Pentecostals, churches and campaign finance in 2014 Brazilian elections

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the number of Pentecostal candidates elected for Brazilian legislatures has remarkably grown. Literature has argued that the phenomenon would be related to Pentecostal churches' support. To date, however, this claim was based only in ethnographies or studies relying in a few cases of elected candidates. Drawing from a new data set of Evangelical candidates for the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and state Assemblies, it tries to answer the following questions: do Pentecostal candidates raise less campaign resources than other candidates? What is the effect of being a Pentecostal candidate on vote in Brazilian legislative elections? Is the structure of the church relevant to this effect? Using OLS regression models, I show that there is a positive statistical relationship between being a Pentecostal candidate and campaign spending, between being a Pentecostal and votes, and between the support of more centralized churches and votes.