The political economy of religion and social insurance in the United States, 1910-1939

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 132-159

  Scheve, Kenneth ^a   Stasavage, David ^b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845878245     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X06000071     Document Type: Review

References (219)

1. Recent examples include Margaret Weir, "States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism," Studies in American Political Development 19 (2005): 157-72;
2. Robert Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
3. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: Norton, 2000);
4. Erzo Luttmer, "Group Loyalty and the Taste for Redistribution," Journal of Political Economy 109 (2001): 500-28;
5. Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, "Why Doesn't the U.S. Have a European Style Welfare State?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity-2001 2 (2001): 187-254;
6. and John Roemer, "Why the Poor do not Expropriate the Rich: an Old Argument in New Garb," Journal of Public Economics 70 (1998): 399-424.
7. Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, "Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics," Quarterly Journal of Economics 121 (2006): 699-746.
8. Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance," Quarterly Journal of Political Science 1 (2006): 255-86.
9. In making this argument, we draw on the arguments and empirical evidence presented by Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
10. Jonathan Gruber and Daniel M. Hungerman, "Faith-Based Charity and Crowd Out During the Great Depression," NBER Working Paper 11332 (2005);
11. and H. Paul Douglass and Edmund de Brunner, The Protestant Church as a Social Institution (New York: Harper and Brothers,1935).
12. A subject that has been analyzed in depth in Thomas Piketty, "Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics," Quarterly Journal of Economics 110 (1995): 551-84.
13. In so doing we hope to contribute to the literature that examines the political economy of welfare state policies in a comparative context including Isabela Mares, The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
14. Jacob Hacker, "The Historical Logic of National Insurance: Structure and Sequence in the Development of British, Canadian, and U.S. Medical Policy," Studies in American Political Development 12 (1998): 57-130;
15. Peter Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);
16. Peter Swenson, "Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden," Studies in American Political Development 18 (2004): 1-29;
17. Evelyne Huber and John Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
18. Torben Iversen and David Soskice, "An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences," American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 875-93;
19. Karl Moene and Michael Wallerstein, "Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution," American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 859-73;
20. Paul Pierson, ed., The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
21. and Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote, "Why Doesn't the U.S. Have a European Style Welfare State?."
22. Scheve and Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance."
23. Robert Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
24. William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978);
25. Daniel Chen and Jo T. Lind, "The Political Economy of Beliefs: Why Fiscal and Social Conservatives/Liberals Come Hand-in-Hand" (mimeo, 2005; version available online at http://home.uchicago.edu/~dlc/papers/ PoliticalEconomy_of_Beliefs.pdf last viewed 8 Oct. 2006).
26. See Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State," Politics & Society 30 (2002): 277-325;
27. Paul Pierson, "When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change," World Politics 45 (1993): 595-628;
28. and Hacker, "The Historical Logic of National Insurance: Structure and Sequence in the Development of British, Canadian, and U.S. Medical Policy."
29. Scheve and Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance."
30. See Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, "Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s-1920," American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 726-50;
31. and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
32. See in particular the exchange between Swenson, "Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden";
33. and Hacker and Pierson, "Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State."
34. Sven Steinmo, "Rethinking American Exceptionalism," in The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. Larry Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).
35. In Section 3, we discuss the contributions of several authors on this subject including Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972);
36. Douglass and Brunner, Protestant Church as a Social Institution;
37. Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940);
38. Robert Moats Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues: 1919-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958);
39. and Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907; Louisville, KY: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1991).
40. Douglass and Brunner, Protestant Church as a Social Institution.
41. Price Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers' Compensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
42. Price Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, "The Adoption of Workers' Compensation in the United States: 1900-1930," Journal of Law and Economics 41 (1998): 305-41;
43. and Price Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, "The Political Economy of Workers' Compensation Benefit Levels, 1910-1930," Explorations in Economic History 35 (1998): 109-39.
44. These include Robert Asher, "Business and Workers' Welfare in the Progressive Era: Workmen's Compensation Reform in Massachusetts, 1880-1911," Business History Review 43 (1969): 452-75;
45. Robert Asher, "Failure and Fulfillment: Agitation for Employers' Liability Legislation and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation in New York State, 1876-1910," Labor History 24 (1983): 198-222;
46. R. Rudy Higgins-Evenson, "From Industrial Police to Workmen's Compensation: Public Policy and Industrial Accidents in New York, 1880-1910," Labor History 39 (1998): 365-80;
47. Julian Go III, "Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance: Discourse and Workers' Compensation in the United States, 1880s-1910s," Social Science History 20 (1996): 401-38;
48. Christopher Howard, "Workers' Compensation, Federalism, and the Heavy Hand of History," Studies in American Political Development 16 (2002): 28-47;
49. Addison Cutler "Labor Legislation in Thirteen Southern States," Southern Economic Journal 7 (1941): 297-316;
50. and James Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation" Labor History 8 (1967): 156-74.
