Religion causes inequality (or is it the other way around?)

In the previous post I wrote about new research linking income inequality to religious attendance. The supposition is that the stresses and bad social conditions that are often found in nations with high inequality goad people into church. It also seems to make them generally more religious.

But hang on! Perhaps that's back to front. Perhaps, in fact, religion causes inequality. Plenty of people think that's the case, and there's some good scientific theories which suggest it should do exactly that. There's also evidence that belief in God and belief in government are alternative reactions to conditions of uncertainty. And David Stasavage at NYU has shown that non-religious people are more likely to favour government welfare schemes.

So does religion help to explain national differences in income inequality? The unfortunate truth is that right now it's not possible to tell. There simply aren't enough good-quality historical data to decide whether changes in religiosity come first, before changes in inequality.

However, it's still possible to have a crack at putting the theory on a slightly more rigorous footing by using multivariate analysis. In other words, look at the correlation between religion and inequality while adjusting for the other factors that also cause inequality.

The only analysis of this type that I'm aware of was published last year in a student-run journal, the Journal of Politics and International Affairs. The author, Priyanka Palani, controlled for the numbers of elderly people in a nation, as well as education, GDP and whether the nation has an advanced economy (according to the IMF). The correlation with income inequality remained significant.

Well, that's interesting but I don't find it too convincing. The problem is that there are many other factors that affect income inequality that weren't included in the model. Here are a few that I am aware of:

• GDP: richer countries have more spare cash to spend on welfare.
  
• GDP growth rate: high economic growth (independent of actual GDP) is supposed to reduce inequality.
• Proportional representation: democracies with PR are more likely to elect left-wing governments than democracies that used a 'first past the post' system. The reasons are complex, but have to do with the way political parties can build coalitions.
• Migration: high numbers of economic migrants increase inequality, because they are prepared to work for lower wages than the locals.
• Working-age population: nations with a demographic 'hump' (i.e. a baby boom) experience low inequality when that hump is at employment age, and higher inequality when they retire.
• Ethnic fractionalisation: people are less likely to support government welfare if they think that the money is going to go to people from different ethnic groups.
• Trade openness: dropping trade barriers increases income inequality.
  

I put all these factors into a model, correlating them with prayer frequency (which I previously found to be strongly related to income inequality).

With 54 nations in the analysis, the only factor that correlated with inequality was religion! None of the others had any effect.

However, that's probably because poorer countries operate on different economic rules than rich ones do. So I re-ran the analysis just using the richest two-thirds of the nations (Mexico was the poorest one included).

This time three factors came out to have a significant effect: GDP, PR voting, and working-age population. The number of migrants just failed to reach statistical significance. All told, the factors explained nearly 80% of the variation in income inequality.

But guess what. Even after controlling for all these factors, religion still had a significant effect. And the effect was powerful: the four most powerful factors (religion being one of them) all had about the same effect.

I played around with the stats in a number of other ways, mixing things around. But the effect of religion was doggedly persistent.

I also looked at the correlates of government welfare spending. This is a tougher nut because the data aren't so good. I controlled for various national-level factors that are supposed to explain differences in welfare spending (GDP, number of school-age children, number of retirement-age people, proportional representation again and also ethnic fractionalisation).

The result? No effect of religion! I had better luck when looking at social wages, which is that part of government welfare spent on taking care of people out of work. Here there was a significant effect of religion.

Does that prove that religion actually causes income inequality? No, it doesn't. But it does help buttress the idea that there's a feedback loop at work here - that inequality leads to more religion, and more religion in turn leads to more inequality.

If that's true, then it raises an interesting possibility. You see, dynamic feedback loops can lead to a system with multiple stable states. In other words, a nation could settle at a position of high inequality and high religion, or low inequality and low religion. Both states would resist change, and it would take quite a hefty kick to move from one to the other.

Could this help explain the persistence of religion and inequality in some parts of the modern world?

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This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Income inequality drives church attendance

The Dutch press is reporting a new study with an international perspective on what drives church attendance (the authors are Stijn Ruiter, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and Frank van Tubergen, a professor of sociology in Utrecht).

What they set out to do was to compare the major theories on what causes religion, using data from the World Values Survey and other sources. Broadly speaking, you can summarize these theories like this:

• Religious regulation: a close relationship between state and church tends to turn people off it.
• Education: better educated people abandon religion
• Economic security: if people don't have to worry about their future, gods lose their appeal.
• Individualization: religion is a social phenomenon, and people are only religious because everyone around them is.

