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Social Indicators Research

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16-06-2016

Religious Transformations and Generalized Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

Author: Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 2/2017

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Abstract

Prominent versions of social capital theory presume a positive link between voluntary memberships—including religious memberships—and generalized trust in society. Yet this relationship has not been tested in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with low average levels of generalized trust and high levels of religious membership and participation, where the rise of Charismatic Evangelical churches has recently transformed the religious landscape. Contrary hypotheses based in a theory of oppositional subcultures would suggest that memberships in such churches could dampen generalized trust due to their oppositional discourse vis a vis the wider society. In this paper, I use 2008 Afrobarometer survey data from seven countries in the region to test these contrasting hypotheses, analyzing both the pooled data and the separate country datasets. I find mixed evidence for the link between religious membership and generalized trust, and more consistent evidence that affiliating with a Charismatic Evangelical group is negatively associated with generalized trust. The study supports the conclusion that the link between religious membership and generalized trust is dependent on both the context and the content of the discourse circulating in religious settings.

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Additionally, ancillary analyses of 2008 data from the Ghana Demographic Health Survey, in which respondents were able to select Charismatic as an identifier, revealed that the Charismatic group in that survey claims roughly the same percentage of respondents as the Christian only, Evangelical, and Independent groups combined in the 2008 Afrobarometer Survey, providing further evidence that these categories refer to congregations within the same larger new wave Charismatic movement.

I established the relevant majority groups in each country using several steps. First, I examined percentages of each ethno-linguistic group in the Afrobarometer sample, looking for those groups that made up a large percentage of the population. Second, I relied on the country summaries from the website of the Minority Rights Group International (www.minorityrights.org) to evaluate imbalances of power and political representation between groups. I also relied on my own field research experience in three out of seven of these countries. In some cases, I determined that two different groups held the status of an ethnic majority. The majorities for each country are as follows: Ghana = Akan; Kenya = Kikuyu; Malawi = Chewa; Nigeria: Hausa and Yoruba; South Africa: Afrikaans and Zulu; Tanzania = Sukuma; Uganda = Buganda.

I conducted a test of the parallel lines assumption (also called the proportional odds assumption) for the outcome variable of generalized trust using the gologit2 command with the “autofit” option, which tests whether there are significant differences in effects at different levels of the outcome variable (Williams 2006). The test verified that differences in effects are not significant at the p < 0.05 level, and thus ordinal logistic regression is more appropriate than multinomial regression in this case.

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Title: Religious Transformations and Generalized Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa
Author: Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber
Publication date: 16-06-2016
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Social Indicators Research / Issue 2/2017
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1383-5

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