Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-020-00421-2

RESEARCH NOTE

Religion, Religiosity, and Corruption

Omer Gokcekus1   · Tufan Ekici2

Received: 21 November 2019 / Accepted: 26 June 2020 / Published online: 8 July 2020
© Religious Research Association, Inc. 2020

Abstract
High levels of corruption in a country could be detrimental to the overall well-being
of the economy. Although legal enforcement mechanisms are in place for most
countries, corruption still exists, even in the most developed countries. Researchers
have tried to identify the correlates of corruption across different countries in the
world. One major finding is that religious affiliation in a country tends to matter for
the corruption level of that country. However, previous research has rarely focused
explicitly on differentiating between religion and religiosity. In this study, we test
if the level of devotion to religion (religiosity) is more important than the specific
type of religious denomination. We use data from multiple countries over different
time periods and experiment with different measures of ‘religiosity’. The empirical
evidence indicates that religiosity, rather than religious affiliation, impacts corrup-
tion levels. The more religious a society is, the higher the corruption, regardless of
religious affiliation.

Keywords  Corruption · Religion · Religiosity · World values survey

JEL Classification  H11 · O17 · D73

“For oppression makes a wise man mad, And a bribe corrupts the heart.”
(Bible 7:7)1
They said, ‘By Allah, you know we did not come to corrupt the land and that we
are not thieves.’ (Quran 12:73)2.

1
 Source: https​://bible​hub.com/eccle​siast​es/7-7.htm.
2
 Source: https​://www.thela​stdia​logue​.org/artic​le/the-topic​-corru​ption​-menti​oned-in-quran​/.

* Omer Gokcekus
omer.gokcekus@shu.edu
Tufan Ekici
tekici@ramapo.edu
1
School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University, South Orange,
NJ 07079, USA
2
Department of Economics, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, NJ 07430, USA

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 564 Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581

Introduction

The literature on effects and causes of corruption are extensive but still new.3 One of
the significant correlates of country level corruption has been found to be religious
culture. Most of the existing corruption studies capture religion by using only reli-
gious affiliation. There is limited consideration of the strength of religiosity: how
religious people are. For example, two Catholics are not necessarily the same when
it comes to living in accordance with their religious beliefs. Yet, conventional studies
don’t differentiate. We see this as a serious problem. According to multiple waves of
World Values Survey (WVS) for instance, in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Spain,
and Venezuela, around 75% of the respondents in these countries defined themselves
as Catholic. Yet, 76%, 83%, 72%, 58%, and 82% of the respondents described them-
selves as religious, respectively. Moreover, there are wide inter-country variations
among the respondents from these countries in two indicators of religiosity; the fre-
quency of attendance to religious services and importance ascribed to God. (See
Conway (2013) for correlates of church attendance in Catholic countries.) There is a
similar trend in predominantly Muslim countries. Table 1 presents religious affilia-
tion and three religiosity indicators for a list of predominantly Catholic and Muslim
countries. Furthermore, while people maintain their religious affiliation over time,
their level of religiosity can change. For instance, according to the WVS, in 1999,
81% of the respondents in Spain were Catholic and 62% were religious. Eight years
later, in 2007, 80% of the respondents were Catholic; however, only 44% declared
themselves as religious. These observations indicate that religious denomination and
religious practice may not always represent the same thing.
In this study, we analyze the relationship between average religiosity in a nation
and perceptions on political corruption using multiple countries from different time
periods. We focus on several different measures to proxy for religiosity. The key
challenge for empirical researchers is the unavailability of corruption data. Transpar-
ency International (a key independent organization working on reducing corruption
across the globe) defines corruption as “The abuse of entrusted power for private
gain” and classifies corruption into three categories as “grand, petty and political,
depending on the amounts of money lost and the sector where it occurs.” Measuring
‘abuse of entrusted power’ is not straight forward and thus empirical researchers in
this area have mainly relied on ‘corruption perceptions’ instead of actual corrup-
tion levels. Establishing ‘causality’ is another key problem since corruption (which
is difficult to measure to begin with) is very likely to be an endogenous variable.
Therefore, researchers are bound by the available data, or lack thereof, to analyze
relationship between two variables. Accordingly, we will refrain from using causal-
ity in this study. Our results, and probably most of the previous literature, identify
correlates of corruption. The next section analyzes the theoretical and empirical link
between religion and corruption in more detail. We then introduce the data and our
variables of interest in “Corruption and Religiosity: Data and Variables” section.
The results are reported and discussed in the last two sections.

3
  For review of research on causes and effects of corruption, please see Lambsdorff and Schulze (2015)
and Dimant and Tosato (2018).