51. Its importance is easily measured by the fact that U.S. state governments continue to spend twice as much on workers' compensation as on unemployment insurance.
52. Weir, "States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism."
53. Given the time period for our study, we do not consider the important question Weir raises in "States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism," where she argues that certain institutions put in place during the Progressive Era, such as independent boards for the administration of workers' compensation programs, ultimately undermined the subsequent possibility for state governments to pursue active welfare policies.
54. The early and extensive study provided by Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943) provides a wealth of evidence on the Works Progress Administration.
55. The political economy of the WPA has also been considered by Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998);
56. Amenta and Drew Halfmann, "Wage Wars: Institutional Politics, WPA Wages, and the Struggle for U.S. Social Policy," American Sociological Review 67 (2000): 506-28;
57. and Gavin Wright, "The Political Economy of New Deal Spending: An Econometric Analysis," Review of Economics and Statistics 56 (1974): 30-38.
58. Piketty, "Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics";
59. Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote, "Why Doesn't the U.S. Have a European Style Welfare State?";
60. Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, "Fairness and Redistribution," American Economic Review 95 (2005): 960-80;
61. and Benabou and Tirole, "Belief in a Just World."
62. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002);
63. Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Modern Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1926),
64. David C. Barker and Christopher Jan Carman, "The Spirit of Capitalism? Religious Doctrine, Values, and Economic Attitude Constructs," Political Behavior 22 (2000): 1-27;
65. and Sigrun Kahl, "The Religious Roots of Modern Poverty Policy: Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Protestant Traditions Compared," European Journal of Sociology 46 (2005): 91-126.
66. Randall Wright, "The Redistributive Roles of Unemployment Insurance and the Dynamics of Voting," Journal of Public Economics 31 (1986): 377-99.
67. See Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald, "Unhappiness and Unemployment," The Economic Journal 104 (1994): 648-59;
68. Rafael Di Tella, Robert MacCulloch, and Andrew Oswald, "The Macroeconomics of Happiness," Review of Economics and Statistics 85 (2003): 809-27.
69. It is also worth noting that the formal presentation of our model in Appendix A illustrates precisely why this third assumption matters.
70. Kenneth Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping (New York: Guilford Press, 1997);
71. Timothy Smith, Michael McCullough, and Justin Poll, "Religiousness and Depression: Evidence for a Main Effect and Moderating Influence of Stressful Life Events," Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003): 614-36;
72. and Crystal Park, Lawrence Cohen, and Lisa Herb, "Intrinsic Religiousness and Religious Coping as Life Stress Moderators for Catholics versus Protestants," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 562-74.
73. Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping (New York: Springer, 1984).
74. Susan Folkman, Richard S. Lazarus, Rand J. Gruen, and Anita DeLongis, "Appraisal, Coping, Health Status, and Psychological Symptoms," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986): 572.
75. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927; London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press, and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 2001);
76. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
77. See Rajeev Dehejia, Thomas DeLeire, and Erzo F. P. Luttmer, "Insuring Consumption and Happiness through Relgious Organizations," NBER Working Paper 11576 (2005), for recent findings.
78. This same correlation is shown in Christopher Ellison, "Religious Involvement and Subjective Well-Being," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 32 (1991): 80-99,
79. as well as in a second study by Ellison, David Gay, and Thomas Glass, "Does Religious Commitment Contribute to Individual Life Satisfaction," Social Forces 68 (1989): 100-123, which demonstrates that religiosity has a positive correlation with subjective life satisfaction even when controlling for levels of sociability.
80. Jonathan Gruber, "Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?" NBER Working Paper 11377 (2005), has recently presented related evidence using a novel instrument for religiosity involving the density of a religion in a particular area given the area's ancestral mix.
81. See Park, Cohen, and Herb, "Intrinsic Religiousness and Religious Coping,"
82. and Smith, McCullough, and Poll, "Religiousness and Depression."
