Peer-reviewed article · 2024
The Extraordinary Effect of Religious Sect Endorsements on Vote Choice: Evidence from Iglesia ni Cristo's “Vote as One” Teaching
Nico Ravanilla · Comparative Political Studies 58(13): 2755-2794
In brief
How the Iglesia ni Cristo's bloc voting (the 'vote as one' teaching) sways Philippine elections: endorsed candidates gain votes one-for-one with the sect's share of voters in a municipality.
Abstract
Sects and strict denominations are growing more rapidly and retaining members better than mainstream religions. To what extent do they influence vote choice? I investigate whether the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC), a religious sect in the Philippines, can compel all members to “vote as one” and support a full ticket of endorsed candidates. Using a triple difference identification strategy, I show that the municipal-level vote-shares of INC-endorsed national candidates are unit elastic with respect to the share of INC voters across municipalities. Conventional low-information rationality models of voting cannot fully explain this. But augmented with social voting in which actions of other group members inform the objective function of voters, a voting model with religious sect endorsements can produce extremely large behavioral responses. These findings have implications on policy as well as on our understanding of strict religions' influence on politics.
Research annotationQuestion, variables, design, findings, and mechanism at a glance▾
- Research question
- Can a religious sect deliver its members as a bloc vote for an endorsed slate of candidates?
- Independent variable (X)
- The natural log of the share of voting-age Iglesia ni Cristo members in a municipality or city, taken from the 2000 census for the 2007 election and the 2010 census for the 2010 election. Endorsement enters by splitting the sample rather than by interaction: the same regression is run separately on endorsed and non-endorsed candidates, and the two coefficients carry opposite point predictions.
- Dependent variable (Y)
- The natural log of a senatorial candidate's vote share in a municipality or city in a given election year, from Commission on Elections returns.
- Identification strategy
- Triple-difference estimation on a stacked panel of candidate by year by municipality observations, covering senatorial candidates in the 2007 and 2010 Philippine elections. The Senate is elected by plurality-at-large from a single national constituency, voters may choose up to twelve candidates, and the sect endorses exactly twelve each cycle, so endorsement is decided nationally and cannot respond to local conditions. The regression includes candidate, municipality, and year fixed effects plus demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic controls. The effect is identified from the change in a municipality's share of voting-age sect members between the two election years, differencing out time-invariant heterogeneity across municipalities and across candidates, which is what makes it a triple difference. Because both sides are in logs the coefficient is an elasticity, and theory predicts it equals 1 on the endorsed subsample and 0 on the non-endorsed subsample.
- Main findings
- With the full set of covariates and fixed effects, the elasticity of endorsed candidates' vote shares with respect to the municipal share of voting-age sect members is 0.97, statistically indistinguishable from 1.00. The same specification on non-endorsed candidates returns 0.01, essentially zero, as the perfectly inelastic prediction requires. No other religious denomination's share explains vote shares of either group. The unit elasticity survives restricting the endorsed sample to candidates who voted against the reproductive health bill, whom sect members had no prior reason to favor, which rules out the possibility that the sect leader simply endorsed candidates his members would have backed anyway.
- Mechanism
- Conventional low-information rationality models cannot generate responses this large. A model with social voting can, because the observed actions of other group members enter each voter's objective function.
- Why it matters
- Documents an endorsement effect large enough that near-complete compliance is the only consistent reading, and shows why strict religions with high retention can convert membership into political power.
- Speaks to
- religion and politicseconomics of religion and club goodsbloc voting and group behaviorendorsements and information shortcutsPhilippine elections
Cite
@article{ravanilla2024inc,
title = {The Extraordinary Effect of Religious Sect Endorsements on Vote Choice: Evidence from Iglesia ni Cristo's “Vote as One” Teaching},
author = {Nico Ravanilla},
journal = {Comparative Political Studies},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1177/00104140241306943},
}