Religious engagement and citizen support for democratic accountability in contemporary democracies

Abstract

The paper posits that individual religious engagement reduces people's motivations to hold governments accountable for their performance while in office. This expectation is based on previous research which shows that religion is closely linked with believing that the world is just, a place where people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Using data from the European Social Survey 2012-13 in seventeen established democracies, the study shows that individual religious engagement - in a form of religiosity and attendance of religious services - is indeed negatively associated with believing that governing parties should be punished in elections for poor performance. Moreover, while strong believers are more satisfied with government than non-believers, religious engagement weakens the relationship between people's economic evaluations and government satisfaction. These findings have important implications for debates on democratic accountability, reward-punishment models of electoral politics, and the prospects of democratic legitimacy in states with considerable shares of religious individuals.