Socio-Political Attitudes Across the World: to What Extent are they Affected by One's Religion, it's Importance, Majority Status and Relative Income

This paper relates four aspects of an individual’s religion (the religion itself, its importance to the individual, and their interactions with each other, whether or not that religion is the dominant one in the country and the individual’s relative income) to six important socio-political attitudes. Two of these attitudes can be regarded as socio-economic objectives (the responsibilities that government should assume, and adherence to the norm of not cheating on taxes). The other four may be considered as four different political means of achieving these objectives (willingness to engage in political activity, to defend freedom of speech, to “give people more say” and to maintain order). The primary objective is to shed light on the political economy and governance issues in countries like those of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) where religious, economic and political differences are strongly interrelated, and already giving rise to social tension and in some cases political instability. The analysis is focused on testing three different but rather general hypotheses concerning the relationships between the four aspects of an individual’s religious affiliation and the six attitudes under investigation. It makes use of data on over 215,000 individuals in 90 countries from Waves 2-6 of the World Value Surveys (WVS). Once the various interactions between religious affiliation and related characteristics are taken into consideration, the relationships between the various different religious affiliations and each of the six attitudes under study are shown to vary in ways that cast doubt on the validity of existing stereotypes of these relations. The results highlight a number of patterns in these relationships that may provide useful insights into the direction that socio-economic policies are likely to take in the years ahead in different MENA countries.