Does Religion Distract the Poor?

Abstract

This article asks whether religion undermines the negative relationship between income and left voting that is assumed in standard political economy models of democracy. Analysis of cross-country survey data reveals that this correlation disappears among religious individuals in countries that use proportional representation. This is the case in large part because there is a moral values dimension that has a correlation with income that is equal in magnitude but has the opposite sign as the economic dimension, and the votes of the religious are better explained by their positions on moral than economic issues, especially in countries with multiparty systems. The authors conclude by discussing implications for theories of redistribution.

Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences

“… 11. In additional robustness checks, we have also controlled for a variety of other variables. These include alternative measures of welfare state size (percentage share of public cash transfers in household disposable income; average tax wedge), trade union density, and factors that are discussed in the growing literature exploring the link between income and voting (De La O & Rodden, 2008), such as religious fractionalization . None of these meaningfully changes the results we report below. …”

Poverty and Divine Rewards: The Electoral Advantage of Islamist Political Parties

“…Communities plagued by poverty, unemployment and underemployment, and a lack of economic opportunity are thought to be strongholds for Islamist parties. Recent literature has provided quantitative support for a correlation between economic strain and religiosity (De La O and Rodden ; Norris and Inglehart ), between economic strain and political Islam (Binzel and Carvalho ), and between religiosity and political Islam (Collins and Owen ; Tessler, Jamal, and Robbins ). However, these studies have neither identified a causal effect of economic strain on political Islam nor articulated the causal mechanism through which it might operate.…”

Income inequality and religion globally 1970–2050

“…One argument is that religiously-inspired ideas and values focus people's attention away from material and economic interests in favour of ideology, values and belief-based policies. Elaborating on this line of argument, Ana De La O and Jonathan Rodden (2008) show, that in economically advanced democracies, poor religious people's preferences for morals appear to dominate over their preferences for redistribution, particularly in countries with large Catholic populations.…”