Do Catholic Societies Really Exist?
- 1 July 1992
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Rationality and Society
- Vol. 4 (3), 261-271
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1043463192004003002
Abstract
Economic theory holds that competition makes firms vigorous, whereas monopoly firms tend to be lazy. When this principle is applied to religious organizations, it leads to the prediction that the average level of religious commitment among Roman Catholics will vary inversely to the degree that a society is Catholic. This prediction is confirmed by analysis of data for 45 societies. The lower the average level of Catholic commitment, the greater the proportion of the population that claimed to be Catholic. Moreover, the recent explosive growth of Protestantism in Latin American is concentrated in the “most Catholic” nations.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
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- The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75The American Historical Review, 1972