83. Andrew Clark and Orsolya Lelkes, "Deliver Us From Evil: Religion as Insurance" (available online at http://www.ugr.es/~teoriahe/RePEc/gra/ paoner/per06_03.pdf [last viewed 2 Oct. 2006]).
84. John Burnett and Bruce Palmer, "Examining Life Insurance Ownership through Demographic and Psychographic Characteristics," Journal of Risk and Insurance 51 (1984): 453-67.
85. Viviana A. Zelizer, "Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in Nineteenth-Century America" American Journal of Sociology 84 (1978): 591-610, provides historical evidence to demonstrate that the growth of the life insurance industry in nineteenth century America was initially limited by religious beliefs involving trusting in God to provide for one's future, among other factors.
86. In "Redistributive Taxation with Endogenous Sentiments," Matteo Cervellati, Joan Esteban, and Laurence Kranich provide an example of a model of redistributive politics where utility from income and from a "psychic benefit" are not additively separable (available online at http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp2312.html [last viewed 2 Oct. 2006]).
87. See Pargament, Psychology of Religion and Coping, 156.
88. Dehejia, DeLeire, and Luttmer, "Insuring Consumption."
89. On this, see Appendix A, below, for significant supporting detail.
90. Piketty, "Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics."
91. In "Belief in a Just World," Benabou and Tirole also consider a model where attitudes toward redistribution depend on religious beliefs. In this case, even when all individuals know the true influence of effort on individual income, they might have different redistributive preferences if they have different beliefs about the extent to which industriousness is rewarded in the afterlife. Individuals who expect that industriousness is rewarded in this manner expect to exert more effort and thus prefer less redistributive taxation.
92. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this point.
93. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
94. Rauschenbush, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 350.
95. On Rauschenbusch's views, Douglass F. Ottati, "Foreward" in Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, (1991 ed.).
96. See Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 237, 243.
97. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 152.
98. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform;
99. Fogel, Fourth Great Awakening;
100. and Chen and Lind, "Political Economy of Beliefs."
101. Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel.
102. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 804.
103. Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 17-47.
104. Some of the best evidence on this period is offered in Miller's thorough study of Protestant publications (Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 17-47. ibid.).
105. Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, Ibid., 116.
106. Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, Ibid., 117.
107. Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, Ibid., 126.
108. Literary Digest, 22 Feb. 1936, 8,
109. cited in Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 122.
110. "The Bishops' Program for Social Reconstruction," Feb. 1919. This program suggested that social insurance should be maintained until such time a legal minimum wage was established at a level sufficiently high to allow workers to make sufficient precautionary savings.
111. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 1,008.
112. Lipset and Marks, It Didn't Happen Here.
113. Pelikan suggests this was reinforced by the medieval papal doctrine that there were "two swords, namely, the spiritual and the temporal" and both were wielded by the church (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of the Doctrine, Volume 5: Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture Since 1700 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 322).
114. Cited in Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 789 (emphasis in orig.). In "Religious Roots of Modern Poverty Policy," Sigrun Kahl has recently presented evidence on the traditional division between Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist beliefs about the responsibility of the poor for their own condition, based on edicts from the Reformation concerning begging and poor relief.
115. In early work on individual level support for New Deal policies, Wesley Allinsmith and Beverly Allinsmith, concluded that average support was clearly correlated with average income levels across denominations ("Religious Affiliation and Politico-Economic Attitude," Public Opinion Quarterly 12 [1948]: 377-89).
116. Chaves, Congregations in America.
117. Gruber and Hungerman, "Faith-Based Charity."
118. Douglass and Brunner, Protestant Church as a Social Institution.
119. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State, 1.
120. Fishback and Kantor, "Adoption of Workers' Compensation";
121. Eliza K. Pavalko, "State Timing of Policy Adoption: Workmen's Compensation in the United States, 1909-1929," American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989): 592-615.
122. The discussion in this subsection draws on a number of sources including Asher, "Business and Workers' Welfare in the Progressive Era";
123. Asher, "Failure and Fulfillment";
124. Higgins-Evenson, "From Industrial Police to Workmen's Compensation";
125. Go, "Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance";
126. Howard, "Workers' Compensation, Federalism, and the Heavy Hand of History";
127. Swenson, "Varieties of Capitalist Interests";
128. Cutler, "Labor Legislation in Thirteen Southern States";
129. Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation";
130. Walter Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York: Free Press, 1974);
131. Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996);
132. and Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
133. See Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation"
134. and Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State, for concise discussions of these principles.
135. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State, for concise discussions of these principles. Ibid.
136. Although Katz, in Shadow of the Poorhouse, draws a more pessimistic conclusion on the achievements of workers' compensation legislation, he does not present evidence to contradict Fishback and Kantor's conclusions on expected accident payments.
137. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
138. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.
139. See Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation," on this incident and its political ramifications.
140. Go, "Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance."
141. Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, 198.
142. Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation," notes that several large companies including U.S. Steel and International Harvester actually started voluntary workmen's compensation programs whereby workers could have a certain amounted deducted from their salary in exchange for benefits that would apply in the case of an accident.
143. On these points, also see Asher, "Business and Workers' Welfare in the Progressive Era";
144. Asher, "Failure and Fulfillment";
145. Howard, "Workers' Compensation, Federalism, and the Heavy Hand of History";
146. and Swenson, "Varieties of Capitalist Interests." It should be noted that these observations about business support for workers' compensation insurance parallel those Mares made regarding France and Germany in Politics of Social Risk.
147. For evidence on this divide, see the discussions in Asher, "Business and Workers' Welfare in the Progressive Era";
148. Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation";
149. Howard, "Workers' Compensation, Federalism, and the Heavy Hand of History";
150. Cutler, "Labor Legislation in Thirteen Southern States";
151. and Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
152. Cutler, "Labor Legislation in Thirteen Southern States."
153. The electronic file for Fishback and Kantor's data used in our analysis differs slightly on the year of adoption variable from Table 4.3 in Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State, for Arizona, Maryland, and Nevada.
154. We resolved the discrepancy in favor of the date in the electronic file based on other sources (e.g., Pavalko, "State Timing of Policy Adoption").
155. See esp. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
156. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State. Ibid.
157. Except for the religious variables, all of the data employed in this section are from this source. For details on original sources and data construction, see Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State, esp. appendices.
158. Data on state religious characteristics is from the United States Census of Religious Bodies, 1906, 1916, 1926, 1936 and the Statistics of Churches in the United States, 1890. The data were accessed from electronic files available at the American Religion Data Archive (http://www.thearda.com; acquired Sept. 2005).
159. In his "Religious Belief, Religious Participation, and Social Policy Attitudes," John Huber has recently investigated the link between religious belief and religious participation, demonstrating that the correlation between the two varies substantially across countries, most notably with levels of income, as well as across individuals (available online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jcarey/Huber_CDG_2005.pdf; last viewed 2 Oct. 2006).
160. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
161. For our purposes, the southern states are: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
162. V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949).
163. For example, see Luttmer, "Group Loyalty and the Taste for Redistribution,"
164. and Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote, "Why Doesn't the U.S. Have a European Style Welfare State?"
165. For example, see Jonathan Rodden, "Red States, Blue States, and the Welfare State: Political Geography, Representation, and Government Policy Around the World" (mimeo, 2005; version available online at http://www.columbia. edu/~kab2106/papers/rodden.pdf; last viewed 2 Oct. 2006).
166. Our application of the Cox model allowed for time-varying covariates and used Efron's method for handling tied events in the calculation of the log partial likelihood.
167. These models are often referred to in the literature as "competing risks" models. We use the term "multivariate hazard model" for clarity as the occurrences of each of the six specific event types coded in Reform Adoption are not mutually exclusive. For example, once a state adopts a workers' compensation law including agricultural workers but excluding domestic workers, this does not preclude it from subsequently modifying the law to include domestic workers. For a discussion of estimation of competing risks models, see Sanford Gordon, "Stochastic Dependence in Competing Risks," American Journal of Political Science 46 (2002): 200-17.
168. Bradford Jones and Regina Branton, "Beyond Logit and Probit: Cox Duration Models for State Policy Adoption," State Politics and Policy Quarterly (2005): 420-43. To implement the model, we stratified on reform type, used Efron's method for handling tied events in the calculation of the log partial likelihood, and adjusted the standard errors for clustering by state.
169. Note again that a positive coefficient estimate for the Catholic Membership variable is consistent with arguments about the effects of religious doctrine on economic beliefs but it is also consistent with other hypotheses such as that states with high concentrations of Catholics faced higher economic risks not measured by the control variables.
170. In addition to the estimates reported in Table 2, we evaluated the sensitivity of our results to model specification. We reestimated the model dropping various sets of control variables (e.g., all the partisan control variables) and found that the results for the correlation between religiosity and the adoption of workers' compensation reforms were qualitatively similar.
