Abstract
Current literature presents conflicting findings concerning the effect of religiosity on attitudes towards redistribution. This paper attempts to reconcile these findings by arguing that the belief and social behavior dimensions of religiosity affect support for redistribution via different mechanisms, and that these effects are moderated by state welfare generosity. Using multilevel path analysis models on data from the World Values Survey, we show that the effect of the religious belief on attitudes towards redistribution is mediated by competing personal orientations—prosocial values and conservative identification—while the religious social behavior dimension significantly decreases support for redistribution via increased levels of happiness. Lower levels of welfare generosity increase the positive effect of prosocial orientations and weaken the negative effect conservative identification, leading to positive or null indirect effect of religiosity. These findings show the importance of taking into account the multiple dimensions of religiosity and institutional context when studying the relationship between religion and redistribution attitudes.
Highlights
The relationship between religion and redistribution is admitted to be highly complex [1, 2], presenting conflicting theories and inconsistent empirical findings
Our results and conclusions are in line with the recent findings that show that aggregating the different elements of individual religious experience into the broad phenomenon of “religiosity”, reducing religiosity to a single individual-level item or disregarding contextual elements, may be misleading on both theoretical and methodological grounds [23, 117, 118]
We find that the positive effect of religious belief via prosocial orientations is generally weaker compared to its negative effect via conservative orientations
Summary
The relationship between religion and redistribution is admitted to be highly complex [1, 2], presenting conflicting theories and inconsistent empirical findings. Some researchers credit religiosity with justifying economic inequalities and defending the pro-market status quo [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Research examining the effect of religiosity on redistribution attitudes has often presented contradictory findings, possibly because different studies capture different aspects of individual religious experience by using different indicators of religiosity. Religiosity is increasingly theorized as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon [14, 15], existing empirical work has paid insufficient attention to the complex nature of individual religious orientations (but see [8, 13]). Most studies only focus on one or a few countries
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