Women, catholicism and the welfare state

In the last 150 years, all developed economies have enlarged their welfare states and given women more political power. Is there a link between these developments?
Yes, says this new paper - but only in non-Catholic countries.
To see the thinking, consider a man in a country where women are disenfranchised. Should he support female suffrage? He’ll weigh two competing considerations:
1. If the wage gap between men and women is low, he’ll support female suffrage. This is because fewer women will vote for higher taxes, and some richer women might vote for lower taxes. So enfranchising women won’t raise his tax bill.
2. If he’s got traditional attitudes to women, he’ll oppose their enfranchisement.
Where attitudes to women are relatively egalitarian, point 2 has less force. So women will be enfranchised even if they earn a lot less than men. There’ll then be more voters supporting higher taxes and a bigger state. But in traditional societies, point 2 has force. So women will only be enfranchised later, when their incomes are higher. Their support for big government will therefore be smaller.
Roughly speaking, attitudes to women are more conservative in traditionally Catholic countries; women got the vote in Spain and Italy much later than they did in  Scandinavia. So you’d expect the link between women’s enfranchisement and the growth of the welfare state to be smaller in Catholic countries.
And this, finds Graziella Bertocchi, is exactly what happened. In non-Catholic nations, women’s suffrage expanded the state. But in Catholic nations, it didn’t.

Comments

[ad]

Maybe that is because the State had more time to expand before womens enfranchisement in Catholic countries?

I wonder how marriage would influence the argument you described. Voting for higher taxes on your spouse does not seem very sensible.

[dearieme]

How does this bear on the removal of the franchise from those women who had it by the 1832 Great Reform Act?

[Tui]

UNESCO reckons that the simplest and most achievable way to expand nations' economies is to expand women's rights. [I accidentally mistyped that as "expand women's tights" -- a quite different tactic.]

[Matt Munro]

Surely taxes will always rise when women are empowered as they will start working and stop looking after their own parents and children. Women (at least those that have children) work fewer hours for fewer years, earn less, pay less tax and live longer, so are inherently economically dependent. In catholic countries that dependence is on the husbands pay packet, in non catholic countries (where the state usurps the church and the family) that dependence is on the welfare state which neccesarily expands to fill the gap. So the priest is replaced by the social worker, the vatican by the government, church charity with child tax credits.

I'm only just getting my head around pareto efficient, but I'm sure it isn't.