Micro-Foundations of Religion and Public Goods Provision: Belief, Belonging, and Giving in Catholicism and Islam

Abstract

While debates continue about the relationship between state-provided social welfare and religious charities, and whether organized religions are more capable of providing social welfare than is the public sector, less attention has focused on the question of what motivates religious adherents to contribute to the charitable work of their religions. In this article, we examine how adherents of Catholicism and Islam understand their generosity and its relationship to their faith. Through 218 semi-structured interviews with Catholics and Muslims in four cities in France, Ireland, Italy, and Turkey, we find systematic differences between the two religions. Catholics emphasize love of others and Muslims emphasize duty to God. We also find, contrary to expectations of the literature that emphasizes monitoring and sanctioning within groups to obtain cooperation, that Catholics and Muslims see their generosity as also motivated by the positive affect they feel towards their respective communities.

Optimizing the utilization of government-owned tangible assets through managing institutional factors in Indonesia

“…The application of Sharia ethics in optimizing assets reinforces the relationship with governance and strengthens the implementation of asset knowledge in optimizing these assets. Kılınç and Warner (2015) explained that good knowledge assisted by religiosity can increase one's view of public assets. Thus, the application of Sharia ethics in the implementation of knowledge assets can increase the optimization of assets owned by the region.…”

Studying Religiosity and Spirituality: A Review of Macro, Micro, and Meso-Level Approaches

“…In other studies, the causal direction is reversed, such that religious factors are investigated as potential explanations for other social outcomes. For example, studies investigate whether religiosity influences economic performance (McCleary and Barro 2019;GPEI , 2019; social trust (Glanville et al 2013(Glanville et al , 2016Paxton and Glanville 2015;Paxton et al 2014); education and printing presses (Woodberry 2010(Woodberry , 2012Nikolova and Polansky 2020); welfare attitudes (Van Heuvelen 2014); and public goods provision (Warner et al 2015(Warner et al , 2018a(Warner et al , 2018bKılınç and Warner 2015;Schäfer 2012).…”

“…In another example of the study of beliefs, Warner and colleagues first qualitatively investigated the content of religious beliefs among Muslims and Catholics, in countries where those religions were the majority (Warner et al 2015(Warner et al , 2018a(Warner et al , 2018bKılınç and Warner 2015;Cohen et al 2017). After identifying duty to God or Allah as a belief that was seemingly held in common across both religious groups, but with important variations, they then designed an experiment to assess what effect priming religious expressions of duty to God had, if any, on each group's election to donate to a charitable cause, as compared to a generic prime in the control group.…”

Religiosity and Generosity: Multi-Level Approaches to Studying the Religiousness of Prosocial Actions

“…(Phillips and Blumberg 2016, p. 318) For this and other reasons, many macro-level studies investigate the role of Islam in shaping philanthropy and generosity. Warner and colleagues analyzed this by comparing generosity within a Muslim-dominant country-Turkey, to Catholic-dominant countries-Ireland, Italy, and France (Warner et al 2015(Warner et al , 2018a(Warner et al , 2018bWarner et al 2011;Kılınç and Warner 2015). The researchers found collected data through a mixed-methods approach that began with a qualitative study designed to better understand the beliefs that Catholics and Muslims in these countries held.…”