Speaking at an Assembly of God Pentecostal church this morning, Brazil’s rightist President Jair Bolsonaro opened a new front in Brazil’s culture wars: the composition of Brazil’s Supreme Court. Decrying a recent Supreme Court ruling that hate crime legislation protects sexual minorities, Bolsonaro asked, “Isn’t it time for us to have an evangelical Supreme Court justice?”

Bolsonaro’s new line of attack takes a page from the war manual of the US right. When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil back in October 2018, the international media touted him as a “Brazilian Trump.” The rightist leaders of the world’s second- and fourth-largest democracies do indeed have a number of things in common. Among the most striking: both Bolsonaro and Trump depended on enthusiastic support from evangelicals to get elected. As I wrote last year, endorsements from evangelical and Pentecostal leaders and electoral support from lay evangelicals appear to have been critical to Bolsonaro’s first- and second-round victories.

But that similarity started to break down around inauguration day. Since Bolsonaro assumed office on January 1, his popularity has fallen substantially among evangelicals. Meanwhile, legislators from Brazil’s powerful evangelical caucus in Congress have refused to join his coalition, and they are resisting his plans for everything from pension reform to loosening gun restrictions. Though some evangelicals may rally at Bolsonaro’s call to take over the Supreme Court, recent history suggests that it alone will not be enough.

Contrast this with the US. As Marty Cohen noted last month, Trump has managed to maintain steady, high levels of support among evangelicals; they’ve become the most important constituency in Trump’s base and in the US Republican Party.

So why are evangelicals reacting so differently to the leadership of Bolsonaro and Trump?

Part of the answer lies in economic data: The US economy has boomed under Trump, while Bolsonaro so far appears unable to turn around a slump that began in 2014.

But just as importantly, I would argue, is that political parties work very differently in the two countries. Those differences affect evangelicals’ political strategies and loyalties.

As I explain in my new book, Religion and Brazilian Democracy, Brazilian evangelicals began engaging in electoral politics during the country’s transition to democracy in the 1980s. Organizing within congregations and denominations, clergy and lay leaders drew on religious networks to elect the evangelicals who would form the country’s new evangelical caucus in Congress.

Their aim — much like their evangelical counterparts in the United States in the 1970s — was to resist liberalizing sexual and family values, especially policies related to abortion and homosexuality. Brazil’s new evangelical politicians of the late 1980s also hoped to guarantee a level playing field for religious competition by thwarting any Catholic attempts to embed privileges for the Church in the country’s new constitution.

But unlike American evangelicals who organized to take over the Republican Party, Brazilian religious conservatives running for office in the 1980s found it impossible to coordinate. The problem was Brazil’s political system, which offered them literally dozens of different parties to join. Combined with extreme multipartism, open list proportional representation allowed dozens or even hundreds of candidates to run for office in most legislative and city council districts. As a result, evangelicals had no incentive to join forces to take over a single party. In fact, competition between religious groups created disincentives for uniting politically; instead, denominations became teams supporting different candidates.

Still, evangelical political leaders recognized that competition between religious groups sometimes hurt their ability to promote shared goals. Electing evangelical mayors, governors, and presidents would require creating coalitions representing a majority of the vote. As a result, races for executive offices have often involved calls for evangelical unity.

As evangelicalism gradually grew to around 30 percent of the Brazilian population today, evangelical political unity achieved some big successes. In 2016, the Brazilian Republican Party — a medium-sized party associated with the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God — managed to elect its Bishop Marcelo Crivella as mayor of Rio de Janeiro. And two years later, evangelicals united behind Bolsonaro, who took over the extremely small Social Liberal Party to launch his winning presidential bid.

Yet Bolsonaro’s evangelical front appears to have broken apart. Though evangelicals got a few key cabinet appointments, leaders have had less access to power than they hoped. Given the ad hoc nature of his coalition, Bolsonaro must satisfy many masters. Tellingly, just a few weeks ago — before dangling the possibility of an evangelical Supreme Court justice today — Bolsonaro indicated he would nominate celebrity judge Sergio Moro, a Catholic, for the next Supreme Court vacancy.

Bolsonaro’s declining popularity among evangelicals is also a sign that religion and politics remain less polarized in Brazil than in the US. Once again, Brazil’s fragmented party system is key to understanding what’s happening.

