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Do Bishops Matter for Politics? Evidence From Italy

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  • Gianandrea Lanzara
  • Sara Lazzaroni
  • Paolo Masella
  • Mara P. Squicciarini

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Gianandrea Lanzara & Sara Lazzaroni & Paolo Masella & Mara P. Squicciarini, 2023. "Do Bishops Matter for Politics? Evidence From Italy," Working Papers wp1179, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    • Handle: RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1179
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Troncone, Massimo & Valli, Roberto, 2024. "Who Pays for the Church? Political Connections and Religious Clientelism in Post-War Italy," OSF Preprints nsyc3, Center for Open Science.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact

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