This dissertation intends to explain three basic questions: 1. Whether different religious norms condition the emergence of different social rights regimes under conditions of modernization 2. Assuming that in authoritarian regimes social rights are provided through administrative agencies rather than arbitrated by courts, whether distributive regulation can be treated as a substitute to the rule of law, and thus distributive justice as a substitute to democracy. 3. Whether the organization of welfare bureaucracies and the delivery of their respective public goods and social services are influenced by religious norms. I argue that the density of social rights and in that respect distributive commitments in a polity depends on the type of religious norms held by the majority. Contrary to the standard premises of modernization theory, I suggest that industrialization does not reduce the impact of religious norms, when it comes to the formal provision of social rights by the government. Different religious traditions correspond to different levels of economic collectivism. Religious norms shape the citizens’ political demands for social welfare; and leaders take these political demands into account when they decide their modernization strategy. Putin’s Russia and Mubarak’s Egypt constitute nondemocratic regimes whose stability depends on the adherence of their leaders to Eastern Orthodox and Islamic norms of economic organization and policy. Hence, democratization occurs only when the level of distributive regulation falls below a minimum distributive threshold.