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Table 1  Religiosity in selected predominantly Muslim and Catholic countries

Country Muslim% Self-declared Frequency of Importance of ICRG​
%Religious attendance God

Jordan 96.0 83.0 4.99 9.86 3.00

Morocco 99.0 92.0 7.65 9.59 2.78
Azerbaijan 94.0 58.0 3.52 9.21 1.50
Turkey 74.5 78.7 4.42 9.13 2.28
Catholic% Self-declared Frequency of Importance of ICRG​
%Religious attendance God

Argentina 75.3 76.0 4.27 7.87 3.08

Colombia 75.8 83.0 5.29 9.62 2.21
Mexico 72.3 72.0 5.56 8.69 2.56
Spain 79.6 58.0 3.56 5.82 4.01
Venezuela 74.1 82.0 4.82 9.39 2.92

Religion and Corruption: Theory and Literature

There is almost no disagreement that all the religions in the world encourage moral
and ethical behavior of individuals. It is also the case that corruption falls outside
the definition of such behavior. In fact, the quotes at the beginning of our manuscript
provide examples of how official religious teachings condemn corruption. It is then
not unexpected to consider religion, in a world where more than 80% of the peo-
ple consider themselves belonging to some religious group, as a potential tool that
can be used to astray individuals away from corrupt behavior which is considered to
be unethical. However, there are two key problems with this thinking. The first is,
although religions do encourage publicly ethical and moral behavior of the individu-
als, there is no way of knowing whether they are successful in relaying their mes-
sage to their followers. The second issue is, ‘belonging’ to a religious group does not
necessarily imply full obedience and practice of the teachings of that group. In this
section, we will lay out some of the theoretical predictions as well as empirical find-
ings on the relationship between religion and corruption.

Different Religions

Religion could unify individuals into group norms through normative integration
(Durkheim 1893). Since all of the main religious denominations preach about norms
and moral values and guide their followers to an ethical path, higher integration
through religious organizations should lead to lower acceptance of corrupt activi-
ties. However, the state and religious affairs may not always be mutually exclusive:
although political corruption falls under immoral and unethical behavior, there is a

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possibility that religious authorities may not condemn those acts if such corruption
brings additional benefits or power to them. Here we are not referring to the case
where religious leaders are the rulers of a nation, but instead looking at the relation-
ship between state and religious leaders. If the power of religious authority comes
from finances or legislation offered by the political leaders, then the former will be
less inclined to expose, if any, of corrupt activities. If religion is operating indepen-
dently and places more emphasis on actual ‘teachings’ of the religion rather than the
authority (e.g., Church), then we can expect more voices speaking against political
corruption.
Such a difference exists among the religions we are studying in this paper.
According to Treisman (2000, p. 403), the hierarchies of Catholicism, Eastern
Orthodoxy, and Islam are more closely intertwined with state hierarchies; they are
less likely to monitor and denounce abuses by state officials. Under Roman Catholic
or Orthodox religions, the Church has been the key and powerful enforcer of reli-
gious teachings. In Western Europe, the church receives taxes from the state. Even
if there is no direct financial link between the two, observance of religion among
office holders in Christian cultures is publicly desired. For example, US presidential
candidates try to identify themselves as ‘Godly’ or ‘Church goers’ in order to attract
voters’ attention. In Islamic countries, religious leaders are generally appointed by
the state and finances are from the state. However, Protestantism was born as a pro-
test against an authoritative homogenous Church. In fact, there are plenty of differ-
ent Protestant denominations all around the world in contrast to central Church fig-
ures under Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Such independence of Protestant
denominations from the states they operate in gives them the flexibility to monitor
and denounce political corruption.
Religion can also be thought of as a proxy for work ethic, tolerance, and trust
which are characteristics of a society that are instrumental in shaping government
practices (La Porta et al. 1999). From a sociological perspective, higher trust in oth-
ers can predict better government performance (Weber 1958; Putnam 1993; Fukuy-
ama 1995). It is argued that some religions have fostered trust and work ethic at their
origins which led to a culture who would monitor and punish political corruption.
Landes (1998) argues that “Catholic and Muslim countries have acquired cultures
of intolerance, xenophobia, and closed-mindedness” (cited in La Porta et al. 1999,
p. 229) that are conducive to political corruption. In other traditions, such as Prot-
estantism which emerged through an opposition to state-sponsored religious author-
ity, the societies will be more prone to monitoring and denouncing state officials in
cases of corruption (Treisman 2000).
Empirically however, these predictions have not been confirmed unanimously.
One of the earliest empirical studies of the relationship between religion and cor-
ruption was carried out by La Porta et al. (1997) who found a positive correlation
between the percentage of the population belonging to hierarchical religions (Catho-
lic, Eastern Orthodox, Islam) and corruption for the sample of 33 countries. The
same authors (La Porta et  al. 1999) reproduce the same result for a larger sample
of 114 countries but with a weaker result when per capita GDP is used as a control
variable. The key argument of the authors is that such hierarchical religions are det-
rimental to civic engagement which is potentially a significant factor in reducing

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corruption. Similar results are obtained by Husted (1999) in a sample of 44 coun-

tries. However, Shabbir and Anwar (2007), who focus on developing countries, do
not find any relationship between religion and corruption. In a more recent study of
174 countries in 2010, Shadabi (2013) also finds no effect of Islam and Christianity
on corruption using micro level data. Treisman (2000), on the other hand finds a
negative relationship in a sample of 64 countries between the percentage of Prot-
estants in a country and corruption. This result for the Protestant religion is also
shown by Gerring and Thacker (2005) but not by Sandholtz and Gray (2003). On
the other hand, Gokcekus (2008) shows that the Protestant tradition from a century
ago is more useful in explaining corruption than the percentage of Protestants in
the country in present times; and Samanta (2011) and North et  al. (2013) find no
significant relationship between Protestant religion and corruption. Thus, our first
hypothesis is as follows:

H1  The share of people belonging to different religious denominations in a country

is not correlated with corruption in that country.

