CURA Co-Hosts Workshop With Guadalupe Tuñón

The Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA), an affiliated center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, co-hosted an April 17, 2019 talk with Guadalupe Tuñón of Harvard University as part of the Research in Comparative Politics Workshop series.

Tuñón gave a talk entitled “When the Church Votes Left: The Electoral Consequences of Progressive Religion.” From the abstract of the talk:

Can economically progressive religious leaders shape the electoral fortunes of left-wing parties? While existing research on religion and electoral politics focuses on the effect of moral conservatism, the effect of religious ideas about economic redistribution is often overlooked. I argue that church leaders who advance doctrinal interpretations that favor progressive economic policies can become crucial partners of left-wing parties, mobilizing religious adherents in their favor. I test this argument using original archival data from the Catholic Church and drawing on a natural experiment in Brazil around Pope John Paul II’s appointment in 1978. Leveraging plausibly as-if random variation in bishop vacancies, as well as Pope John Paul II’s systematic appointment of conservative bishops to posts where progressives previously held court, I study the effect of progressive bishops on the electoral success of the left-wing Workers’ Party. I find that the left’s electoral prospects suffered significantly in places where progressive bishops were replaced between 1978 and Brazil’s first democratic elections after the military dictatorship. The left’s stronger performance in progressive dioceses can be partly explained by its access to religious networks, which allowed it to build organizational structures that delivered an electoral advantage.

Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) brings together a multi-disciplinary community of scholars to encourage and support research on the role of religion in public affairs. Established in 1985, CURA is the oldest center for the study of religion and world affairs in the United States. Supported by a substantial endowment and grants from funders such as the Henry Luce Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Kroc Institute for International Peace, and the Metanexus Foundation, CURA has sponsored over 140 research projects on five continents that have led to the publication of over 145 books. Learn more about CURA here. 

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