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What Drives Religiosity in America? Evidence from an Empirical Hotelling Model of Church Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Raphael Corbi
  • Fabio Miessi Sanches
Abstract
We develop and estimate a Hotelling model of religious competition that allows us to study how churches ideological views are built depending on both societal and their own ideological preferences as well as strategic interactions between churches. Demand for religion is a function of the distance between individuals` ideology and the ideological type of each church. We show that churches ideological types can be identified using the structure of the demand model. We find that individuals choose churches that have ideological types close to their own ideological types. We also document that religious groups are overwhelmingly on the conservative side of the spectrum as they systematically deviate from profit maximization. Their ideological positioning is driven mainly by clergy intrinsic preferences (supply) as opposed to society ideological views (demand). Our counterfactuals indicate that the recent societal shift to the left in terms of political views and attitudes towards sexual norms is able to explain a substantial part of American religiosity trends observed in the last decades.

Suggested Citation

  • Raphael Corbi & Fabio Miessi Sanches, 2022. "What Drives Religiosity in America? Evidence from an Empirical Hotelling Model of Church Competition," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2022_08, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).
    • Handle: RePEc:spa:wpaper:2022wpecon08
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Religion; Ideology; Product Differentiation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • C57 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Econometrics of Games and Auctions
    • L66 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Food; Beverages; Cosmetics; Tobacco

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