There are several reasons why we expect no such correlation. First of all, the reli-
gious culture developed many years ago may not be the same as today. Also looking
at aggregate share of the population belonging to a specific religion could be mis-
leading if individual feelings are not the same as government statistics. Furthermore,
there could even be even differences between evangelicals and mainline Protestants
on their views of market society which has different implications on the fight against
political corruption (Steensland and Schrank 2011). Similarly, Ko and Moon (2014)
find heterogeneity between the so-called ‘hierarchical religions’ in terms of atti-
tudes toward obedience to authority, amoral familism and trust that could potentially
impact the degree of corruption. Finally, the availability of other religions (religious
competition) in the nation could change the focus of religious authorities from con-
veying moral (anti-corruption) messages to trying to become the dominant religion,
which we discuss further next.

Religious Competition

Competition between religious denominations could influence the focus of the reli-
gious teachings. This notion was first developed by Adam Smith (1776), and it has
come to be known as the root of ‘economics of religion’. It resembles the view that
competition among firms in a marketplace fosters better quality and lower prices for
the customers. If we see religious organizations as firms and their followers as the
customers, we can apply it to our setting.
As Anderson (1998) notes, David Hume argued that religious leaders are moti-
vated to attain more “customers” (followers), “by disregarding ‘truth, morals or
decency’ and appealing to the ‘passions and credulity of the populace’” (p. 1073).
Similarly, Adam Smith claimed that religious leaders saw “the church as [the]

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‘monopoly of religion’ thereby reducing the quality of religion supplied to consum-

ers” (Anderson 1998, p. 1080). It may be likely that religious leaders focus more
on general moral values that serve the interests of the clergy and relevant religious
authorities, rather than denouncing corruption.
There is some empirical support on this view. Cantoni et al. (2018) argues that
the introduction of religious competition has caused a reallocation of resources from
religious to secular purposes and lowered the power of religious authorities dur-
ing Protestant Reformation. Paldam (2001) concludes that religious diversity is an
advantageous tool in fighting corruption. Gutmann (2015) also shows empirically
that religious competition could constrain rent-seeking interests of the clergy, and as
a solution, he recommends ‘regulating the appointment and promotion of religious
leaders’ (p. 162). Thus, our second hypothesis is as follows:

H2  More religious competition lowers the degree of corruption within a nation.

Religiosity

Both of these arguments focus on presence of different religious affiliations within

a nation but ignores the degree of attachment of followers to the teachings of those
denominations. We call this attachment ‘religiosity.’ We aim to uncover its correla-
tion with political corruption after controlling for the shares of different religions
or religious competition within a country. The conventional expectation is more
religious countries should have lower political corruption. For example, religiosity
is found to be positively correlated with risk-averse preferences for some religious
denominations (Miller and Hoffmann 1995; Miller 2000) which implies that these
members should stay away from risky actions such as corruption. Also, belief in
a God who requires moral conformity should also deter individuals from immoral
behaviour (Stark 2001; Corcoran et  al. 2012). But there are other channels where
religiosity could have adverse effects.
One direct adverse effect of religiosity on corruption lies in the very teachings of
religions that reduces demand for accountability and transparency of the office hold-
ers. It is possible that some religious people believe that all evil deeds committed
in this life will be punished by a higher divine power in this life or the next. These
people will not engage in corrupt behavior themselves but also may not feel the need
to monitor the corrupt behaviors of others because they believe that the perpetra-
tors will ultimately be punished. Also, studies show a positive relationship between
religiosity and social trust (Uslaner 2002; Delhey and Newton 2005), and religios-
ity and trust in government institutions (Guiso et  al. 2003). Higher trust in others
and in law enforcement mechanisms may lead to a lower demand for accountability
of actions. Finally, there is higher likelihood of moral government officials being
elected from the more religious societies (Flavin and Ledet 2013) thus less need
for monitoring of elected official. A lack of monitoring in highly religious countries
then may lead to ample opportunities for corruption.
The degree of practicing of religion could impact the degree of political corrup-
tion indirectly. Religious participation is shown both theoretically and empirically to

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increase political participation (Gokcekus and Sonan 2017) and civic engagement
(Merino 2013; Everton 2015). However, the motives behind such engagement could
be due to rent-seeking which will increase political corruption. There are also other
economic incentives for religious followers: portraying one’s self as religious can
add to an individual’s moral reputation, which has capital value in the marketplace
(Anderson 1998). Individuals who would like to send a positive signal to poten-
tial transactors regarding their personal value (low risk), are more likely to present
themselves as more ‘religious’. Furthermore, people that belong to the same group
are more tolerant of group members’ corrupt behaviors (Kalin and Siddique 2016).
People that portray themselves as highly religious through frequent participation in
religious services will meet more people within their group—increasing the trust
and tolerance of society towards these individual, allowing for corrupt behavior with
a lower likelihood of confrontation.
There is some empirical literature on the relationship between religiosity and
corruption. Flavin and Ledet (2013) find no relationship between state-level corrup-
tion and religiosity in the United States. Yeganeh and Sauers (2013) finds a negative
relationship between the two variables using a single wave of WVS but they do not
control for some of the standard variables that are found to be correlates of corrup-
tion in the literature such as per capita GDP, colonial heritage, or effectiveness of
the legal system (however they do include Human Development Index as a control
variable). Furthermore, the authors do not control for religious competition (but do
include percentage share of religious denominations). When looking at the effects of
religiosity on individual’s responses to ‘justifiability of corruption’, Sommer et  al.
(2012) find a negative relationship but that may not transfer to aggregate political
corruption. Accordingly, our main hypothesis is the following:

H3  There will be more political corruption in nations that have a larger share of
‘religious’ population.

