This study investigates the relationship between the religiously-induced internalized values of individuals and their specific attitudes regarding accepting corruption. The study uses data collected by the World Values Survey (WVS) on 139,826 individuals in 78 countries with 979 regions surveyed in 13 different years. The study concludes that: (a) religiosity does lower acceptance of corruption only when it exceeds a certain level of religiosity for a specific individual; (b) the effect of religiosity on acceptance of corruption does not systematically diverge between individuals of different religious denominations; and (c) as for the societal level, the more accepted corruption is at the societal level, the less of a mitigating effect religiosity has on individual acceptance of corruption. The study also reviews the empirical literature on religion and corruption and concludes: “the results of the considerable body of empirical literature tackling this relation remain controversial and inconclusive…much has to do with how religiosity is assessed, or how to quantify the level of religiosity.”

Reference

Gouda, Moamen, and Sang-Min Park. “Religious Loyalty and Acceptance of Corruption.” Jahrbücher Für Nationalökonomie Und Statistik 235, no. 2 (2015): 184-206. Accessed June 3, 2020: https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/855.pdf