Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism

Felix Kersting,Iris Wohnsiedler,Nikolaus Wolf

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3653945

Abstract

We revisit Max Weber's hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late 19th century Prussia we reject Weber’s suggestion that Protestantism mattered due to an “ascetic compulsion to save”. Moreover, we find that income levels, savings, and literacy rates differed between Germans and Poles, not between Protestants and Catholics using pooled OLS and IV regressions as well as IV mediation analysis. We suggest that this result is due to anti-Polish discrimination.

Highlights

We revisit Max Weber’s hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development
Given that we have the data for Polish savings only for counties in the Provinces of Poznan and West Prussia, we show that our main findings remain qualitatively unchanged, if we drop the other two provinces with large Polish populations, Silesia and East Prussia (Table 4, Col. 3 compared to Col. 6)
We showed that a misinterpretation of this context can lead to missing the main factors in the evidence, including mistaken econometric specifications

Summary

Introduction

We revisit Max Weber’s hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We find that income levels, savings, and literacy rates differed between Germans and Poles, not between Protestants and Catholics, using pooled OLS and IV regressions We suggest that this result is due to anti-Polish discrimination. Weber (1904, 1905) famously hypothesized that a specific Protestant work ethic fostered modern economic development due to a “compulsion to save.” He motivated this with some statistical evidence on differences between Protestants and Catholics in Baden around 1900 and used anecdotal evidence to suggest a much more general relationship. We argue that the “common interpretation” (Delacroix and Nielsen 2001) of Weber has often missed his own argument on saving behavior as the key mechanism It missed Weber’s nationalist and anti-Polish bias. We show empirically that we need to modify the so-called “common interpretation” twofold: with a focus on savings as a mechanism by which religion might have affected economic outcomes and by controlling for differences between ethnic groups as a possibly crucial confounding factor

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