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Pastors for Pinochet: Authoritarian Stereotypes and Voting for Evangelicals in Chile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2016

Taylor C. Boas
Taylor C. Boas*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA; e-mail: tboas@bu.edu
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Abstract

How does a candidate’s religion affect voting behavior in societies without politically salient interdenominational cleavages? Communicating one’s faith should win votes among fellow believers, but in the absence of intergroup competition, it should not directly affect the vote of out-group members. Yet a candidate’s religion can also influence out-group voting behavior via stereotypes that are politically salient. This article uses a survey experiment, conducted prior to Chile’s 2013 election, to examine how priming evangelicals’ historical support for the government of General Augusto Pinochet affects vote intention for an evangelical candidate for Congress. Identifying a candidate as evangelical boosts vote intention among evangelical respondents but does not directly affect members of the out-group. Among right-wing non-evangelicals, the Pinochet prime increases vote intention for an evangelical candidate, but it has no effect for center-left voters. These results suggest that pinochetismo remains salient for a new generation of right-wing voters in Chile.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Winter 2016 , pp. 197 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2016 

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