Pray, vote, and money: The double-edged sword effect of religions on rural political participation in China

Abstract

This paper studies the impacts of religions on political participation in rural China. Using a representative national survey data, we show that an increase in the share of religion believers in a village significantly raises the voting participation of individual believers but reduces the voting participation of individual nonbelievers. Instrumental variable estimation and robustness checks support our main empirical results. Consistent with the theory, we show that religion believers groups affect voter turnout decisions through expected pivotality, informational transmission, and increased private benefits from being religious. In particular, an individual believer is significantly more likely to receive poverty-targeting subsidies if there are more believers in the village, indicating the local capture by religion believers groups.