Does a Protestant work ethic exist? Evidence from the well-being effect of unemployment

Highlights

• Evidence on Weber's original thesis of a Protestant work ethic is ambiguous.

• A better test is to compare the well-being effects of unemployment between groups.

• Protestants are hurt more by unemployment than people from other denominations are.

• People living in Protestant societies are hurt more by unemployment than others are.

• Extensive checks show effects indeed derive from an intrinsic appreciation of work.

Abstract

Evidence on Weber's original thesis on a Protestant work ethic is ambiguous and relies on questionable measures of work attitudes. We test the relation between Protestantism and work attitudes using a novel method, operationalizing work ethic as the effect of unemployment on individuals’ subjective well-being. Analyzing a sample of 150,000 individuals from 82 societies, we find strong support for a Protestant work ethic: unemployment hurts Protestants more and hurts more in Protestant societies. Whilst the results shed new light on the Protestant work ethic debate, the method has wider applicability in the analysis of attitudinal differences.

Introduction

More than a century after its first publication, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1904/5 [1930]) continues to inspire social scientists in many disciplines. A large stream of work in the social sciences has built on Weber's idea that religious values explain social and economic developments (Tawney, 1926, Huntington, 1993, Landes, 1998, Harrison and Huntington, 2000, Barro and McCleary, 2003, Guiso et al., 2003, Guiso et al., 2006, McCleary and Barro, 2006, Rupasingha and Chilton, 2009, Cavalcanti et al., 2007, Arruñada, 2010, Bettendorf and Dijkgraaf, 2010). Ironically, this research has so far failed to provide support for the thesis of Weber that originally inspired the literature. Though some of the results of McCleary and Barro (2006) suggest that Weber may have been right, the empirical link between Protestantism and a work ethic inducing economic development remains tenuous (Lehmann and Roth, 1993, Delacroix and Nielsen, 2001, Sanderson et al., 2011; see Iannaccone, 1998: 1474–1475).¹ Some researchers have even reported evidence that Protestants overall value work less than people from other religions do (Norris and Inglehart, 2004, Weil, 2009).

One reason for this lack of results may be the difficulties inherent in measuring values such as work ethic. Existing measures typically rely on values surveys, focusing on self-professed attitudes toward work, which suffer from a number of methodological problems, particularly social desirability bias and extreme sensitivity to fluctuating circumstances (Clarke et al., 1999, Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2001, Maseland and van Hoorn, 2009).

In this paper, we test the “Weber thesis” using a novel method that provides a most direct measurement of people's appreciation of work. Building on the rapidly developing literature on the economics of happiness or subjective well-being (SWB), our approach is to estimate inter-religious differences in the happiness loss caused by unemployment. If we find that unemployment has a stronger negative effect on SWB for Protestants or in Protestant societies, we interpret this as an indication that work matters more to Protestants.²

Analyzing a sample of almost 150,000 individuals from 82 societies, we thus find strong and robust support for the existence of a Protestant work ethic at both the individual and the societal level. Individual Protestants and historically Protestant societies appear to value work much more. The societal effect, meaning the effect of living in a Protestant society thereby dominates the individual effect of being Protestant. Robustness checks shows that the findings are not sensitive to different measures or driven by other factors such as differences in formal institutions related to social security. We conclude that the Weber thesis is confirmed; a Protestant work ethic exists.