主教对政治有影响吗？来自意大利的证据

中文摘要

本文研究宗教领袖是否以及如何影响政治。聚焦于1948—1992年间的意大利教区，我们发现，现任主教的身份能够解释基督教民主党（DC）得票率变动中的很大一部分。这一结果在采用不同样本和时间窗口的多项检验中均保持稳健。进一步考察作用机制后，我们发现主教的两个特征具有重要影响：（i）其政治文化；（ii）其与民众的互动，其中后者使用文本分析技术进行衡量。

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 text-analysis techniques.