Evangelicals and legislative vote: Confessional diversity and vote for deputies of the evangelical caucus in Brazil

This article analyzes the impact of the diversity of evangelical denominations at the municipal level on the proportion of votes obtained by those members of Congress belonging to this demographic group. To reach this goal, we employ demographic and electoral data, as well as the composition of the evangelical caucus in the 2014 elections to Congress. We compare the effect of confessional diversity in the municipalities between two groups of elected representatives: evangelicals and nonevangelicals. We found that the higher the number of evangelical churches in the municipality, the more significant the proportion of votes obtained by the evangelical deputies. Controlling the effect of confessional diversity on electoral performance by other members of Congress also enabled us to confirm that the observed effect was exclusive to evangelical deputies and not replicated in other representatives. The results provide consistent empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that there is complementarity between religious denominations about voting.