In the United States, the Christian Right’s alliance with the Republican Party led evangelical activists increasingly to adopt conservative positions on other issues from the environment to gun control. Meanwhile, liberals and conservatives increasingly sorted themselves into religious camps: Conservatives chose to become evangelicals and liberals chose to leave evangelicalism (actually, often religion altogether).

But in Brazil, evangelicalism only affects attitudes on issues related to sexuality, gender, and the family. Hence, Brazilians’ weak party ties likely limit the intensity of the country’s culture wars.

By the time most readers in North America awoke Tuesday morning, a military uprising was underway in Venezuela. Juan Guaidó — the president of the National Assembly, whom many countries including the United States recognized in January as the country’s constitutionally legitimate interim president — tweeted a video of himself on a military base at the crack of dawn. By his side stood his mentor, opposition leader Leopoldo López — an unexpected development, since López was supposed to have been under house arrest.

Flanked by uniformed service members, Guaidó declared that Venezuela had entered the “final phase” of the overthrow of authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. Guaidó renewed his calls for citizens to take to the streets, and for the military to switch its loyalty from Maduro to him.

Not so fast. By the time most of the Western Hemisphere went to bed, it appeared that Maduro would hang on to power for yet another day, or month, or year. The military, apparently still largely loyal to Maduro, deployed tanks and tear gas against civilians who poured into plazas and public spaces at Guaidó’s call, and military weapons are rumored to have “disappeared” in order to arm pro-Maduro paramilitaries. The recently freed López took refuge with his family first in Chile’s embassy and later Spain’s, while Brazil granted asylum to 25 dissident members of the military.

The history of Venezuela’s April 30, 2019, uprising will be written in the coming weeks and years. Experts on coups note the event appeared poorly planned and executed. One intriguing but unconfirmed rumor holds that it had been planned for later and was suddenly moved up to prevent Guaidó’s arrest; and that his military backers got cold feet when the date changed. Another one, promoted by no less than US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is that Maduro initially intended to flee the country and decided to stay only at Russian urging.

But taking a step back to think like a political scientist, how should we understand Tuesday’s events? Were they an attempted coup? A democratic uprising? I argue they defy easy categorization — but that how we understand them matters a lot.

The uprising looks like a coup in many but arguably not all respects. Professor John Polga-Hecimovich of the US Naval Academy notes that academics have come up with a lot of definitions of the term “coup.” The definitions share three core elements:

• The who: A coup is launched by a small group of people close to power — most commonly the military, sometimes allied with politicians or other political elites. (Yes, citizens might go out to the streets, as in Venezuela, but they’re not the ones effecting the transition of power.) Guaidó flanked by the military seems to count. Check
• The what: A coup tries to take over “government,” or the executive. The object is to control a country’s public sector, namely, the military and the bureaucracy — pretty clearly Guaidó’s goal. Check
• The how: Here’s where it gets tricky. A coup involves “illegal” or “extraconstitutional” methods; it also entails violence or the threat thereof. Coups can be bloodless, but one needs at least tacit military support to claim and hold power. Guaido’s attempted reliance on the military satisfies the “capacity for violence” half of the definition. Half a check.

But was the attempted uprising “illegal” or “extraconstitutional”? If we accept that Guaidó is the legitimate interim president of Venezuela, arguably no. Guaidó’s defenders maintain he simply tried to reassert constitutional authority after a “usurper” (the opposition’s preferred term) stole the election of May 2018 and has refused to relinquish power. This is why Bloomberg refused to call it a “coup,” noting that many countries consider Guaido to be the country’s legal, legitimate president. Half an X.

Yet constitutional issues are still fuzzy. Political scientists argue that institutions (including constitutions) make politics predictable and incentivize people to follow the rules of the game. The awesome thing about constitutional transitions of power through elections is that all the major players know what to expect. When politics becomes predictable and routinized, the stakes fall, and conflicts are less likely to turn violent.

But constitutions don’t exactly provide a step-by-step guide for ejecting a “usurper” from power. There are no clear procedures governing the military’s potential transfer of loyalty from Maduro to Guaidó. In fact, most members of the Venezuelan military perceive a system of formal and informal rules requiring loyalty to Maduro. So the opposition and its international sympathizers might believe Guaidó’s claims are constitutional in the abstract, but many of the country’s relevant players disagree with that interpretation of the constitution. And even if they did agree with him, there are no obvious constitutional procedures to follow.

