Taylor Boas’ Evangelicals and Electoral Politics in Latin America: A Kingdom of This World is a major contribution to the literature on religion and politics. Boas seeks to explain descriptive representation, i.e., the extent to which elected officials mirror the demographic makeup of the populations they represent. Women legislators represent women, Japanese–Brazilian legislators represent Brazilians of Japanese descent, evangelical legislators represent evangelicals. The topic is important because Latin America has become more pluralistic in religious identifications. Evangelicals (defined broadly to include all Protestants) and those declaring no religion have both increased their population shares, while affiliation with the Catholic Church has decreased. Issues involving sexuality, especially those involving same-sex marriage and legalised abortion, are prominent on legislative agendas. Elections once dominated by economic cleavages are now influenced, as in the United States, by social cleavages.
Descriptive representation of evangelicals varies considerably across Latin America and is not always equally proportional to the size of the evangelical population. The usual explanations for the varying differences between evangelical population shares and legislative seat shares centre on voting behaviour and formal institutions. Voting behaviour arguments suggest that the discrepancies reflect national differences in the willingness of evangelicals to vote for coreligionists. Formal institution arguments claim that different kinds of electoral systems favour or repress the ability of groups like evangelicals to win elected offices.
Boas argues that these explanations – willingness and electoral institutions – are partial and incomplete. He demonstrates this with two quantitative analyses. Relying on a Facebook-generated sample that is both younger and more educated than a true probability sample, an experimental conjoint analysis shows that evangelicals in Brazil, Chile and Peru are willing to vote for evangelical candidates in roughly similar proportions. This is interesting but inconclusive. Unlike the conjoint analysis, other candidate attributes (gender, age, education, policy stances, etc.) in the real world are far from randomly distributed. We cannot know how actual voters weigh the different mixes of religion, policy stance, gender, etc., in the candidates they actually confront. Recognising this problem, Boas responds with an ecological analysis of municipal-level voting results. Evangelical candidates perform better in municipalities with higher proportions of evangelical residents. In Brazil, for example, a 1 per cent increase in the evangelical population is associated with a 0.18 per cent increase in the share of the vote captured by evangelical legislative candidates.
I suspect that Boas’ conclusion is correct, but the analysis seems problematic. Questions of the ecological fallacy aside, the real problem is one of offer, of supply. Boas’ unit of analysis is the municipality, but in Brazil whole states, not municipalities, are electoral districts. Candidates do not make equal campaign efforts across all their states’ municipalities. They campaign where they have political histories, where they form alliances with local bosses, or where their policy proposals find responsive voters. Evangelical candidates campaign where evangelical populations are large; non-evangelical candidates avoid such places. The effective slate of candidates from which voters choose varies among municipalities precisely by the predominant social, religious and ethnic characteristics of municipal voters.
It’s not entirely clear whether Boas thinks the institutional explanation is wrong or merely incomplete. I suggest that institutional explanations work well in explaining cross-country differences in long-term levels of evangelical representation but less well in explaining the rates of change in evangelical representation within each country. Fortunately, change is really the central focus of Boas’ book. Its core, an explanation of long-term growth and short-term volatility in descriptive representation, is based on the theory of critical junctures. What motivates evangelicals to seek electoral office? Their initial motivations were material. Evangelicals needed to respond – starting at the beginning of the twentieth century – to a material threat, the threat to religious equality posed by the efforts of the Catholic Church to fight liberal reform, recover its colonial era social and legal dominance, and repress Protestant recruitment. Their second motivation – beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century – has been ideational. Evangelicals responded to threats to their core values, threats represented by demands for same-sex marriage and legalised abortion.
Boas’ critical junctures approach focuses on Brazil, Chile and Peru, three countries with quite disparate ratios of evangelical population to seat shares. Brazil has a large evangelical population and a large contingent of evangelical legislators. Chile’s evangelical population (as a percentage of all Chileans) is about two-thirds of Brazil’s, but Chile has few evangelical legislators. Peru’s evangelical population share is about two-thirds of Chile’s, and while Peru has a far higher proportion of evangelical legislators, the evangelical share has been quite volatile in response to domestic politics, especially the rise and fall of Alberto Fujimori. Boas develops and supports the argument with deep and thoughtful dives into the documentary record and interviews with evangelical leaders.
The first critical juncture, the threat to material interests, produced varying evangelical responses. In Brazil the Catholic Church’s aggressiveness forced evangelicals to mobilise and elect legislators; in Chile the Church’s lesser hostility allowed evangelicals to maintain their aversion to electoral politics. Peru’s evangelicals faced a threat more like their Brazilian compatriots, but Peru’s smaller evangelical cohort produced a more limited electoral mobilisation.
The second critical juncture reflects sexuality politics. In Brazil, Catholic legislators did not lead the fight against abortion and same-sex marriage, so evangelicals filled that space, mobilising and electing more legislators. In Chile, the Church actively fought to stop or weaken legislation involving abortion and same-sex marriage; evangelicals thus had fewer incentives to take up these fights. In Peru, the divisions stemming from support or opposition to Fujimori, coupled with the chaos and weakness of political parties, limited the ability of both Catholic conservatives and evangelicals to fight the battles of sexuality politics. Evangelical factions aligned with fujimorismo strongly opposed the new ‘gender ideology’, but they struggled to work with anti-fujimorista evangelicals even though they shared gender perspectives.
Boas recognises that his theory of descriptive representation is inductive in the sense that the argument is based on his interpretation of the three cases. In the concluding chapter he extends the theory to Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala (with the caveat that Guatemala has many evangelicals but little democratic history). Colombia’s permissive electoral institutions should lead to a relatively high seats/population ratio, but actual levels of evangelical representation in the legislature are quite low. Boas offers two explanations for Colombia’s paucity of evangelical representatives. The raw numbers of Protestants in the population remain quite small, and Catholic conservatives fought the sexual politics issues alongside evangelicals. Thus evangelical leaders, as in Chile, felt less pressure to mobilise. In Costa Rica the Catholic Church never lost its historic privileges. Because it remained a privileged actor with little sense of grievance, the Church rarely mobilised politically, and evangelical forces felt no need to counter-mobilise. After 2018, however, a decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a decision that forced Costa Rica to recognise same-sex marriage, pushed sexual politics to centre stage. Evangelicals, leading opposition to that decision, elected 25 per cent of Costa Rica’s deputies, but much of their electoral support came from non-evangelical social conservatives.
Overall, Boas’ critical junctures theory is persuasive, mostly because of the author’s impressive documentary and interview research. The quality of the writing is quite high (although it would be nice if Cambridge University Press paid a little more attention to copy editing). In the future, I would urge scholars to investigate two complementary facets of this story. What is the effect on descriptive representation of the struggles of evangelical leaders, either by attracting new adherents or by increasing their political projection, for primacy in their communities? These struggles should vary according to the personalisation (very high in Brazil) of evangelical organisation. Second, how do evangelical legislators behave in legislative offices? In Brazil (especially compared to Chile), coalitional presidentialism centres on clientelistic outputs, both patronage and pork. Evangelical legislators play that game skilfully, trading votes on issues of lesser concern for benefits for themselves and their churches. Inside legislatures, with rules and norms providing varying incentives to evangelical politicians, institutions still matter.
