Religious sects and strict denominations are growing faster and retaining members better than mainstream faiths. This study asks: can a sect compel all members to "vote as one" and deliver a full slate of endorsed national candidates? The evidence shows a strikingly large effect.

🔎 Where the Evidence Comes From

• Analysis focuses on the Philippines and the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) sect.
• Municipal-level vote shares for national candidates who received INC endorsements are the primary outcome.
• Variation in the share of INC voters across municipalities provides the key source of cross-sectional leverage.

🧭 How Causal Effect Is Identified

• A triple-difference identification strategy is used to isolate the endorsement effect: it compares endorsed versus non-endorsed national candidates across municipalities with different INC concentrations (and over the relevant comparisons captured by the design).
• This design exploits differential changes in municipal vote shares tied to endorsements while accounting for other confounders captured by the triple-difference approach.

📈 Key Findings

• Municipal-level vote shares of INC-endorsed national candidates are unit elastic with respect to the municipal share of INC voters — an endorsed candidate's vote share rises roughly one-for-one with the share of INC voters (i.e., a one percentage-point higher INC share is associated with about a one percentage-point higher vote share for endorsed candidates).
• Standard low-information rationality models of voting do not fully account for the magnitude of this effect.
• When voter behavior models are augmented with social voting—where an individual's objective function incorporates the actions of other group members—very large behavioral responses to sect endorsements become plausible and align with the observed patterns.

🔍 Why It Matters

• Findings show that strict religious organizations can exert exceptionally strong electoral influence through coordinated endorsements.
• This has implications for electoral competition, candidate strategy, and policy debates about collective influence, mobilization, and accountability in contexts with cohesive religious groups.
• The results advance understanding of how social mechanisms within groups amplify the political power of sect-like religions.