171. Fishback and Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State.
172. It should also be noted that these are the probabilities of each type of accident occurring, not the probability of each type of accident occurring given that some type of accident has occurred.
173. In addition to the estimates reported in Table 3, we evaluated the sensitivity of our results to model specification. We reestimated the model dropping various sets of control variables (e.g., all the partisan control variables). For the specifications that include the Catholic membership variable, the results for the correlation between religiosity and benefit levels were qualitatively similar across all specifications. For those omitting the Catholic membership variable, the coefficient on religiosity was not statistically significant in a few sparse specifications which omitted most of the control variables, but otherwise these alternative specifications generated qualitatively similar results.
174. Gallup Poll Number 1939-0149 with field dates 24 Feb. through 1 Mar. and a sample size of 3,134; Gallup Poll Number 1939-0143 with field dates 9-14 Jan. and a sample size of 3,063.
175. John Joseph Wallis, Price Fishback, and Shawn Kantor, "Politics, Relief, and Reform: The Transformation of America's Social Welfare System During the New Deal," NBER Working Paper 11080 (2005).
176. Based on the figures Howard reports in WPA and Federal Relief Policy, the WPA employed 2.93 million workers in January 1939, in addition to the 0.44 million workers employed on "other federal work projects" (ibid., 854-57). In January 1941, the WPA continued to employ 1.8 million individuals while the number of workers employed on other federal work projects increased to 0.78 million. The figures provided for "other federal work projects" here are exclusive of employment for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Youth Administration (NYA).
177. Ibid., 38.
178. Katherine Baicker, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz, "A Distinctive System: Origins and Impact of U.S. Unemployment Compensation," NBER Working Paper 5889 (1997).
179. Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Policy, 435-40.
180. Conflict over WPA wages is analyzed in detail in Amenta and Halfmann, "Wage Wars: Institutional Politics, WPA Wages, and the Struggle for U.S. Social Policy";
181. and Amenta, Bold Relief.
182. On the regional distribution of WPA spending, see Wright, "Political Economy of New Deal Spending";
183. and Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Policy.
184. The exact wording of the Sunday attendance question was "Did you happen to go to church last Sunday?" The exact wording of the relative attendance question varied across the two forms of the survey instrument for Gallup Poll Number 1939-0149. For Form A, the phrasing was "Did your parents go to church more often or less often than you do?" For Form B, the phrasing was "Do you go to church more often or less often than your parents did?"
185. The categories used were 1 for "poor"; 2 for "poor plus"; 3 for "average"; 4 for "average plus"; and 5 for "wealthy."
186. Gary King, James Honaker, Anne Joseph, and Kenneth Scheve, "Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation," American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 49-69;
187. Joseph L. Schafer, Analysis of Incomplete Multivariate Data (London: Chapman & Hall, 1997);
188. J. Rodrick Little and Donald Rubin, Statistical Analysis with Missing Data (New York: Wiley, 1987);
189. Donald Rubin, Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys (New York: Wiley, 1987).
190. Andrew Gelman, Gary King, and Chuanhai Liu, "Not Asked or Not Answered: Multiple Imputation for Multiple Surveys," Journal of the American Statistical Association 93 (1998): 847.
191. It is also necessary to assume the parameters describing the missing data process are distinct from parameters of the data model so that the missing data mechanism is ignorable. Again, because the "missingness" in this analysis is primarily due to questions not asked, there is no reason to think this assumption is violated. See Gelman, King, and Liu, "Not Asked or Not Answered," for further discussion of the application of multiple imputation to the problem of missing questions in independent cross-sectional surveys.
192. The imputation procedures were implemented using the Amelia software package.
193. King, Honaker, Joseph, and Scheve, "Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data". In this analysis, the imputation model was multivariate normal with a slight ridge prior.
194. See King, Honaker, Joseph, and Scheve, "Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data". In this analysis, the imputation model was multivariate normal with a slight ridge prior. ibid.,
195. and Schafer, Analysis of Incomplete Multivariate Data) for a complete description of these variances. Another potential problem with the Gallup surveys is that they were conducted using quota control sampling rather than probability sampling methods.
196. Adam Berinsky, "American Public Opinion in the 1930s and 1940s: The Analysis of Quota-Controlled Sample Survey Data," (mimeo, 2005; version available online at http://web.mit.edu/berinsky/www/QCS.pdf; last viewed 2 Oct. 2006), discusses the methodology of these early surveys and the problems that these methods may generate for various types of analyses. For individual-level regression analyses like those conducted in this section, the recommended method for dealing with potential biases from non-representative quota samples is to control for those demographic variables that may influence sample selection.
