Pentecostal Political Influence in Brazil
Awarded LACEA’s Londoño Prize in 2023.
Media: uc3nomics (English); Nada es Gratis (Spanish).
Pentecostals are playing an increasingly important role in Latin American politics, supporting pastors and far-right candidates for elected office. In this paper, I use the staggered translation of the Bible into indigenous languages by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a 20th century US evangelical organization, to isolate exogenous variation in the growth of the Brazilian Pentecostal movement. Focusing on municipalities in which indigenous languages are spoken, I find that the growth of Pentecostalism had substantial effects on political outcomes, increasing the vote share of far-right candidates in presidential elections and the vote share of candidates associated with evangelical churches.
📃 The Catholic Church and its effects on Redistributive Conflict in Brazil
Monica Martinez-Bravo,
Daniela Solá and
Guadalupe Tuñon
The Catholic Church is one of the oldest and most influential institutions in human history. While a long tradition in social sciences has examined the social and political effects of different denominations, we know little about whether doctrinal changes within the Catholic Church have influenced these outcomes. In this paper, we build on the framework developed by Tuñon (2017) and examine the consequences of the shift from progressive to conservative doctrine triggered by the appointment of John Paul II in 1978. This change had dramatic implications in Latin America, where progressive priests and bishops actively promoted redistributive agendas. We focus on the case of Brazil, where the progressive Church had been highly involved in the landless movement; a redistributive conflict in which poor and landless peasants invaded large landholdings to force land redistribution. We collect historical data on the identity, appointment, and turnover of all priests and bishops in Brazil from 1965 to 1997. We combine these data with a highly detailed dataset on the number of land invasions at the municipality-year level. Using the staggered replacement of progressive bishops for more traditional ones after 1978, we find that the removal of progressive religious leaders halted the land invasion movement. These results suggest that changes in the leadership of the Church can have important consequences for the emergence or suppression of social conflict.
📃 Does crime increase support for far-right movements? The case of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro
In 2018 the homicide rate was reaching its historical record in Brazil and Bolsonaro ran for elections with an aggressive anti-crime platform. In this paper, I exploit a quasi-experimental variation generated by introducing police units in favelas near the Olympic facilities of Rio de Janeiro. For each census tract in Rio de Janeiro I show there is variation in the homicide rate according to proximity to a favela and whether or not there are police units installed. In addition, I show that the introduction of police units also had an effect on the votes obtained by Bolsonaro in 2018. Results suggest that an increase of one homicide per 100,000 inhabitants corresponds to a 2.8 p.p. increase in the share of votes won by Bolsonaro in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro.
