Robert D Woodberry

Appendix II for Woodberry, Robert D. 2012. “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy” American Political Science Review 106(2): 244-274. It contains 11 additional tables I had hoped to reserve for future publications. They mainly show the relationship between Protestant mission and the intervening mechanism – e.g., book publishing, education, INGO involvement, GDP, etc.

Risk preference theory argues that the gender gap in religiosity is caused by greater female risk aversion. Although widely debated, risk preference theory has been inadequately tested. Our study tests the theory directly with phenotypic and genetic risk preferences in three dimensions-general, impulsive, and sensation-seeking risk. Moreover, we examine whether the effects of different dimensions of risk preferences on the gender gap vary across different dimensions of religiosity. We find that general and impulsive risk preferences do not explain gender differences in religiosity, whereas sensation-seeking risk preference makes the gender gap in self-assessed religiousness and church attendance insignificant, but not belief in God, prayer, or importance of religion. Genetic risk preferences do not remove any of the gender gaps in religiosity, suggesting that the causal order is not from risk preference to religiosity. Evidence suggests that risk preferences are not a strong predictor for gender differences in religiosity.

The growth of Protestantism among U.S. Latinos has been the focus of considerable discussion among researchers. Yet few studies investigate how Latino Protestants and Latino Catholics differ, or which types of Latinos convert from Catholicism to Protestantism. Our study tests various theories about why some Latinos convert including a modified version of the semi-involuntary thesis, the national origin hypothesis, and assimilation theory. We use data from a large national sample of U.S. Latinos and find some support for assimilation theory and less for the semi-involuntary thesis. However, context matters. If we divide Latinos into national origin groups, these groups strongly predict who converts and who are lifelong Protestants. We discuss how war may influence the religious composition of early migrants and thus shape both the religious composition and conversion of later migrants.

Every challenge facing the world today has a history--in most cases, a very long one. These histories matter, not simply because we wish to understand the causes of a current problem but also because we wish to understand its trajectory. One's perspective on an issue is necessarily affected by one knowledge of its past, or pasts. For example, one is apt to consider “globalization” quite differently if the topic is viewed in the context of (a) current history (the past half-century),(b) modern history (the past two centuries), or (c) human ...

Many scholars note the exceptional economic and political performance of Botswana relative to other Sub-Saharan African Countries (e.g., Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2003; Lange 2009). Since independence Botswana has had one of the highest average growth rates in the world, plus high rule of law, political rights, and social rights relative to other African countries- despite the fact that the same party has won every election since independence. In addition, Botswana is the leading producer of diamonds in the world (in terms of value), yet has not suffered from the “resource curse” that plagues so many major exporters of mineral resources.
In this article I compare the history and development of Botswana, Lesotho and Zimbabwe (three landlocked, former British colonies, with limited post-colonial ethnic diversity) to try to understand why Botswana has done so much better than other similar countries. These matched cases studies undermining arguments for post-colonial economic and political development based on greater exposure to British colonialism, European settlement, healthy climates, British common law, state capacity and diversified economies. Instead the relative influence of Protestant missions relative to European settlers seems crucial for understanding rule of law, protection of indigenous land rights, and the independence of local rules from outside interference. Although the choices of local elites were also important, Protestant missionaries helped create conditions that enabled better institutions.
I completed these case studies as part of the review process for Robert D. Woodberry. 2012. “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy” American Political Science Review. Among many other things reviewers asked me to complete case studies of India and China and matched case studies from somewhere else in the world. If picked these cases because I knew they had very different political outcomes, but knew almost nothing about their missionary and colonial history. Thus, I thought they would serve as a good test of my theory about Protestant missions and democracy. However, because I wrote them as part of the review process, this article still has the form of an online appendix to the previous article.

A recent article in the American Sociological Review (Hadaway, Marler and Chaves 1993) claims that church attendance is only half the level reported on surveys. They suggest this may be due to social desirability bias. If true, this has serious implications for survey research. In this thesis I demonstrate that little is actually due to social desirability: most is due to incomplete head-counts, data selection, and sampling problems. Survey typically over-sample religious people because they are easier to contact and more cooperative.  Current weighting techniques do not correct these problems. This thesis lays the groundwork for more sophisticated weighting techniques and exposes several weakness in current survey methodology. it also suggests that weekly church attendance in the US is not 40% or 20%, but somewhere between 27.6% and 30.4%.

