Religious Practice and Attitudes Toward Government Responsibility for Citizens’ Welfare: A European Comparative Analysis

The article aims to investigate the relationship between individual religiosity and attitudes towards government responsibility for citizens’ welfare. The rationale for such a relationship stems from the idea that religion and government spending can be intended as substitute mechanisms that may insure individuals against negative life events. In other words, individuals who rely on religion to deal with their life difficulties would not need government’s welfare provision and thus would be less inclined to support it. However, we argue that this role of religion is likely to be different depending on the societal context. The latter can be captured by two relevant features: the prevalent religious denomination in a country and the type of welfare state regime. Both may have indeed influence on citizens’ opinions about the role of government responsibility because they contribute to shape individual preferences. Together they moderate the relationship between individual religiosity and support for government responsibility. To address these issues in a multilevel framework, we analyse the integrated European Value Study database (waves 2-3-4) for all the countries included in at least two waves; this results in a dataset covering the period ranging from 1990 to 2008 for 31 European countries. Individual religiosity is defined as attendance at religious services; attitudes toward government responsibility are measured with a self-placement scale ranging 1 to 10, where 1 means “individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves” and 10 “the state should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for”. At the macro-level, we define the societal context using a categorical variable that combines prevalent declared religious denomination and type of welfare state to which a country belongs. Our analyses show that, after controlling for socio-demographic variables, religious practice has different effects on support to government responsibility depending on welfare regime and prevailing religious denomination at country level. In social-democratic (Scandinavian) protestant countries, in liberal mixed-religion countries (UK), and in southern Mediterranean orthodox countries (Greece) there are no statistically significant differences between religious and non-religious people. The effect of religious practice is negative (leading to less support) in liberal, conservative and southern Mediterranean catholic countries, as well as in conservative mixed-religion countries (e.g. Germany). By contrast, religious individuals are more in favor of government responsibility than non-religious ones in former socialist countries, being them catholic, orthodox or mixed-religion (although with differences among these). These results confirm that the different Christian doctrines as well as the various types of welfare state regimes shape differently the individual preferences toward government responsibility; in combining these two features it is possible to draw an interesting and comprehensive picture of European attitudes toward public intervention.