Corruption and Religiosity: Data and Variables

Dependent Variable

Measuring corruption is not straightforward. There is also the censoring problem

where some corruption might exist but is not yet identified and thus is not reflected
in the data. Researchers focusing on aggregate level corruption have utilized corrup-
tion perceptions instead. Our measure of corruption comes from the PRS Group’s
International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) corruption index. ICRG rating is an
index which includes 22 variables from various risk categories. Corruption ranges
between 0 and 6 (we have reverse coded this so higher numbers indicate more cor-
ruption). According to the PRS Group, this component measures political corruption
and is concerned with “excessive patronage, nepotism, job reservations, favor-for-
favors, secret party funding, suspiciously close ties between politics and business.”
It should be noted that corruption is determined subjectively; therefore, it should be

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seen as a ‘perception of corruption’. The annual data is available for more than 100
countries since 1984.
Using expert opinions on corruption is actually more beneficial than using other
aggregate measures such as the size of the shadow economy, or number of con-
victions, or alike. Such measures are bound to have measurement error and at the
same time only provide under-estimates for the true extent of the problem because
they don’t include uncaptured behavior. Also, some researchers use answers given
by respondents to individual questions that ask about their values regarding certain
acts that can be classified as corruptive behavior (Swamy et  al. 2001). For exam-
ple, when one is asked about his/her perception about bribery or tax evasion, he/
she is most likely to respond negatively but that does not necessarily imply that the
respondent is behaving in a non-corruptive manner. Furthermore, we are combining
corruption perception information from experts with religion related variables from
individuals in a country that come from a completely different survey. This should
reduce survey bias.

Independent Variables

Religion related variables are obtained using waves 1 to 6 of World Values Sur-
vey (WVS). WVS is a publicly available survey conducted in many countries in the
world since 1981 when the survey started with 10 countries and more countries have
been added since then. We cannot use all the countries because other variables of
interest are not available for each country in each year: In our estimations, we use
up to 179 different observations from 77 unique countries. When we merge this data
with data from ICRG, we assigned the corruption data from the following year of
the survey year. To derive religion related variables, we use the integrated data set
(Inglehart et  al. 2018). Control variables come from World Bank Database, PRS
Group and previous research.

Religion

WVS includes a series of questions about the religious beliefs of participants; after
asking respondents whether they consider themselves a part of a religious denomi-
nation, they follow-up with questions regarding degree of religiosity. To capture reli-
gion, first we calculate the ‘share of religion’ for each country by looking at the
percentage of respondents in each of the four religious denomination categories of
Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox, and Protestantism. We also have a separate category
for atheists/no religion. These shares are calculated by the self-reported responses of
the participants; therefore, it is more accurate than aggregate official state statistics.
Second, we create a ‘religious competition index’ by taking the sum of squares
for shares of the four main religions and the rest including atheists (Paldam 2001)
to capture the diversity of various religious beliefs within a country (higher num-
bers indicate less religious competition or less diversity). Since major religious
denominations have ‘offices’ (i.e. church, mosque, synagogue) that are dedicated to
preaching their respective beliefs and such a mechanism does not normally exist for

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atheists (at least not as extensively), it is imperative that we control for the share of
non-religious members separately when using this index.

Religiosity

There are several questions that could be used to measure religiosity although not all
of these are available for each wave of the survey. Accordingly, we create the follow-
ing five variables:
Religious measures self-declared response to whether or not the respondent con-
siders himself religious and is coded as a binary variable. Frequency of attendance
to religious services is a continuous variable (range 1 to 8) where higher numbers
indicate more attendance. Importance of God is a self-reported continuous answer
that ranges from 1 to 10 measuring ‘how important God is in one’s life’ where
higher numbers indicate more importance. Belief in heaven (not asked in waves 5
and 6) and Belief in hell (not asked in wave 5) asks respondents about their beliefs in
these two notions and are coded as binary (1 = yes, 0 = no).
For continuous variables we take the average and for dummy variables percent-
ages for all the people that responded to the corresponding question and create
country level variables. The same country in different waves is treated as a different
observation. Some of these questions are not available for all of the countries in the
same survey and some of these questions are not asked at all in some surveys. Thus,
sample sizes in our estimations are going to be different.
For a robustness check of the results, we also create ‘high religiosity’ variables
for Frequency of attendance and Importance of God. Instead of using the average
value, we calculate the percentage of respondents in the population who attend most
frequently (values of 7 and 8 only) and thinks God is of utmost important (value of
10 only) in their lives.

