A regional analysis of religion and labour market outcomes in the UK

Neil Rowland, Queen's University Belfast

This project seeks to analyse the relationship between religion and labour market outcomes in three UK regions – Northern Ireland, England/Wales, and Scotland. This will be achieved using data from each of the UK LSs.

In the UK, employment inequalities according to race, ethnicity and religion are an important feature of the labour market. In Northern Ireland, inequalities according to religious affiliation – specifically Catholic versus Protestant – have historically been more prominent. Yet while employment inequalities according to religion have been largely eroded in Northern Ireland, inequalities according to race, ethnicity and religion remain persistent in the rest of the UK (for instance, see Khattab et al., 2015) and thus remain a matter of policymaking concern.

One objective of this project is to use each UK LS to learn more about how Catholic/Protestant unemployment differentials were reduced in Northern Ireland. It will do so by investigating whether Catholic/Protestant differentials exist in each regional labour market and whether they have changed through time. This will help to shed light on whether Catholic unemployment was higher in Northern Ireland because of Catholic-specific behaviours (i.e., economic behaviour common to Catholics regardless of where they live) or because of Northern Ireland’s unique economic, social and political environment that has been argued to have been hostile to Catholics at various times (i.e., discrimination that was specific to Northern Ireland). Because the causes of the religious differential – and specifically the exact role of discrimination – are still not fully understood, this research has the potential to shed new light on this important economic question. Understanding how this inequality has changed, and in particular how discrimination has contributed, is relevant for understanding the dynamics of contemporary inequalities according to race, ethnicity and religion in the rest of the UK. This is because in Northern Ireland being Catholic or Protestant is not just a religious marker but an ethnic marker as well, albeit a less visible ethnic marker than in the wider UK context. In turn, this understanding may pave the way for a more effective framework for bringing about a reduction in these related inequalities.

The analysis will investigate whether Catholics and Protestants experience different rates of labour market success in each UK region, focusing on unemployment at this stage, using data for Census years 1991, 2001 and 2011. The rationale is that each context represents (or has represented) a distinctly different labour market environment for each religious group. Many have argued that Catholics faced various forms of discrimination in Northern Ireland, and that many of these had some degree of institutional support (e.g., support from the pre-1972 Stormont government). In Scotland, meanwhile, although allegations of anti-Catholic discrimination have been made, these were not backed up by a comparable system of `ethnocratic’ government, nor was there much reliable evidence that anti-Catholic attitudes translated into widespread labour market discrimination (Paterson and Iannelli, 2006). By stark contrast, England/Wales has not experienced any significant level of anti-Catholic discrimination in the labour market. One might therefore expect Catholics to face larger employment penalties in Northern Ireland compared with Scotland and in Scotland compared with England/Wales. The analysis proposed here will test whether this is the case.

It is anticipated that a future project would consider additional labour market outcomes such as occupational status, social class and educational attainment, thus contributing to wider debates about social mobility and whether the role of ascriptive characteristics – in this case, religion or religious background – has changed for different cohorts.

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