197. See also Andrew Gelman, "Struggles with Survey Weighting and Regression Modeling," (mimeo, 2005; available online at http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=565; last viewed 2 Oct. 2006). For example, quota samples are known to have undersampled women and therefore sex should be controlled for in the regression analyses. As discussed above, our baseline analysis includes a fairly full set of demographic controls including sex, age, race, and wealth. Moreover, in the robustness checks below, we include a comprehensive set of control variables including indicators for region, occupation, and living in an urban area.
198. Scheve and Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance."
199. Scheve and Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance." Ibid.
200. Note again that differences between Catholics and Protestants may be a function of differences in economic risk not accounted for in our control variables. While we think the mixed results for the economic beliefs effect are interesting, the main point here is that there is evidence of a negative correlation between the religiosity measure and unemployment spending preferences, controlling for denominational membership. We note also that other studies including our own analysis of contemporary social insurance policy opinions in the United States have found systematic differences between Catholics and Protestants (see Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, "Religion and Social Insurance: Evidence from the United States, 1970-2002," [mimeo, 2005; Not available online]).
201. The obvious problem with this analysis is that to the extent that support for Roosevelt is determined by attitudes toward redistribution and social insurance, it does not make sense to enter this variable in the regression. For this reason, our baseline specification excludes the support for Roosevelt measure.
202. Scheve and Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance."
203. We also considered the possibility that the marginal effect of religiosity varied across different levels of income or wealth. We added interaction terms between religiosity and our measures of wealth to the baseline specification. The coefficient estimates for the interaction terms are positive but not statistically significant. It is important to note that although the argument and its formalization presented in the appendix assumes that utility from monetary consumption and "psychic benefits" are not additively separable and thus implies that the psychological benefits of religion are greater for those with lower incomes, the model does not generate any direct predictions about the relationship between religiosity, income, and spending preferences (see equation 7). Even if we assume that economic insecurity is correlated with income, the model does not make unambiguous predictions about the magnitude of the effect of religiosity for different levels of economic insecurity. Thus, the lack of a significant interaction term between religiosity and the wealth measures is not inconsistent with the model.
204. See, for example, Rodden, "Red States, Blue States, and the Welfare State."
205. The analysis here provides substantial evidence of a robust correlation between religiosity and unemployment spending preferences, controlling for measured characteristics of respondents. It remains possible that there are unobserved characteristics omitted from the model that could generate biased estimates. Although not available for the 1930s data analyzed here, in "Religion and Social Insurance: Evidence from the United States, 1970-2002," we use parental religiosity in an analysis of contemporary U.S. social insurance policy opinions to address this issue and document further evidence that increasing religiosity decreases support for general social insurance programs.
206. Iversen and Soskice, "Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences";
207. Moene and Wallerstein, "Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution";
208. and Wright, "Redistributive Roles of Unemployment Insurance."
209. Piketty, "Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics";
210. and Benabou and Tirole, "Belief in a Just World."
211. Wright, "Redistributive Roles of Unemployment Insurance."
212. One way of stating this assumption in words is that someone who currently has a job is more likely to be employed in the next period than is someone who is currently unemployed.
213. The advantages and disadvantages of including a psychic benefit directly in a utility function of this sort is discussed by Jean Tirole, "Rational Irrationality: Some Economics of Self-Management," European Economic Review 46 (2002): 633-55.
214. For a related application, see Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, "Incentives and Prosocial Behavior," (mimeo, 2004; version available online at http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp1695.html; last viewed 2 Oct. 2006).
215. In Scheve and Stasavage, "Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance," we explored the possibility that individuals choose their level of religiosity under the constraint that greater time spent on religion leaves less time for other leisure activities, and we obtained similar theoretical predictions to those reported here.
216. One would also continue to observe a preferred level of social insurance that is decreasing in the level of religiosity even if individuals were partially altruistic, if one followed the proposal in Anthony Atkinson, "Income Maintenance for the Unemployed in Britain and the Response to High Unemployment," Ethics (1990): 569-85, for modeling altruism.
217. Piketty, "Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics."
218. On this issue, see Christophe Chamley, Rational Herds: Economic Models of Social Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
219. Benabou and Tirole, "Belief in a Just World."