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

梁平汉教授与合作者Shukang Xiao的研究论文发表在SSCI经济学类优秀期刊China Economic Review.

内容提要：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.

关键词：Religions,Voting,China,Local capture