Overview

Why are religious minorities well represented and politically influential in some democracies but not others? Focusing on evangelical Christians in Latin America, this book argues that religious minorities seek and gain electoral representation when they face significant threats to their material interests and worldview, and when their community is not internally divided by cross-cutting cleavages. Differences in Latin American evangelicals' political ambitions emerged as a result of two critical junctures: episodes of secular reform in the early twentieth century and the rise of sexuality politics at the turn of the twenty-first. In Brazil, significant threats at both junctures prompted extensive electoral mobilization; in Chile, minimal threats meant that mobilization lagged. In Peru, where major cleavages divide both evangelicals and broader society, threats prompt less electoral mobilization than otherwise expected. The multi-method argument leverages interviews, content analysis, survey experiments, ecological analysis, and secondary case studies of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

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9781009275118

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'... a new wave of scholarship on religion and politics in Latin America has developed. Whereas an older body of work up through the 1990s primarily used qualitative methods, including ethnography and historical analysis, recent scholarship on religion and politics in the developing world typically uses both behavioralist empirical methods and rigorous tracing of causal processes. Perhaps the most important new Latin Americanist book in this renaissance is Taylor Boas's 2023 monograph ... Boas's explanation is powerful and intellectually satisfying.' Amy Erica Smith, Perspectives on Politics

Author Information

Taylor C. Boas is Associate Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Boston University. He is author of Presidential Campaigns in Latin America: Electoral Strategies and Success Contagion (2016).

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