Cross-national empirical research consistently suggests that, on average, former British colonies are both more democratic and have more stable democratic transitions. I argue that former British colonies are distinct not because Great Britain was a democracy – so were France and Belgium during the late 19th and early 20th century. Nor were the British more altruistic. However, British colonial elites were more divided and thus more constrained. In particular, religious groups were more independent from state control in British colonies than in historically-Catholic colonies (i.e., colonies of France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy). Initially the British restricted missions in their colonies, but Evangelical Protestants forced the British to allow religious liberty in 1813. Protestants were not able to win religious liberty in most other European colonizers during the entire period of colonization.
    Protestant missionaries were central to expanding formal education in the colonies because they wanted people to read the Bible in their own language. Governments wanted a small educated elite that they could control. Other religious groups invested in mass vernacular education primarily when competing with Protestants.
    Missionaries also constrained colonial abuses when they were independent from state control (i.e., chose their own leaders and raised their own funds). If colonial exploitation was extreme, it angered indigenous people against the West and made mission work difficult. Thus missionaries had incentive to fight abuses. Other colonial elites had no incentive to expose their abuses, and indigenous people had little power in the colonizing state. This left missionaries in a unique bridging position. Non-state missionaries also fostered institutions outside state control, institutions that nationalist leaders later used to challenge British colonization and birth political parties.
    Statistical analysis confirms the centrality of missions in expanding education and fostering democracy. Controlling for Protestant missions removes the association between democracy and British colonization, other “Protestant” colonization, percent European, percent Muslim, being an island nation, and being a landlocked nation. Other controls (such as current GDP, and current education enrollments) do not remove the strong positive association between Protestant missions and democracy.

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

Christian missionaries were crucial to the development of formal education throughout much of the world, including East Asia. They generally provided the first Western formal education, often initially against local resistance. They demonstrated the economic value of this education – which spurred later demand. They trained many of the teachers who staffed non-missionary schools. They pioneered education for women and poor people. They were the major early teachers of European languages, Western science, and Western medicine. These innovations had a number of important social consequences around the world, including East Asia (Woodberry 2004; 2006; Woodberry and Shah 2004; Etherington 2005). For Protestants, mass education was crucial because they wanted people to read the Bible in their own languages. Thus, wherever Protestant missionaries went they almost immediately imported printing technology, created fonts, and began printing Bibles, tracts, newspapers, and other texts for ordinary people. They also rapidly developed mass literacy programs to teach ordinary people to read. This was true even of Protestant missionaries with little formal education themselves. In areas where Catholic missionaries competed with Protestants, they too invested heavily in education and printing, often developing the best elementary and secondary schools (ibid.). In the literate cultures of Asia and the Near East, missionaries also invested in colleges and medical schools. Of course, missionaries founded such institutions in areas where inhabitants were not literate prior to missionary contact, but not nearly to the same extent as in Asia. In Africa and the Pacific missionaries could train the children of the elite by providing elementary schools. However, the dominant cultures of Asia already had extensive literary traditions and educational systems for elite men. Many Asians considered their own systems superior to Western ones. Thus, to get Asian elites to expose themselves to Christian teaching, missionaries had to provide a higher level of service, such as university education (see for example, Covell 1978). Protestant missionaries also generally believed that Western science and legal traditions had developed from Christianity, particularly in its Protestant form, and that science would undermine "superstition". Thus, many missionaries felt that teaching Western science, medicine, law, etc., was a helpful preparation for conversion (Covell 1978; Bohr 2000; Bennett 1983; Drummond 1971; Khalaf 2002).

Although often ignored, religion has profoundly shaped political and economic conditions around the world. This claim is suggested by three historical divergences: (1) a divergence between Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim regions of Europe (these differences emerged after the Reformation and began to dissipate only after World War II) (Young 2009); (2) a divergence between Protestant and Catholic settler colonies in Oceania and the Americas; and (3) a divergence between the impacts of Protestant and Catholic missionaries on societies throughout the global South prior to Vatican II (which ended in 1965). Discussions of the influence of religion in Europe have been stymied because it is difficult to disentangle religious and nonreligious causes. in this chapter I argue that both in Europe and in the global South, thus I use the Protestant and Catholic missionary movement as a quasi-natural experiment.
      I argue that both in Europe and in the global South, Protestants shaped human capital development (mass education and mass printing) and institutional development (civil society, colonial rule of law, and market economics)—especially prior to the 1960s. Together these shaped elites’ incentives and thus long-term prospects for economic development and political democracy. Other groups have copied many Protestant patterns (e.g., the Catholic Church in Vatican II [1965]), and thus differences are dissipating, but the historic pattern is clear.