What Ruiter and van Tubergen did was a multi-level analysis. In other words, they looked at the characteristics of individuals and compared them with their churchgoing habits. And they also looked at the characteristics of nations, and looked to see what effect that had on individual churchgoing.

This multilevel analysis is a very powerful. But one downside is that it needs a lot of data, and the sort of data it needs aren't available for a lot of countries. In fact, it's mostly available only for rich, Christian countries. Still, they included 60 in their analysis, which is quite a pool.

By far and away the strongest predictor of how often a person goes to church is whether they had religious parents. That's not too surprising. But what is surprising is that, even after controlling for that effect, one of the most powerful predictors is how religious everyone else's parents are. In other words, one of the major deciding factors in whether or not you go to church is whether you grew up in a religious country.

Another important factor was religious regulation. In countries with a strong state interference in religion, attendance goes down. Other studies suggest that's probably because when people feel pressured into going to Church, they don't enjoy it.

One thing that didn't have much effect was education. There was no clear effect of average education in a country. But there was a slight effect of individual education - more educated people are slightly less likely to be churchgoers. That's probably because education is double-edged when it comes to religion. It decreases beliefs, but it also increases 'community-mindedness'. In other words, educated people tend to get involved in community activities.

The final factor was income inequality. In line with other studies, they found that both income inequality and low state welfare spending are associated with more religion:

...we find that attendance rates are particularly high in countries with more socioeconomic inequalities and fewer social welfare expenditure. This effect equally applies to both poor and rich people, which is in line with the idea that because of economic mobility and the possibility of unemployment in the (nearby) future also the more affluent population feels more insecure in countries with more inequalities and without a well-developed social welfare system.

We also see that people with a lower income and who are unemployed attend religious meetings more often, and we find an enduring effect of growing up in times of war. In summary, the results of our study suggest that personal and societal insecurities play a crucial role in explaining cross-national variation in religious attendance.

Now this is particularly interesting because it backs up what I found in my own study, published earlier this year. In that study, I looked (in a rather simpler analysis) at the country-level factors that correlate with how often people pray. I found that income inequality was one of the strongest.

So the two studies complement each other. Religious attendance and religious belief are related, but they are not the same. At yet both these two key aspects of religion both decrease in countries with strong social systems where people have less to worry about.

But by now people have probably spotted the potential flaw, which is shared by all these kinds of correlational studies: correlation does not mean causation! So which is it? Does inequality really lead to more religion? Or could it be that religion causes inequality?

That's a good question - and it's a topic for the next post!

Hat tip: David Flint of Humanists4Science.

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Stijn Ruiter, & Frank van Tubergen (2009). Religious Attendance in Cross-National Perspective: A Multilevel Analysis of 60 Countries American Journal of Sociology (November)


This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Live long and be atheist

The splendid World Happiness Database has released a new analysis of their 2009 data. Basically what they've done is to multiply happiness scores in each nation with the life expectancy. The idea is that what most people want is a life that's both long and happy.

Costa Rica came out top, followed by the usual gaggle of Northern European Countries (and Canada).

Now, there's an 'ecological' problem in this analysis, in that the people with long lives in a nation aren't necessarily the happiest. What's more, happiness might be very unevenly distributed in some countries.

And being grumpy might have its plus side - in the news yesterday was an Australian study which claimed that grumpy people are less prone to errors of judgement!

Be that as it may, whenever these national statistics come out I always like to correlate them against religion, to see how they stack up. So here's the results for this one.

What I've done is plot the percentage of hard-core non-believers in each country against the 'happy-life-years'.

In the top graph, it's the percentage of people who say they are 'confirmed atheists'. In the bottom graph, it's the people who say that religion is 'not at all important' to them.

There is a weak, but statistically significant relationship - especially with the unimportance of religion. What's more, the correlation is about 50% stronger than with happiness alone.

However, digging around in the data shows that the is mostly driven by life expectancy. Average happiness, by itself, is not related to the number of atheists, and only marginally related to the number of non-religious.

Now the interesting thing is that happiness is strongly correlated with life expectancy (as you might expect). So you also would expect a correlation of happiness with atheism - simply because they both correlate with life expectancy.

The fact that this does not happen suggests a negative interaction. What may be happening is that some countries with short life expectancy are particularly religious. That makes them happier than you would expect, and confounds the straightforward link between long life expectancy, happiness and atheism.

To put it another way, turning to religion has the effect of increasing happiness. But good life expectancy is more important, and countries with good life expectancy are the happiest and least religious. 
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This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.