This matters a lot. If or when the Venezuelan opposition eventually unseats the “usurper,” the country will be in uncharted territory, resembling the aftermath of a military coup more than that of a democratic election. The democratic opposition has proclaimed its intent to call for new elections as quickly as possible after Maduro’s fall. But in the hours and days following the end of the Maduro regime, little can be taken for granted. History is littered with cases of military-supported transitions of power (whether you call them coups or uprisings) that are supposed to lead to elections and democracy … and don’t.

Political science research provides reasons for optimism that a future Venezuelan transition could lead to democratic elections. Though most coups lead to new authoritarian regimes, over the past decade, academics have examined what makes military coups occasionally propitious for democracy. Venezuela looks like it has many of the appropriate conditions: a discredited authoritarian regime; a history of citizen-led resistance against the regime; an alliance between democratic politicians and the military; a history of partisan electoral competition. A military-civilian uprising in Venezuela could go the way of Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, which ended 41 years of dictatorship, or Nigeria’s 1999 coup-initiated transition to democracy.

Yet things could go awry. Maduro has held on to power by paying keen attention to who controls firepower. He has allowed military officers to take on lucrative criminal smuggling operations, while also strategically arming paramilitary groups known as colectivos that take on some of the regime’s dirty work. A post-Maduro regime will have to incorporate and appease all these groups — any one of which could try to derail a democratic transition.

For the present, the most immediate danger is intensified repression from the Maduro regime itself. Following the example of Erdogan’s response to Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt, Maduro could interpret the events of April 30 as a sign of the need to crack down brutally on civil society and purge the military. And if the repression succeeds, speculation regarding the outcomes of a future uprising will remain an academic question.

On Saturday afternoon, images went viral of burning humanitarian aid trucks full of food on the Venezuelan border — set alight by informal, pro-government militias called colectivos that are loyal to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader clinging to power. Juan Guaidó, whom many countries now recognize as the constitutionally designated interim president of Venezuela, had sought to enable the trucks to enter the country.

By inviting in international aid, Guaidó was attempting to address Venezuela’s severe shortages of food and medical supplies, which have reached crisis levels under Maduro. Yet the invitation also dramatically escalated the two men’s conflict for control of the country — putting Maduro in the position of either very publicly rejecting much-needed aid or allowing his rival to invite trucks into the country against Maduro’s explicit orders.

In the short run, Maduro won the food fight by sending the food up in flames. In the long run, Saturday might turn out to be a turning point in Venezuelan history, leading to hemorrhaging domestic and international legitimacy, and perhaps ultimately Maduro’s downfall.

Guaidó has closely tied together his struggles to bring democracy and food to Venezuela. Seldom in recent years has the democracy-food linkage been so stark.

But what does democracy have to do with food? Did authoritarianism cause hunger in Venezuela? In one sense, the answer is clearly “yes”: Maduro is an authoritarian leader, and he has failed to address the humanitarian crisis.

More generally, though, it doesn’t seem obvious at first glance that democracy would boost the caloric intake of the poor. No rational government, either democratic or authoritarian, should want its people to starve. Even if we ignore humanitarian concerns, hunger is bad for the labor force and can trigger political instability. And defenders of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes historically argued that they were better at public administration than democracies. Put rational incentives and technical competence together, and one might even imagine authoritarian regimes as cornucopias of plenty.

This makes it all the more surprising that the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen famously asserted the opposite in his 1999 book, Development as Freedom. Reflecting on differences between democratic India and authoritarian Bangladesh, he proclaimed that ‘’No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” Democracy did not cure hunger, he said, but it beats authoritarianism.

What helps democracies avoid famine? Three closely related features may be key: free media, competition for leadership, and mechanisms for peaceful transitions of power. First, a free press — including social media today — is more likely to call attention to developing trouble spots. Second, leaders who must routinely compete for votes are more likely to deploy resources to those trouble spots. Third, when things go terribly wrong, elections provide citizens a way to replace an incompetent administration presiding over an incipient crisis.

In other words, Sen suggested that, compared to their democratic counterparts, authoritarian rulers are more likely simply to ignore widespread starvation. Though the phrase “Let them eat cake” is likely apocryphal, it might capture something real about authoritarian regimes’ weak incentives to address hunger.

Yet the authoritarian caloric disadvantage might be even worse than Sen described. A regime such as Maduro’s administration might actually weaponize hunger to stay in power, rather than simply ignore it.