Other Controls

There are also other variables potentially correlated with corruption levels. The one
used extensively in the literature is per capita GDP of the country. We use 2011
PPP $ values from the World Bank’s World Development Indicator Database. Liter-
ature also shows that traditions of the nations could influence corruption levels. For
example, Treisman (2000) argues that in Britain and some of its former colonies,
procedural aspects of law have been very important in keeping social order which
significantly increases the chance of exposing corruption. Such ‘legal culture’ can
be the key in deterring political corruption as opposed to nations with social culture
that values ‘hierarchy and authority of offices’ (Treisman 2000, p. 403): We use a
dummy variable to control for colonial heritage of the countries.
Another such historical influence could be presence of communist heritage.4
Given that a centralized system is needed under communism to allocate eco-
nomic resources, state officials are more prone to abuse of power (Rose et al. 1998;

4
  We would like to thank an anonymous referee for bringing this to our attention.

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Table 2  Summary statistics of corruption, religion, religiosity

All sample Europe/North Asia Africa Latin America
America

ICRG​ 2.94 2.32 2.96 3.82 3.12

Religion HHI 0.754 0.677 0.864 0.805 0.706
%Muslim 17.0% 11.4% 13.3% 47.0% 0.4%
%Catholic 27.0% 26.4% 10.6% 8.5% 63.9%
%Orthodox 7.0% 17.6% 0.2% 3.1% 0.7%
%Protestant 9.6% 10.1% 7.3% 15.9% 5.2%
%Atheist/no religion 18.7% 21.1% 29.0% 3.0% 18.4%
Frequency of attendance 4.5 3.78 4.49 5.75 4.84
Importance of God 7.6 6.5 6.68 9.45 8.73
%Self-religious 67.0% 63.4% 52.1% 86.3% 74.7%
%Believe in heaven 72.1% 55.1% 71.3% 96.2% 76.2%
%Believe in hell 59.4% 45.5% 62.6% 86.2% 54.4%
%High attendance 33.1% 18.7% 31.0% 59.6% 37.3%
%High importance of God 49.5% 30.5% 37.2% 81.3% 64.5%
Former British colony 29.9% 15.1% 46.7% 60.5% 5.3%
Communist heritage 25% 56.1% 26.1% 0% 0%
Democratic accountability 4.39 5.18 4.12 3.38 4.33
log of Per capita real GDP 8.63 9.42 8.42 7.61 8.53

Sandholtz and Taagepera 2005; Yeganeh and Sauers 2013): To control for traces of
communism, we include a dummy variable.
We also include democratic accountability as a control variable which comes
from PRS Group’s ICRG calculations which measures the responsiveness of govern-
ment to its people based on type of governance. The expectation is that if there is
more democratic accountability in a country, one would expect less corruption.
To control for the effects of different time periods, we create four time dummies
for each decennial starting with 1980. Alternatively, one can create 1 year dummy
for each of the survey years being conducted but this would reduce degrees of free-
dom in an already small sample without any additional benefits since a significant
change in corruption behavior of a society within a few years is not expected. Also,
we have four regional dummies for Europe-North America-Central Asia, Latin
America & Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa—Sub-Saharan Africa, and
East Asia and Pacific—South Asia. (Source: World Bank Database.) The summary
statistics are shown in Table 2. Simple Pearson correlation matrix for the main inde-
pendent variables are in Table 6 in “Appendix”.

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Table 3  Religious competition, religiosity, corruption: OLS regression results

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Average religiosity 0.238** 0.234*** 0.944 1.019 1.386***

measure (0.092) (0.072) (0.598) (0.686) (0.503)
Religious competition 0.033 0.120 0.109 0.031 0.917* 0.076
(0.389) (0.428) (0.350) (0.395) (0.462) (0.394)
%No religion − 1.290*** − 0.491 − 0.149 − 0.857* 0.914 − 0.077
(0.331) (0.444) (0.550) (0.478) (0.661) (0.471)
log(per capita GDP) − 0.432*** − 0.382*** − 0.369*** − 0.385*** − 0.603*** − 0.496***
(0.069) (0.079) (0.070) (0.069) (0.087) (0.088)
British colony − 0.274 − 0.360* − 0.336 − 0.395* − 0.484* − 0.505**
(0.212) (0.205) (0.209) (0.218) (0.264) (0.227)
Communist heritage 0.429 0.445 0.655*** 0.417 − 0.047 0.451*
(0.286) (0.292) (0.236) (0.295) (0.410) (0.237)
Democratic account- − 0.195*** − 0.204*** − 0.148*** − 0.218*** − 0.148** − 0.162***
ability (0.057) (0.061) (0.054) (0.055) (0.070) (0.054)
Constant 6.813*** 5.161*** 4.063*** 5.767*** 6.326*** 6.418***
(0.688) (1.103) (0.959) (0.953) (1.038) (0.833)
Religiosity measure Attendance Imp of God Religious Heaven belief Hell belief

N 187 179 179 177 76 119

R2 0.681 0.703 0.716 0.697 0.782 0.769
Adjusted ­R2 0.659 0.679 0.693 0.673 0.741 0.741
Shapiro–Wilk normal- 0.357 0.12 0.604 0.696 0.696 0.747
ity test (p value)

