Religious Voting in a Secularised Country: Evidence From Chile’s 2022 Constitutional Referendum

Abstract

In Latin America, unlike in Europe, religion is not a variable commonly used to analyse electoral behaviour in constitutional referendums, where theoretical approaches such as systematic political reasoning, heuristic approaches, and economic voting predominate. However, religion matters even in countries with high levels of secularisation. Chile’s Constitutional Referendum 2022, in which citizens were to approve or reject the proposed new constitution, is a good example. Four findings indicate the relevance of the religious cleavage. First, religion affected voting intentions, even after controlling for theoretically more powerful variables such as ideology. Second, Evangelicals were more homogeneous than Catholics, who were divided according to the content of the constitutional proposal. Third, rejection responds to the opposition to the five axes of the constitutional proposal: plurinationality, gender parity, elimination of the senate, abortion, and the creation of a public National Health System. Fourth, Evangelicals rejected abortion across the board, so much so that Evangelicals on the left and right opposed it in almost equal proportions.

Keywords

• religious cleavage
• referendum
• electoral behaviour
• chile
• constitution