Political Campaigns and Church Contributions

We combine a new dataset of weekly Catholic church donations with a new dataset of presidential-election campaign stops to explore the impact of stops on donations. We find that stops increase donations, with a campaign stop generating 2 percent more donations in the following week. Our results sugg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Policy File 2018
Main Authors: Hungerman, Daniel M, Rinz, Kevin, Weninger, Tim, Yoon, Chungeun
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
Economic policy
Elections
National Bureau of Economic Research
Theology/Religion
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:We combine a new dataset of weekly Catholic church donations with a new dataset of presidential-election campaign stops to explore the impact of stops on donations. We find that stops increase donations, with a campaign stop generating 2 percent more donations in the following week. Our results suggest that this effect is of short duration. Further, it does not appear to vary based on the political language used by the parish in its own church bulletins. However, the effect does appear to vary based on the religiosity of the candidates themselves, with Catholic candidates generating the largest increases.