In many developing countries — both democratic and authoritarian ones — politicians sometimes use and abuse food for political ends. What scholars call “clientelism” involves giving people material goods, ranging from bags of rice to jobs, in exchange for their support. During Mexico’s 2012 election campaign, for instance, the Institutional Revolutionary Party gave voters gift cards to a major supermarket chain, a gambit that apparently boosted the party’s vote totals.

Just like in Mexico, Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have used food giveaways to shore up popular support. But in Venezuela’s authoritarian context, clientelism has acquired a more menacing hue.

Taken to its worst extreme, food-based clientelism could force hungry citizens to behave like suppliant, sycophantic subjects. But free and competitive elections blunt clientelism’s most pernicious potential effects. In democracies, voting is still secret and free, so citizens can punish politicians they perceive as exploitative. And if multiple parties get involved in clientelism, citizens can shop around for the best deal. Perhaps as a result, clientelistic politicians rarely threaten to withhold material goods from citizens in democracies; they tend to use food as a carrot, rather than a stick.

By contrast, political leaders in Venezuela’s chavista regime withhold food distribution (and other goods) from citizen opponents. This strategy is effective because of ongoing shortages that result from grave economic mismanagement, as well as the government’s refusal to accept international aid. With opposition parties unable to access similar resources, citizens cannot shop around for better deals. And like the authoritarian regimes Amartya Sen studied, the government has little competitive incentive to address the problems of the citizens who go hungry.

In this context, as Saturday’s events suggest, food security and democratization must advance together. It is hard to see how to promote either one without the other.

Democracies can escape endemic clientelism. Over the past two decades, critical public policy reforms have taken root in Latin America, as many democracies have established nonclientelistic social programs that promote food security for all citizens, regardless of party affiliation. Perhaps Venezuela will soon join them.

In advance of this Sunday’s second-round presidential election between far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro and center-left candidate Fernando Haddad, Brazilian media are reporting that Brazilian police have been staging raids, at times without warrants, in universities across the country this week. In these raids, police have been questioning professors and confiscating materials belonging to students and professors.

The raids are part a supposed attempt to stop illegal electoral advertising. Brazilian election law prohibits electoral publicity in public spaces. However, many of the confiscated materials do not mention candidates. Among such confiscated materials are a flag for the Universidade Federal Fluminense reading “UFF School of Law – Anti-Fascist” and flyers titled “Manifest in Defense of Democracy and Public Universities.”

For those worrying about Brazilian democracy, these raids are some of the most troubling signs yet of the problems the country faces. They indicate the extremes of Brazilian political polarization: Anti-fascist and pro-democracy speech is now interpreted as illegal advertising in favor of one candidate (Fernando Haddad) and against another (Jair Bolsonaro). In the long run, the politicization of these two terms will hurt support for the idea of democracy, and bolster support for the idea of fascism.

In the short run, the raids have even more troublesome implications. Warrantless police raids in university classrooms to monitor professor speech have worrisome echoes of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime — particularly when the speech the raids are seeking to stop is not actually illegal.

Perhaps the most concerning point of all is that these raids are happening before Bolsonaro takes office. They have often been initiated by complaints from Bolsonaro supporters. All of this suggests that if Bolsonaro wins the election — as is widely expected — and seeks to suppress the speech of his opponents, whom he has called “red [i.e., Communist] criminals,” he may have plenty of willing helpers.

Update: On Friday, October 26, Brazil’s Attorney General of the Republic said she will bring the matter to the Supreme Court, seeking to guarantee freedom of expression in universities. Members of the Supreme Court also expressed concern about the raids on Friday.

Update 2: On Wednesday, October 31, Brazil’s Supreme Court voted unanimously to suspend the electoral court decision that had led to last week’s university raids, holding that the raids violated Brazilians’ constitutionally guaranteed right to free expression. The decision holds force in both public and private universities. In casting her vote, Supreme Court Justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha declared that, “The only legitimate force to invade universitites is free and plural ideas. Any other force that enters is tyranny, and tyranny is the exact opposite of democracy.”

A viral (and false) meme shows a picture of Brazil’s left-leaning Workers’ Party presidential candidate Fernando Haddad, with a superimposed quote attributed to him: “When they turn five, children will become the property of the state. It’s up to us to decide if a boy will become a girl, and vice versa! It’s parents’ job to respectfully comply with our decision! We know what’s best for children!”

