Secularization and Religious Backlash: Evidence from Turkey Seyhun Orcan SAKALLI* February 25, 2019 Abstract How do people react to a public policy that targets a cultural identity? This paper ex- amines the effects of a top-down secularization-of-education reform on education and reli- giosity outcomes in Turkey. After the secularization, residents of provinces with higher pre- secularization levels of religiosity were less likely to send their children to secular schools rel- ative to others. I provide evidence consistent with the mechanism that pious parents avoided sending their children to secular schools in order to better transmit their religious identities. They forewent economic benefits of education to achieve this goal and started giving more frequently religious names compared to others after the secularization. Taken together, my findings suggest that education policies that target a cultural identity might result in a back- lash and highlight the importance of schooling choices made by parents in transmitting their identity to their children. JEL Classification Codes: O10, O43, P48, Z12 Keywords: Culture; Religion; Secularization; Education; Ethnic Cleansing *University of Lausanne, Department of Economics. Quartier UNIL-Dorigny, Bâtiment Internef, Office 501.1, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Phone: 0041 21 692 34 84. E-mail: [email protected]. I am grateful to Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Mathias Thoenig, Denis Cogneau, and Thierry Verdier for their advice and support. I am thankful to Pauline Grosjean, Claudio Ferraz, Anett John, Sylvie Lambert, Karen Macours, Elias Papaioannou, David Yanagizawa-Drott, and participants at PSE, AMSE, EDP Jamboree, NEUDC 2014, the University of Munich, CEA 2015 Annual Conference, the EBRD, and the Galatina Summer Workshop for their helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this study was distributed under the title “Coexistence, Polarization, and Development: The Arme- nian Legacy in Modern Turkey.” The DHS data used in this study was made available by the Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, under permission for data use no. 2014/10. I acknowledge financial support from the ERC Starting grant GRIEVANCES-313327. All errors are mine. 1 INTRODUCTION Culture is a persistent determinant of economic performance and political stability.1 Under- standing whether policies can affect culture, in particular how people react to a public policy that targets a cultural identity, is therefore crucial. Religion is one of the most important compo- nents of culture; as a social identity, it strongly affects the self-evaluation, beliefs, and values of billions of people worldwide. At a societal level, religion and politics intersect. In both autocratic and democratic countries, religious groups influence the political trajectory. Religious beliefs are at the core of debates on social issues such as abortion, contraceptives, and same-sex marriage. On the other hand, public policies can shape the beliefs and worldview of people and therefore affect the salience of religion. In many different contexts, rulers challenged religious institutions as a part of state-building efforts (e.g. France and the Soviet Union after their respective revolutions). Education policies have always been a fundamental part of the state-building process. Through schooling, states can teach children values that they deem important for social cohesion and a sense of unity. This paper provides novel evidence for the interaction between secular-state-building-reforms and religiosity by examining the effects of a top-down secularization-of-education reform that was implemented in the 1920s in Turkey. It analyzes whether residents of localities with vary- ing levels of Islamic religiosity reacted differently to the secularization-of-education reform in terms of schooling decisions and religiosity outcomes. To these ends, it exploits an extensive, novel dataset that combines historical population data with contemporary political and socioe- conomic data, at both the village level and different levels of administrative subdivision. Turkey provides an ideal context for studying this question. After World War I (WWI), the Ot- toman Empire, a religiously plural multiethnic empire, transformed into the Republic of Turkey, a nation-state. Founders of the Republic of Turkey implemented a series of top-down modern- ization reforms. Secular nation-building was one of the main pillars of the reformation. In the Ottoman Empire, religion was the main social group identifier and played a central role in the ad- ministrative organization (Göçek, 1993).2 Secularization reforms aimed to rupture the Ottoman traditions and institutions and promote a national identity. The founders abolished the institu- tion of the Caliphate, secularized the education system (closed Muslim religious schools), and adopted the Latin alphabet, which replaced Arabic script, between 1924 and 1928. Turkey was thus a predominantly Muslim country (97.4 percent of the population in 1927) that transitioned from having religious education at all levels of schooling to abruptly lacking religious instruction 1See Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales(2006), Nunn(2012), and Algan and Cahuc(2013) for literature reviews. 2Greeks and Armenians, the two largest Christian minority groups, constituted 9.7 percent and 7.2 percent of the Ottoman population in 1914, respectively. Almost all Armenians and Greeks were forced to leave Turkey through the deportation and persecution of Armenians in 1915–1916 and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923–1925. 1 in the nation’s curricula for over two decades, until the opening of vocational religious junior high schools in 1951. I exploit historical exposure to non-Muslims as a source of variation in the level of religiosity of Muslims prior to the secularization. I document that historical Armenian presence is positively correlated with the level of religiosity of Muslims across villages in close proximity and across districts (second-level administrative subdivision) that are farther apart, both in the short and long run. Then, I examine the effect of secularization of education on literacy and primary school completion rates across provinces (first-level administrative subdivision) with varying levels of religiosity before the secularization, using as a proxy the share of Armenians in 1914. Employing a difference-in-differences estimation strategy that exploits variation in Islamic religiosity levels before the secularization and in exposure to secularization across five-year birth cohorts, I find that secularization leads to a decrease in education outcomes in provinces with higher pre-secularization religiosity relative to other provinces. The estimated negative effect is not driven by pre-secularization levels of development of provinces, supply of secular schools, selective migration or mortality, or spatial correlation between residuals across provinces.3 The relative decrease in education levels occurs immediately after the secularization and is unlikely to be driven by other contemporaneous reforms. The estimated effects are substantial: a one- standard-deviation increase in the share of Armenians in 1914 increases the share of illiterate population by 12.2 percent and the share of the population without a primary school education by 9.6 percent. I propose and test for a mechanism to explain the negative effect of secularization on educa- tion outcomes: The secularization reforms led to a religious backlash and hardened the religious identity of pious Muslims. After the secularization, in order to better transmit their religious val- ues to their children, pious parents became less likely to send their children to school compared to other parents, as children’s exposure to secular values at school can crowd out religious values transmitted within the family. Consistent with the imperfect empathy of parents in the cultural transmission model of Bisin and Verdier (2000; 2001), pious parents forewent their children’s po- tential social and economic success through secular education in favor of raising offspring who are religious, i.e., who reject secular norms and attitudes.4 I provide several pieces of evidence consistent with this mechanism: First, I construct a time- varying measure of religiosity at the province-of-birth and five-year birth-cohort levels using male first names. Using a similar difference-in-differences strategy as before, I find that sec- ularization leads to a relative increase in the share of religious male first names in provinces 3Instrumenting the share of Armenians in 1914 with walking distance to Mt. Ararat, where Armenians believe that the founder of their nation, Hayk (Hayg), settled after his flight from Babylon, produces similar results. 4Imperfect empathy implies that parents socialize their children to their own cultural trait instead of the trait that maximizes the children’s success. 2 with higher pre-secularization religiosity compared to those with a lower level. Second, after the opening of religious junior high schools in 1951, the take-up of religious instruction was higher in provinces with higher religiosity before the secularization, suggesting a greater demand for religious instruction, than it was in other provinces.5 Third, I find that completing primary school increases labor income among the male population that attended primary school be- tween 1924 and 1951, when there was no religious instruction in the nation’s curricula. This pos- itive association is