Religion, welfare regimes and attitudes toward government responsibility for citizens’ welfare. A European comparative analysis
Francesco Molteni (UNIVERSITY OF MILAN, Department of Social and Political Sciences)
Renzo Carriero, Marianna Filandri (UNIVERSITY OF TURIN, Department of Cultures, Politics and Society)
ECPR General Conference 2017 - Oslo
INTRODUCTION Religion can work as coping strategy for individuals facing difficult life events by providing psychological as well as material support in the form of community assistance…and Welfare state systems clearly do the same
Substitution effect
If this “substitution effect” is actually working, individuals who insure themselves by way of religion should be less favourable to high level of social insurance by the state.
OUTLINE 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND RQ AND HYPOTHESES DATA AND METHODS RESULTS CONCLUSIONS
1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND (1/3) • Religion and government spending can be considered as substitutes to insure individuals against negative life events (Scheve and Stasavage 2006) • As governments started to assume welfare functions, individuals with elastic preferences started to reason about the costs of their religious participation, as the desired welfare goods could be obtained also from secular sources (Gill and Lundsgaarde 2004) • Religious individuals are no longer likely to demand for other kind of social insurance because congregational members still receive benefits directly from religion (Scheve and Stasavage 2006) • Religiosity has a clear effect on welfare state attitudes at the individual level (Ervasti 2009) • Both Catholics and Protestants strongly oppose redistribution (Stegmueller at al. 2012)
1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND (2/3) IMPORTANCE OF RELIGIOUS CONTEXT • Relevance of the Catholic-Protestant cleavage (Stegmueller at al. 2012) • Strong link between the welfare policies adopted by the Christian Democratic parties and the Catholic tradition (Esping-Andersen, 1990)
• The overlap can suggest a positive attitude toward state intervention (van Oorschot 2000; Kahl 2005) but the facts tell something opposed. • Protestant church and state mutually reinforced themselves during the reformation (Kahl 2005) but then the conflicts about moral authority and material resources fell back under the rules of the state (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) NO contributions concerning Orthodoxy Many politicians and political forces use Orthodoxy as a way to reconstruct a post-Communist identity (Borowik, 2002; Meulemann, 2004) Strong interconnection between political forces and Orthodox religion Positive attitude toward state intervention?
1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND (3/3) IMPORTANCE OF WELFARE STATE REGIME
• Like religions play a role in legitimizing (or not) social policies, so do welfare institutions. • Concept of policy feedback: effect of welfare institutions which do not only set constraints and opportunities for social actors, but can also contribute to shape their preferences (Pierson, 1993; Rothstein, 1998; Mettler and Soss, 2004)
• Different welfare regimes have subscribed to different models of solidarity, i.e. they built their institutions and social policies around different principles of justice (Gelissen, 2000; Arts and Gelissen, 2001)
2. RQ AND HYPOTHESES Religiosity can have positive, null or negative effect on individual attitudes depending on both the countries’ predominant Christian denomination and the solidarity model underlying their welfare regimes Relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward public support:
• CATHOLIC: - (substitution mechanism) • PROTESTANT: NULL (focus on individual merit. No subsidiarity nor state intervention) • ORTHODOX: + (complementarity mechanism) • • • • •
SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC: NULL (strong egalitarian model) LIBERAL: NULL (residual conception of the welfare state) MEDITERRANEAN: - (substitution mechanism, channel of solidarity other than the state) CORPORATIST: - (substitution mechanism, channel of solidarity other than the state) FORMER SOCIALIST: + (complementarity mechanism, mutual support between religion and state in “burning the bridges” with the past)
2. RQ AND HYPOTHESES The genesis and development of welfare state institutions is strongly intertwined with the history of religious institutions. For analytical reasons, here we treat the influence of welfare state institutions and religious denominations separately. MOREOVER the boundaries between these two macro-features are blurred and they can also combine in moderating the impact of individual religiosity on the attitudes toward the government responsibility
Welfare regime and religious denomination clusters Social democratic - protestant Liberal - catholic Liberal – mixed religion Corporatist - catholic Corporatist - mixed religion Mediterranean - catholic Mediterranean - orthodox Former socialist - catholic Former socialist - mixed religion Former socialist - orthodox
Expected relationship according to religious denomination Null Negative Negative Negative Positive Negative Positive
Expected relationship according to welfare regime
Relevant factors
Expected relationship according to both factors
Null Null Null Negative Negative Negative Negative Positive Positive Positive
both both only welfare both only welfare both both both only welfare both
Null Null/Negative Null Negative Negative Negative Null Null Positive Positive
3. DATA AND METHODS (1/2) • Three waves (1990, 1999, 2008) of EVS longitudinal data file • 40 Christian-majority countries and 94 country-waves • DEP. VAR: 1-10 scale • “Individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves” (1) • “The state should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for” (10)
• IND. VAR (individual): Monthly attendance to religious services (0-1) • IND. VAR (country): Prevailing religious denomination (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Mixed)
• IND. VAR (country): Welfare regimes classification (Liberal, Corporatist, Social-Democratic, Mediterranean, Former Socialist)
• IND. VAR (control): age (6 cat.), gender (male/female), years of formal education (4 lev.), employment status (employed, retired, out of labor force, unemployed), and marital status (married).
3. DATA AND METHODS (2/2) • 2-LEVELS MULTILEVEL MODEL: Individual nested within countries • Random intercepts and random slopes for religiosity • MODEL 1: Only individual level covariates • MODEL 2: Model 1 + interaction between individual religiosity and religious denomination • MODEL 3: Model 1 + interaction between individual religiosity and welfare regime • MODEL 4: Model 1 + interaction between individual religiosity, religious denomination and welfare regime
4. RESULTS (1/3) MODEL 2 Estimated effect of individual religiosity on attitudes toward government intervention according to the prevalent religion denomination. Mean and 95% confidence intervals.
4. RESULTS (2/3) MODEL 3 Estimated effect of individual religiosity on attitudes toward government intervention according to the welfare regime. Mean and 95% confidence intervals.
4. RESULTS (3/3) MODEL 4 Estimated effect of individual religiosity on attitudes toward government intervention according to a combination of the prevalent religion denomination and welfare regime. Mean and 95% confidence intervals.
5. CONCLUSIONS • Religious influence in shaping individual attitudes toward government responsibility is definitely not a matter of Protestantism and social-democratic or liberal tradition. • Catholicism seems instead to drive the substitution effect between religion and state and this effect is reinforced in corporatist and Mediterranean countries • The communist past of the Eastern European countries seems to convey a positive relationship between religiosity and the principle of state intervention. This is reinforced by the Orthodox tradition, but nullified where Catholicism is the dominant religious tradition. • Compared to Stegmueller and colleagues: • Only Catholics oppose redistribution • The effects of individual religiosity that we found are not comparable in size with the differences by income or education … and probably this effect is getting weaker and weaker as secularization unfolds
THANK YOU
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