“I was hungry and you gave me food”: Religiosity and attitudes toward redistribution

Current literature presents conflicting findings concerning the effect of religiosity on attitudes towards redistribution. This paper attempts to reconcile these findings by arguing that the belief and social behavior dimensions of religiosity affect support for redistribution via different mechanisms, and that these effects are moderated by state welfare generosity. Using multilevel path analysis models on data from the World Values Survey, we show that the effect of the religious belief on attitudes towards redistribution is mediated by competing personal orientations—prosocial values and conservative identification—while the religious social behavior dimension significantly decreases support for redistribution via increased levels of happiness. Lower levels of welfare generosity increase the positive effect of prosocial orientations and weaken the negative effect conservative identification, leading to positive or null indirect effect of religiosity. These findings show the importance of taking into account the multiple dimensions of religiosity and institutional context when studying the relationship between religion and redistribution attitudes.