Religion and Government Corruption in the American States

One way to measure the quality of government is to assess the extent to which political officials are corrupt (i.e., use their public office for private gain). This study presents a set of theoretical expectations for why states with a larger proportion of religious citizens will have lower levels of government corruption and then tests this proposition using cross-sectional data from the American states. Despite reasons to expect otherwise, the religiosity of a state's population is not related to instances of government corruption. This result is robust as related to multiple measures of both corruption and religiosity. This article concludes with a discussion of how these findings increase understanding of the impact of societal characteristics on the quality of government.