***, **,* indicates significance, respectively, at 1%, 5% and 10% levels. Dependent variable: ICRG
(higher numbers indicate more corruption). Heteroscedasticity corrected robust regression results are
reported. Null hypothesis for Shapiro–Wilk normality test that residuals are normally distributed. All the
models include decennial time dummies and regional controls

Estimation and Results

For analyzing the relationship between corruption and religiosity, our estimations
are based upon a model with country level corruption index as the dependent vari-
able and the above mentioned variables as measures of religiosity, while also con-
trolling for religious affiliation:
Corruptioni = 𝛽o + 𝛽1 Religioni + 𝛽2 Religiosityi + 𝛽3 Xi + vi ,

The dependent variable is ICRG corruption index where higher numbers indi-
cate more corruption. We use the same set of control variables in all the models but

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we experiment with two different measures of religion and five different measures
of religiosity. We also check if the OLS assumptions are satisfied and report Sha-
piro–Wilk normality test results in each table. Variance Inflation Factors (VIF) are
all less than 10 in all the models.5 The standard errors reported are all corrected for
heteroscedasticity.
Table  3 looks at the relationship between corruption and religiosity variables
when we control for the religious composition of the country. Instead of focusing on
specific religions, we are controlling for competitiveness between religious denomi-
nations in the country while also controlling for the share of nonreligious popula-
tion. In all of the specifications, the competitiveness of religions in a country is not
a significant correlate of corruption in the presence of other variables such as per
capita GDP and democratic accountability. Interestingly however, three of our dif-
ferent measures of religiosity in the nation are significant at 10% level or better, with
the self-reported religiousness dummy and belief in heaven being the only non-sig-
nificant variables (Model 4 and 5). In order to increase the impact on corruption per-
ception by one standard deviation, average frequency of attendance should increase
by about three points on a scale of 8. Similar effect is needed for average importance
of God on a scale of 10. However, a one-percentage point increase in the ratio of
people who believe in hell will have a similar one standard deviation increase in cor-
ruption perception. The religiosity variables also add to the adjusted-R2 of the mod-
els which shows they have some additional power in explaining variation in corrup-
tion. In fact, belief in hell increases the power of the model by 8 percentage points.
Other results are similar to previous findings where per capita GDP, British colonial
origin, and democratic accountability are all negatively correlated with corruption
perception.
In Table  4, we turn our attention to shares of specific religions in the country
and see if religiosity has an added effect on corruption. We find some evidence that
high shares of Orthodox Christianity in a nation increases corruption perceptions
(Model 1, 2 and 4) but the evidence is not strong. In fact, in all of the specifica-
tions, the shares of other three religious denominations have no significant effect.
Yet again, despite controlling for other factors and religious denomination shares, all
four religiosity indicators, namely frequency of attendance, importance of God, self-
reported religious dummy and Belief in Hell are important correlates of corruption.
Their magnitudes are similar to values in Table 3.

Robustness Checks

In Table 5 we focus on the two religiosity variables that were highly significant in
the previous results, frequency of attendance and importance of God, but use the
share of the people who are strongly religious as our measure, i.e., ‘high religiosity’
variables. When we use religious composition as the control variable (Models 1 and

5
  Due to space limitations, we are not reporting these values here but are available from the authors upon
request.

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Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581 575

Table 4  Major religious affiliations, religiosity, corruption: OLS regression results

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Average religiosity 0.281*** 0.252*** 1.068* 0.666 1.244**

measure (0.091) (0.075) (0.614) (0.803) (0.581)
%Muslim 0.117 0.215 − 0.321 0.094 0.099 0.052
(0.310) (0.310) (0.314) (0.339) (0.477) (0.367)
%Catholic − 0.032 − 0.382 − 0.371 − 0.340 0.135 − 0.119
(0.421) (0.455) (0.419) (0.477) (0.613) (0.416)
%Protestant − 0.346 − 0.248 − 0.485 − 0.338 − 1.300* − 0.293
(0.402) (0.385) (0.412) (0.426) (0.737) (0.558)
%Orthodox 0.592 0.475 0.065 0.345 0.143 0.304
(0.484) (0.499) (0.480) (0.519) (0.692) (0.472)
%No religion − 1.196*** − 0.362 − 0.314 − 0.827 0.495 − 0.203
(0.379) (0.471) (0.551) (0.527) (0.838) (0.558)
log(per capita GDP) − 0.396*** − 0.326*** − 0.348*** − 0.345*** − 0.548*** − 0.477***
(0.076) (0.083) (0.071) (0.071) (0.107) (0.094)
British colony − 0.223 − 0.328* − 0.370* − 0.358 − 0.420 − 0.466**
(0.223) (0.196) (0.209) (0.222) (0.295) (0.219)
Communist heritage 0.378 0.494* 0.641** 0.459 − 0.372 0.402
(0.306) (0.283) (0.278) (0.313) (0.496) (0.289)
Democratic account- − 0.190*** − 0.190*** − 0.146** − 0.202*** − 0.140* − 0.157**
ability (0.060) (0.063) (0.057) (0.058) (0.071) (0.060)
Constant 6.569*** 4.591*** 4.126*** 5.421*** 7.065*** 6.461***
(0.699) (0.968) (0.955) (0.927) (1.072) (0.901)
Religiosity measure Attendance Imp of God Religious Heaven belief Hell belief

