Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/282301 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
Quaderni - Working Paper DSE No. 1179
Publisher: 
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche (DSE), Bologna
Abstract: 
This paper studies whether and how religious leaders affect politics. Focusing on Italian dioceses in the period from 1948 to 1992, we find that the identity of the bishop in office explains a significant amount of the variation in the vote share for the Christian Democracy party (DC). This result is robust to several exercises that use different samples and time windows. Zooming into the mechanism, we find that two characteristics of bishops matter: (i) his political culture, and (ii) his interaction with the population-the latter being measured using state-of-the-art text-analysis techniques.
Subjects: 
Voting Behavior
Religion
Bishops
Leaders
JEL: 
D72
Z12
D02
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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