Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance

Abstract

In this paper we argue that religion and welfare state spending are substitute mechanisms that insure individuals against adverse life events. As a result, individuals who are religious are predicted to prefer lower levels of social insurance than will individuals who are secular. To the extent policy outcomes reflect individual preferences, then countries with higher levels of religiosity should have lower levels of welfare state spending. In formalizing our argument we also suggest that if benefits from religion are subject to a network externality (I derive greater pleasure from religion when others are also religious), it is possible for countries that are similar in terms of underlying conditions to exhibit multiple equilibria with respect to religion and social insurance. We empirically test our predictions using individual-level data on religiosity, individual-level data on social insurance preferences, and crosscountry data on social spending outcomes. The findings are strongly supportive of our hypotheses.

Religion, income inequality, and the size of the government

“…Consistent with Palani (2008) and Rees (2009), we find that there is a significant positive correlation between religiosity and income inequality across a wide spectrum of countries including both advanced and less advanced countries. We next show that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and state welfare spending, thus confirming the findings of Gill and Lundsgaarde (2004) and Scheve and Stasavage (2006). However, we go beyond these studies and show that a negative correlation is also present between religiosity and total government spending as well as between religiosity and government spending excluding spending on welfare.…”

Spend it like Beckham? Inequality and redistribution in the UK, 1983–2004

“…We also include a variable NORELIGION according to whether individuals do not have a religion (Scheve and Stasavage, 2006, provide an argument for why the religious are less in favour of redistribution). Non-christians are too few in number to allow more disaggregation than this.…”

Open economy politics: A critical review

“…New work seeks to open up the question of interests by examining how gender, religion, and other attributes interact with a unit's production profile. Research shows that religion (Scheve and Stasavage 2006) and gender differences (Burgoon and Hiscox 2003;Goldstein et al 2007) are important to how individuals experience or interpret their economic policy interests. Cross-national surveys of attitudes toward trade, now in progress, promise important insights.…”