N 187 179 179 177 76 119

R2 0.689 0.716 0.722 0.707 0.793 0.773
Adjusted ­R2 0.662 0.688 0.695 0.678 0.741 0.737
Shapiro–Wilk normal- 0.348 0.039 0.506 0.696 0.512 0.84
ity test (p value)

***, **,* indicates significance, respectively, at 1%, 5% and 10% levels. Dependent variable: ICRG
(higher numbers indicate more corruption). Heteroscedasticity corrected robust regression results are
reported. Null hypothesis for Shapiro–Wilk normality test that residuals are normally distributed. All the
models include decennial time dummies and regional controls

2), only Importance of God is significant; however, when we use individual shares
of religious denominations (Models 3 and 4), they both are significant. In all mod-
els, religious denominations or religious competition measures are not significant. If
percentage of people who believe God is of very high importance increase by two
percentage points, the corruption perception will increase by one standard deviation
(Model 2) when we control for overall religious competition. The effect sizes are
stronger when we control for individual religious denominations: if the percentage
of most frequent attendees in a nation increases by one percentage point, corruption

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 576 Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581

Table 5  Strong religiosity and corruption

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

High religiosity 0.805 0.751* 1.308** 0.811*

(0.524) (0.444) (0.583) (0.435)
Religious competition 0.087 0.005
(0.435) (0.383)
%No religion − 0.982** − 0.944** − 0.835* − 0.966*
(0.384) (0.464) (0.442) (0.500)
log(per capita GDP) − 0.409*** − 0.401*** − 0.326*** − 0.370***
(0.079) (0.072) (0.092) (0.076)
British colony − 0.356 − 0.294 − 0.364 − 0.277
(0.218) (0.211) (0.220) (0.218)
Communist heritage 0.460 0.586** 0.489* 0.520
(0.291) (0.270) (0.291) (0.313)
Democratic accountability − 0.196*** − 0.159*** − 0.193*** − 0.158**
(0.062) (0.057) (0.065) (0.060)
%Muslim 0.126 -0.152
(0.333) (0.320)
%Catholic − 0.377 − 0.128
(0.498) (0.437)
%Protestant − 0.319 − 0.473
(0.406) (0.409)
%Orthodox 0.671 0.409
(0.515) (0.506)
Constant 6.260*** 5.938*** 5.522*** 5.836***
(0.906) (0.772) (0.845) (0.812)
Religiosity measure Attendance Imp of God Attendance Imp of God

N 179 179 179 179

R2 0.688 0.696 0.703 0.703
Adjusted-R2 0.663 0.672 0.674 0.674
Shapiro–Wilk normality test (p 0.134 0.752 0.04 0.654
value)

***, **,* indicates significance, respectively, at 1%, 5% and 10% levels. Dependent variable: ICRG
(higher numbers indicate more corruption). Heteroscedasticity corrected robust regression results are
reported. Null hypothesis for Shapiro–Wilk normality test that residuals are normally distributed. All the
models include decennial time dummies and regional controls

perception will increase by one-standard deviation. Furthermore, the magnitude of

the coefficient in absolute value is higher in this table compared to Table 3 (Mod-
els 2 and 3) which could suggest that the share of strong religious people is more
important than the average practitioner when it comes to corruption levels in a
nation: These results indicate that as the degree of religiosity increases in a nation,
perceptions of corruption levels also get higher.

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Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581 577

The regulation of religion in a country could also influence the level of corrup-
tion. There are several ways of controlling for the degree of state regulation on reli-
gion but the data is not available for all of the countries in our sample. Neverthe-
less, we experiment with two measures, a Government Religious Regulation (GRR)
Index released by Association of Religious Data Archives6 and a dummy variable
used by Barro and McCleary (2002) that identifies if there is any state regulation
on religion or not (whether the government appoints or approves religious leaders).
GRR Index is available for the years of 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2008. Since our sam-
ple of observations include countries from other years as well, it would not have
been consistent if we assign different survey year-GRR value combinations to the
countries. Thus, we use 2003 GRR for the countries that were surveyed 2004 and
onwards. Obviously, this reduces our sample size considerably. We also use the
dummy variable used by Barro and McCleary (2002) for all the waves in our sam-
ple, but there are still some countries that are not included. Both of these variables
turn out to be significant predictors of corruption, but they do not affect the signifi-
cant negative impact of religiosity in the models.
Finally, we experiment with ordered logit estimation technique as an alternative
to OLS.7 Ordered logit model assumes ordinal measure of corruption, so we recoded
the dependent variable into LOW corruption (0 ≤ ICRG ≤ 2), MIDDLE corruption
(2 < ICRG ≤ 4) and HIGH corruption (4 < ICRG ≤ 6). Once again, the two religiosity
variables (importance of God and Frequency of Attendance) are highly significant
in these models regardless of whether we use religious competition or individual
shares of religious denominations.