Meanwhile, a video viewed more than 4 million times since late September claims that the Workers’ Party was distributing baby bottles shaped like penises in daycare centers. 

These are among the false messages that have circulated through Brazil’s Pentecostal and evangelical social networks in the last few weeks of Brazil’s 2018 first-round presidential election campaign. Purveyors of “fake news” seek to manipulate evangelicals and Pentecostals by emphasizing the core issues of Brazil’s culture wars: gender, sexuality, and the role of parents and the state in children’s education.

Meanwhile, viral videos feature evangelicals praising the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro — a politician whose incendiary comments and ambiguous commitment to democracy have led to frantic condemnations from such hotbeds of leftist radicalism as The Economist and Foreign Policy.

On Sunday October 7, Brazilians went to the polls for the first-round presidential election. Bolsonaro had steadily climbed in vote intentions for months. Still, to many observers’ shock, the rightist surpassed all projections, ending up with 46 percent of the first-round vote in a field of 13 candidates.

On October 28, Bolsonaro will face Haddad, who took second place, in a runoff election. The Workers’ Party candidate — the designated successor of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whom the Supreme Court had barred from candidacy due to a conviction for corruption — garnered just 29 percent of the vote.

What was the role of evangelicals and Pentecostals in the election? Did their support help drive the spike in Bolsonaro’s support? We think it did. As one of us shows in a forthcoming book, evangelicals and Pentecostals first started to get involved in Brazilian electoral politics in the 1980s. Still, Pentecostal and evangelical leaders have shown their political muscle in 2018 like never before.

Throughout most of its history, Brazil was known as a Catholic country. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the ranks of Pentecostal and evangelical clergy, as well as the pews of their congregations, began to swell. Rising from a bit over 5 percent of the population in 1970, evangelicals and Pentecostals will likely constitute nearly 30 percent of the population in Brazil’s 2020 census.

From the early days of Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s, evangelical and Pentecostal leaders have recognized the importance of electoral politics. Both the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the Assembly of God have mobilized to support socially conservative policies and candidates.

Until now, though, evangelical and Pentecostal activists have usually been most effective in supporting candidates for legislative office. Under Brazil’s open list proportional representation rules in which a single district elects dozens of legislators, highly organized religious denominations such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God can muster enough votes to get their own legislative candidates elected.

But at the presidential level, evangelical and Pentecostal activism has usually been marked by disunity, with different denominations supporting different candidates. In the most recent presidential election of 2014, evangelical and Pentecostal alliances were “pulverized” among the three leading candidates.

Yet 2018 has taken a drastically different turn. Though various presidential candidates sought evangelical alliances in other recent elections, in 2018 Bolsonaro was the primary candidate to court evangelical leaders. Bolsonaro claims to be a nominal Catholic, yet he attends a Baptist church and has long sought the political support of evangelical and Pentecostal leaders. Cementing these alliances, he was baptized in the Jordan River by the prominent Assembly of God Pastor Everaldo Dias in 2016 (who himself had run for president in 2014).

So it was not surprising when influential Assemblies of God Pastor Silas Malafaia declared his support for Bolsonaro in March 2018. Malafaia predicted that 80 percent of the evangelical vote would go over to Bolsonaro with him. A frequent social media commentator, Malafaia began to use his online presence to attack Bolsonaro’s opponents.

Bolsonaro’s religious alliances solidified in the final week of the first-round campaign. On September 30, Edir Macedo, the powerful founder of the Universal Church for the Kingdom of God and owner of the third-biggest TV station in Brazil, publicly threw his support behind Bolsonaro and gave him a softball interview. José Wellington Bezerra da Costa, the president of the General Convention of the Assemblies of God of Brazil, soon followed in publicly endorsing Bolsonaro on October 2, as did the Congressional Evangelical Caucus on October 4.

Has all of this made any impact on evangelical and Pentecostal citizens? Malafaia might have been wrong about the exact figure, but there is no doubt that Bolsonaro has done well with evangelicals. In the final month of the election, Bolsonaro’s votes among evangelicals shot upward: from 26 percent on August 22 to 36 percent on September 20, and, finally, to 48 percent on October 4.

Still, the rapid growth in Bolsonaro’s support might not be due to the influence of evangelical leaders. The candidate’s support among non-evangelicals also rose dramatically in this period.

