Not All Radical Right is Equal: Evangelical and Catholic Support for Kast And Kaiser in Chile’s 2025 Presidential First Round
摘要
This article examines whether municipal religious composition is associated with electoral support for two radical-right candidacies in Chile’s 2025 presidential first round: José Antonio Kast and Johannes Kaiser. Using an ecological design, we combine municipal electoral returns with census-based religious composition, socioeconomic indicators, demographic controls, and a measure of confrontational robbery victims. We estimate revised fractional logit models that treat the no-religion share as the omitted compositional reference category and complement the main equations with stacked candidate models, electoral baselines, regional fixed effects, and Conley spatial HAC standard errors. The results show that both the evangelical/protestant and Catholic municipal shares are positively associated with Kast’s vote, while neither religious variable is robustly associated with Kaiser’s. A formal stacked comparison confirms that the religious association is significantly stronger for Kast than for Kaiser, and the intrabloc model shows that more religious municipalities tilt toward Kast within the radical-right bloc itself. These patterns survive controls for prior electoral geography and spatial dependence, although they attenuate once past conservative voting is introduced. The findings support the distinction between a moral-religious authoritarian subtype and a more anti-establishment radical-right subtype, and are consistent with the hypothesis that churches may operate as political mediators in weakly mediated territorial contexts.