Religious identity and the provision of public goods: Evidence from the Indian Princely States

Abstract

Identifying the effect of a ruler's religious identity on policy is challenging because religious identity rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting quasi-random variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States. Using data from the 1911 census, we find that Muslim-ruled states had lower Hindu literacy but the religion of the ruler had no statistically significant impact on Muslim literacy, railroad ownership, or post office provision. These results support the hypothesis that rulers provide less public goods when religious institutions provide a substitute targeted at their co-religionists.

The Effect of Religious Identity toward Academic Performance: An Experimental Study

“…This study was conducted to determine the effect of religious identity on the academic performance. Some studies show that religious identity has impacts on education [23].…”

Religious Cycles of Government Responsiveness: Why Governments Distribute in Ramadan

“…More interestingly, these seasonal changes in distributive policies occur in a highly religious environment at a time where religious mechanisms for distribution are the most active. This questions the argument that religious distribution reduces incentives for government distribution (Scheve andStasavage, 2006, Chaudhary andRubin, 2016). In Muslim societies, Ramadan is a time where distribution via religious mechanisms is the highest, but government distribution also rises in parallel.…”

“…Parties might divert voters away from their economic demands by focusing on religiously salient social issues (De La O and Rodden, 2008). And, governments in religious societies could limit their support to economically vulnerable groups to rely on religious charities as substitutes (Scheve andStasavage, 2006, Chaudhary andRubin, 2016). This paper adopts a different view of the religious environment as a time-variant structural factor that shapes the timing of government responsiveness to economic demands and its returns from economic distribution, in interaction with existing political threats to the autocrat.…”

A Theory of Conservative Revivals

“…Finally, the elite agents have a vested interest in the provision of particular types of public goods. For instance, merchants desire protection of property rights and transport infrastructure (North 1981;Acemoglu and Robinson 2012), military elites desires spending on defense (Tilly 1990;Hoffman 2015), religious authorities advocate for spending on religious infrastructure and education (possibly to the detriment of spending on secular public education; see Gill (1998), Coşgel and Miceli (2009), Chaudhary and Rubin (2016), and Rubin ( 2017)), and elites in "dying" industries may push for subsidies or tariffs to revitalize their industry (e.g., coal mining in the U.S.). We assume there are two types of elite, and the elite of type i ∈ {1, 2} derives utility…”