But survey evidence indicates that evangelical and Pentecostal citizens were at least getting the message from their leaders. Over the last two weeks of the first-round campaign, one of us (Amy Erica Smith) ran an online survey asking Brazilians about political information in their churches. Among those who attend church, 29 percent of Catholic church attendees, 38 percent of non-Pentecostal evangelicals, and 46 percent of Pentecostals were aware of their church leaders supporting a candidate. Nearly all of them said that that candidate was Bolsonaro.

So what happened? Did evangelical leaders’ campaigning matter? We suspect that it did. In the final days of the campaign, Bolsonaro’s support jumped by about 5 percentage points. Some of the voters Bolsonaro gained may have been persuaded by evangelical leaders and their church communities.

Yet perhaps the most important impact of Bolsonaro’s late-in-the-game evangelical endorsements may have been to give him the aura of momentum and inevitability. While much attention  has been paid to the #elenão movement against  Bolsonaro, the rejection rate for Haddad and the PT is nearly as high, reaching 40% in various polls. As a result, in the final days of the campaign, Bolsonaro picked up steam, as undecided voters jumped on his bandwagon, and strong opponents of the Workers’ Party decided he was their best bet.

On Wednesday night, the Argentine Senate voted 38-31 to reject a bill that would have legalized abortion up to 14 weeks. Before its defeat, the bill had garnered substantial political and social movement support. When the bill passed the Chamber of Deputies (Argentina’s lower house) in June, conservative President Mauricio Macri had committed himself to signing the bill if it passed the Senate, despite his personal opposition to abortion. And in recent days, a self-named “Green Tide” of women bedecked in green scarves have taken to plazas across the country to support legalization.

This latest wave of mobilization has emerged out of a larger social movement called #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less) protesting violence against women. It seems likely that last night’s vote is not the last we will hear of either the women’s movement or abortion legalization in Argentina.

But Argentina is not alone. Similar debates have been occurring in other countries. In the past week, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court has held hearings on the possibility of decriminalizing abortion, which is presently legal only in exceptional circumstances. Across the Atlantic, Ireland voted in late May to overturn a constitutional amendment that had outlawed abortion. And a year ago this month, Chile’s legislature legalized abortion in limited cases.

What’s especially striking is that Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Ireland are all majority-Catholic countries where the Roman Catholic Church has historically been a dominant force. Despite Pope Francis’s light touch on culture war issues, both the pope and the church more broadly remain strongly opposed to abortion. For instance, in June, shortly after the Irish vote, Francis equated abortion with “white glove” Nazism.

What explains the newly vigorous debate over abortion? Is there something in the (holy) water? Is this a sign the Catholic Church is losing its power?

We can quickly dismiss the most obvious possibility — that citizens are simply losing their religion. Though one might think the abortion debate signals the declining importance of Catholicism, interestingly, there is only limited evidence of this notion. It is true that identification with Catholicism is on the decline throughout South America, including Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. However, the proportion of the population saying that “religion is very important” in their lives has gone up in the past decade in the AmericasBarometer surveys in Brazil and Argentina.

This is true not only for the population as a whole but for Catholics specifically. And trust in the Catholic Church has also risen in Argentina. Ireland’s abortion vote might have resulted from the declining political power of the Catholic Church, but this explanation does not seem to fit the other cases.

So if declining religion doesn’t explain the growing public debate over abortion, what does?

Two speculative answers come to mind. First, since 2010, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil have all seen waves of social movements, facilitated in part by new communications technologies. Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos movement is an example of how social movements adopt feminist demands. The abortion debate, then, might be a sign not of the decline of religious conservatism, but of the increasing sophistication of leftist movements.

The second answer relates once again to religion. In my forthcoming book and a recent paper, I have found that Brazilian clergy are very sensitive to religious competition and the threat of membership loss. When reminded (i.e., primed) that they face these challenges, they ease up on “fire and brimstone” teachings. That is, they give lower priority to topics such as “God’s wrath” and the need for chastity, apparently in an attempt to keep the faithful in the pews.

If some Catholic clergy deliberately deemphasize abortion, there is no need for citizens to reject church teachings. And indeed, observers have noted the church’s reticence to speak out in the abortion debate in both Argentina and Ireland.

What does the future hold? In the short term, abortion policy is unlikely to change in Chile, Argentina, or Brazil. In the long term, though, abortion will remain on public agendas, as both social movements and religious competition continue to grow.