Conclusion and Implications

We consistently find that more religious countries, measured by frequency of attend-

ance to religious services, and importance of God in an average person’s life, tend
to have higher corruptions levels even after taking religious affiliation into account
and controlling for several other potential correlates. This result is contrary to the
conventional view since all the religious denominations promote ethical and moral
values and thus more involvement with religion within a nation is expected to lower
levels of corruption.
Although the results are counter-intuitive, they are consistent with the theoretical
predictions we have presented in “Religion and Corruption: Theory and Literature”
section. We should reiterate that these results do not suggest that more religious
people are more corrupt. On the contrary, this could be due to the ‘opium’ effect
(a la Karl Marx) of religion on its followers. Marx’s interpretation of religion was
that people are so comforted by the religious teachings that they simply ignore or
fail to see what’s transpiring around them. Another possibility is that people turn to

6
  We would like to thank an anonymous referee for bringing this index to our attention. The data were
downloaded from the Association of Religion Data Archives, www.TheARDA.com, and were collected
by Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke.
7
  Estimation results are available from authors uponrequest.

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 578 Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581

religion because there is so much bad (corruption) around them, and people try to
get away from that and find peace elsewhere although we are not able to test causal-
ity empirically.8 Regardless of the direction of the relationship, this explanation is
consistent with the finding that there is a positive relationship between religiosity
and corruption.
This study is not without limitations: (1) replicating the analyses with actual
country level corruption measures instead of perceptions could provide different
insights; (2) the use of more countries and experimenting with other religios-
ity measures (trust in religious organizations or comfort taken by religion for
example) would be valuable. Different results are expected for different regions
but due to the small sample size, these effects may not be captured clearly in this
study; and (3) although we are not claiming causality, finding proper instrumen-
tal variables and taking care of endogeneity bias will bring us a step closer in
explaining the true relationship between religiosity and corruption.

Implications

Despite certain limitations we identify above, we believe that this paper pre-
sents convincing evidence that religiosity is more important than religion per
se in combatting corruption. The two key religiosity measures of Frequency of
attendance and Importance of God are found to have significant effect on degree
of political corruption in various countries. These results have two key implica-
tions. First, rather than focusing on various types of religions or competition
between them, the actual practice of religion should be the more important focus
in this line of research. The counter-intuitive positive result also requires further
scrutiny. Second, the results certainly do not imply that religiousness is to be
blamed for corruption, but instead, lack of monitoring and inadequate demand
for accountability as side effects of religiosity are the potential problems. Devo-
tion to the teachings of religions could increase the moral belief system of the
individuals, but it could also create a side effect that probably lowers the desire
to monitor elected officials which creates plenty of opportunities for those inter-
ested in corruption. This is a potential tool that should be targeted by those who
want to reduce the degree of political corruption.

Acknowledgements  We would like to thank Andrea Bartoli, Samin Gokcekus, Serkan Ozbeklik, Michael
Munger, Friedrich Schneider, Edward Tower, and in particular three anonymous referees for their helpful
comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.

Appendix

See Tables 6 and 7.

8
  We would like to thank an anonymous referee for pointing out the reverse causality in this hypothesis.

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Review of Religious Research (2020) 62:563–581 579

Table 6  Table of Pearson correlation coefficients of main religiosity variables with other variables
Mean attendance Imp of God % Religious Hell belief Heaven belief

Religion HHI 0.1449 0.1612 0.0206 0.3266 0.3014

%Muslim 0.2462 0.4408 0.2648 0.5756 0.3882
%Catholic 0.1273 0.1101 0.1785 − 0.1602 0.1231
%Protestan − 0.0756 − 0.0744 0.1315 − 0.1531 − 0.3726
%Orthodox 0.0555 − 0.0153 0.0415 − 0.0613 0.0526
%No Religion − 0.6528 − 0.7243 − 0.7462 − 0.653 − 0.6378
Lngdp − 0.5404 − 0.481 − 0.4466 − 0.4718 − 0.3984
Colonial Heritage 0.3116 0.2219 0.2966 0.3596 0.4129
Communist Heritage − 0.3693 − 0.4594 − 0.323 − 0.4108 − 0.6115
Democratic Accountability − 0.1827 − 0.3044 − 0.1324 − 0.3588 − 0.3766

Table 7  The list of countries (number of times) used in the analyses

Albania (2), Algeria (2), Argentina (6), Australia (3), Azerbaijan, Bangladesh (2), Belarus, Brazil
(2), Bulgaria (2), Canada (2), Chile (5), China (5), Colombia (4), Cyprus(2), Czech Republic (2),
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt (3), El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland (2), France,
Germany (3), Ghana (2), Guatemala, Hong Kong (2), Hungary (2), India (4), Indonesia (2), Iran
(2), Iraq (3), Israel, Italy, Japan (5), Jordan (2), Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malaysia (2) Mali, Mexico
(6), Moldova(2), Morocco (3), Netherlands (2), New Zealand (3), Nigeria (4), Norway (2), Paki-
stan (3), Peru (4), Philippines (3), Poland (3), Qatar (1), Romania (3), Russia (4), Saudi Arabia,
Singapore (2), Slovakia, Slovenia (2), South Africa (5), South Korea (5), Spain (5), Sweden (3),
Switzerland (3), Tanzania, Thailand (2), Trinidad & Tobago (2), Tunisia, Turkey (5), Uganda,
Ukraine (2), United Kingdom (2), United States (4), Uruguay (3), Venezuela (2), Vietnam (2),
Zambia, Zimbabwe (2)

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