Religion and Social Justice: A Review of the Influence of Religiosity on Social Policy Preferences

Abstract

Anna Kulkova – junior research fellow, Laboratory for Political Studies, NRU HSE, Mosсow,
Russian Federation. Email: akulkova@hse.ru

The generosity of social policy depends on a country’s economic development levels, which, in turn, determine how much the state can redistribute and use to help those in need. However, particular social policies in a given country also depend on citizen preferences and their perceptions of whether it is necessary to help certain categories of people in need, as well as how far the state should intervene in the economy. Unlike most studies that explain differences in social policy preferences with reference to socio-economic factors, this literature review focuses on religion as a cultural predictor of welfare attitudes.
Religion can influence individual redistribution preferences by creating the overall cultural context and setting the standards for helping those in need, as well as via determining believers’ perceptions of who deserves help and how these social support measures should be implemented. The paper offers a review
of the mechanisms through which religion can shape individual attitudes towards social policy and, based on these existing studies, analyses whether there are differences in welfare attitudes between followers of different religious traditions, as well as between religious and non-religious individuals in contemporary
Europe. Firstly, the paper studies how different modes of interaction between churches and secular states, as well as differences in the content of religious traditions, can lead to the formation of distinctive attitudes towards poverty and, as a consequence, to the formation of distinctive welfare provision regimes in Europe. Following this, the paper reviews how redistribution preferences can be affected by individual religiosity (religious affiliation and degree of religiosity), and identifies the mechanisms through which religion can substitute the state social institutions for its followers.