Using regional data for about 180 African provinces, we find that measures of Protestant missionary activity in the past are more correlated with schooling variables today than similar measures of Catholic missionary activity, as previous papers have suggested. However, we find that this effect is mainly driven by differences in Catholic areas (i.e., areas in which Catholic missionaries were protected from competition from Protestant missionaries in the past). This is not surprising because most former Catholic colonies had a number of restrictions to the operation of Protestant missionaries that benefited Catholic missionaries. Therefore, our results are consistent with an economic rationale in which different rules created differences in competitive pressures faced by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

In the United States, highly religious people tend to live longer, have fewer health and mental problems, steal less, volunteer more time, and give away more money than others. Even when other relevant factors are controlled for statistically, these differences persist. Moreover, in many cases the religiosity of the community influences these factors as much as the religiosity of individuals. Thus, there seems to be a communal product which goes beyond individual religiosity. All the factors listed above presumably influence the economy. To the extent people's religious commitments cause these differences, we can view religion as a resource which social scientists should account for in their economic models. Just as scholars have used the concepts of "human capital," "social capital," and "cultural capital"—perhaps we can add the concept "spiritual capital." We can define this as resources that are created or people have access to when people invest in religion as religion. "Spiritual capital" differs from the other forms of capital, not because religious groups don't have material resources, skills, trusting relationships, and cultural-valued knowledge – that is, financial, human, social and cultural capital. 1 They do. But religious groups are concerned with more than these. For example, most religious groups purport to be more than mere social clubs. They often stress that their relationship with God is central and that the focus of group activity is precisely to emphasize and actualize that relationship. Moreover, participants often claim that people can access spiritual resources anywhere without respect to group solidarity per se. Both these suggest that what happens in religious groups is not fully encompassed by the concept of social capital. Empirical evidence seems to confirm this. Research consistently shows that those who attend religious services for social or other non-religious reasons (the extrinsically religious) are significantly different from those who attend for religious reasons (the intrinsically religious), even if they attend church the same amount.

Since the rise of the religious right, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying conservative Protestantism. Not only do conservative Protestants (CPs) make up at least a quarter of the US population; they differ from many Americans in gender-role attitudes, childrearing styles, political orientation, and other ways as well. In fact, religious factors often predict people’s political views better than do either class or gender, even though the latter two have received far more attention in the scholarly literature (Manza & Brooks 1997, Kellstedt et al 1996b). Unfortunately research in this area has been hampered by imprecise measurement and poor understanding of the various movements grouped together as CPs. This has muddied statistical results, stifled theoretical development, and blinded researchers to promising areas of analysis. Thus, in this chapter we first discuss the history and distinctive qualities of the various CP movements, then we use these insights to propose better survey measures, and finally we apply this knowledge to several substantive areas (i.e., gender-role attitudes, childrearing styles, tolerance, the .culture wars,. the religious right, and the reasons for the religious vitality of CP groups).

The relationship between religion and educational ideals in Taiwan is explored using the Taiwan Social Change Survey (1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005). Religion seems to influence the overall level of educational ideals. Both before and after controls, Taiwanese Protestants have the highest educational ideals for both boys and girls; the nonreligious have the second highest ideals. Members of the new religious movement Yi-Guan-Dao and Catholics have the lowest ideals, while folk religionists/Taoists and Buddhists are in the middle and not significantly different from each other. We discuss possible mechanisms of influence and how our findings speak to the available literature on religion and education in the United States and elsewhere.

This article explores Protestantism’s inadvertent, historic role in dispersing elite power and spurring democracy. Economic and political elites typically hoard resources and perpetuate class distinction. Conversionary Protestants undermined this social reproduction because they wanted everyone to read the Bible in their own language, decide individually what to believe, and create religious organizations outside state control. Thus, they consistently initiated mass education, mass printing and civil society and spurred competitors to copy. Resultant power dispersion altered elite incentives and increased the probability of stable democratic transitions. I test my historical arguments statistically via the spread of Protestant and Catholic missionaries. Protestant missions account for about half the variation in non-European democracy and remove the influence of variables that dominate current research. These findings challenge scholars to reformulate theories about cultural vs. structure, and about the rise of democracy.

I was asked to review an article submitted to the British Journal of Political Science (BJPS) entitled "Conversionary Protestants Do Not Cause Democracy" by Elana Nikolova and Jakub Polansky. They also posted their article to SSRN. Eventually the article was accepted at BJPS. Because people have begun to cite both the forthcoming article and SSRN paper, and because NP continue to ignore the flaw in their article, I think it is important to document the problems they are choosing to ignore, and to provide an informal response until my formal response is accepted and published. This is my first review of the article. I did not edit this review after submitting it to the British Journal of Political Science other than to add a title, my name, and page numbers and this brief introduction. Thus, the text contains some misspellings and typos.