Conference Agenda

The paper aims to investigate if being religious affects the propensity of people to trust others in the European society.

Interpersonal trust is fundamental to reach economic success (Knack and Keefer, 1997) and one important determinant of trust is culture, described as “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious and social group transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation” (Guiso et al., 2006).

One of the first papers linking trust with many socio-economic variables (Alesina, La Ferrara, 2002) shows that religion seems not to affect trust. Nevertheless, more recently, it has been proved (Valencia Caicedo et al., 2023) that a relationship exists but we still do not know if it is positive or negative. For this reason, this contribution will try to shed light on the controversial existing results.

To uncover the link between religion and trust, we use three waves of the European Social Survey (5,6 and 7) and adopt a quantitative approach.

First, we use regression analysis to study the correlation between religion and trust, controlling for an array of individual characteristics such as age, gender, years of schooling, ethnicity, marital status and employment status. We found that the relationship is highly significant and positive: trust is 2.2 percentage points higher for individuals reporting to be religious and 2.4 percentage points higher for practicing Christians catholics as compared to non-practicing ones.

Analyzing the direct link between religion and trust is problematic as the estimation might be biased due to endogeneity and/or reverse causality. To address this issue, we leverage plausibly exogenous variation in religiosity brought about by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in February 2013. We find that, right after the event, trust is about 10 percentage points higher for Christian catholic people.

Understanding the role of religiosity in shaping trust has some important implications. Trust is fundamental for state capacity building as it promotes development. In effect, our results can inform the European Cohesion policy 2021-2027 in the fourth objective “a more social and inclusive Europe” which aims to promote social cohesion and enhance community resilience, for which trust is fundamental. Moreover, findings will be of interest for the 10th ONU Sustainable Development Goals “reduce inequality within and among countries” as, by 2030, the ONU Agenda 2030 aspires to “empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status”.

References

Alesina A, La Ferrara E. Who trust others?, Journal of Public Economics, 2002

Guiso L., Sapienza P., Zingales L., “Does culture affect economic outcomes?”, Journal of economic perspectives, 2006

Knack S., Keefer P, “Does social capital have an economic payoff? A cross-country investigation”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997

Valencia Caicedo F., Dohmen T., Pondorfer A., “Religion and Prosociality across the Globe”, IZA Discussion Paper, 2023

Can individual data be used to compare countries even when measurement invariance is not satisfied? Using the European Social Survey (506,000 observations from 39 countries, with 10 measurement occasions over two decades), this study examines social and political trust as examples. Measurement invariance across countries failed, but repeated measurements within single countries exhibited support to approximate measurement invariance over time. We compare countries' factor scores based on partial approximate measurement invariance (acknowledging substantial non-invariance at the individual level) with simple composite scores (assuming full invariance). Their correlations exceeded .99, highlighting the viability of composite scores even in the absence of measurement invariance. The findings show how composite scores can be used to challenge the widespread belief that trust has steadily declined across Europe. The study concludes by demonstrating limitations in measurement invariance for detecting validity problems and discusses opportunities that arise when data do not demonstrate measurement invariance.

This paper investigates the importance of accounting for the profile of inequality in the analysis of institutional trust. Using data from 28 European Union countries over the 2002-2018 period, results suggest that the negative association found between total income inequality and institutional trust may hide some troubling countervailing effects. Institutional trust appears to be negatively related with inequality experienced among the income poorer and individuals belonging to the middle class, but positively related with inequality experienced among richer individuals. The results resist a set of robustness checks and, most importantly, they remain stable when the level of analysis is changed from individual to country aggregate. We highlight potential limitations of exploring the impact of the income distribution’s shape on trust using - as traditionally done in the literature - a single inequality indicator: it would only capture an average effect and hide a more complex underlying nexus between income distribution and trust.