Protestantism and insurance—an elective affinity? A multilevel comparative-historical analysis of the confessional insurance gap

Abstract While there are many studies and theories about the rise of social insurance and the public welfare state, the prior emergence and growth of private life and nonlife insurance are largely understudied, mostly due to a lack of data. This article fills this gap by testing whether there is an elective affinity between the rise and evolution of private insurance and Protestantism that is irreducible to typical factors external to religion (gross domestic product, education, demography, public welfare). Drawing on multiple new datasets, the paper tests whether Catholic–Protestant differences in insurance demand persist when controlling for standard covariates external to religion across nineteen OECD countries (1870–2020), across states in the confessionally mixed federations of Germany, Switzerland and the USA (1876–2020) as well as across US counties and European cities around 1909. The article finds Lutheran and Reformed Protestant areas to have had higher private insurance penetration and density than Catholic ones, controlling for standard covariates. This relationship is more pronounced in life than nonlife branches, more pronounced for insurance demand than insurance company activity, and more consistently found in Europe than within the USA. More generally, the article suggests that the confessional insurance gap may provide a missing empirical link to better understand the emergence of Alpine and Maritime insurance cultures, different premodern poor-ethics traditions and the different worlds of modern welfare states and pension systems.