Religious Leaders and Distributive Politics in Postwar Italy

How do unelected local leaders shape distributive politics? Religious authorities and other local leaders are often deeply embedded in the communities that receive public investment, yet many have no formal role in allocating or delivering state resources. I argue that such leaders can nonetheless shape distribution by increasing electoral returns to public investment. I test this argument using data on public works from a large-scale development program in postwar Southern Italy, exploiting variation in the election of Christian Democratic (DC) politicians and the local embeddedness of Catholic bishops. Difference-in-differences estimates show that DC politicians allocate more public works where bishops are locally embedded. These investments translate into higher DC vote shares specifically where bishops are local, with no evidence that bishops lobby for community- or Church-aligned projects or are rewarded for prior electoral support. These findings shed new light on the relationship between political intermediation and distributive politics.