Abstract

DIAZ-GONZALEZ, José Andrés. Religious Identification and Voting Intention in Costa Rica During the 2022 Presidential Elections. rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2022, n.82, pp.159-178.  Epub Nov 08, 2022. ISSN 0123-885X.  https://doi.org/10.7440/res82.2022.09.

This article analyzes whether there is a link between the religious identification of the Costa Rican population and their voting intention. Following the results of the 2018 presidential elections, in which an evangelical Protestant candidate passed to the second electoral round, several works have pointed out that religion is an increasingly important variable in explaining the voting intention of the Costa Rican population. In view of this, the objective of the article is to determine whether there is a “religious vote” in Costa Rica, for which we base ourselves on the following working hypothesis: people would express a greater voting intention for those candidates whose religious identification is similar to their own or whose political-electoral proposal is congruent with their own. To corroborate the hypothesis, we used data from a voting intention survey for the 2022 national election, collected in November 2021. We construct several logistic regression models to determine whether religious identification, together with other demographic and political variables, has an impact on voting intentions. It is concluded that Costa Rica seems to follow the same pattern found in other Latin American countries, where although the number of people who recognize themselves as evangelical Protestants has increased, it is only in certain sectors of this group that religious identification is a variable associated with voting intention. In groups with other religious beliefs, no significant relationship is found between these beliefs and voting intention. Hence, the existence of a “religious vote” in Costa Rica is ruled out.

Keywords : Costa Rica; elections; religion; voting intention.

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