Does money matter less to evangelical candidates?

Abstract This article analyzes the impact of campaign spending on the voting record of individual candidates in legislative elections in Brazil. We more specifically examine the existence of a Jacobson effect for candidates with access to other resources providing leverage to their campaigns. For the 2014 elections for Federal and State Deputy, we find money has less impact on the voting record of candidates presenting themselves as pertaining to an evangelical church. To identify this religious framing of individual campaigns, we resort to the official nickname candidates are allowed to use in electoral campaigns in Brazil. This technique has been successfully applied in previous research. The causal mechanism behind this lesser effect of money on the voting record of candidates evoking a religious connection represents the symbolic and real power of Protestant Churches in the electoral process in Brazil. This result is similar to other studies showing that the value of money in election campaigns varies depending on other candidate characteristics. Candidates who have other mechanisms at their disposal to access and mobilize potential voters, such as the support of a church either in the form of an institutional endorsement, access to voters or unaccounted funding, are less dependent on officially accounted for resources than other competitors.