Wirtschaftspolitisches Seminar Alpenrhein: «On the Effect of Religiosity on Pre-Enlightenment Warfare»

Zum Vortrag
Does religiosity affect attack warfare? We introduce two annual religiosity measures for several pre-Enlightenment European states capturing (i) religious language in books and (ii) Christian birth names. To isolate causality, we exploit the exogenous nature of locally visible solar eclipses as religious primers (phenomena orthogonal to anthropoid and natural developments). Results from studying dyad-year-level data reveal positive, statistically significant, and quantitatively sizeable effects. Exploring mechanisms, religious terminology explicit to non-mainstream Christian denominations (specifically Judaism) spikes in solar eclipse years and predicts attack war onsets. This result is consistent with the idea of religiosity highlighting an in-group-out-group demarcation to cause large-scale organized violence. Consistent with that mechanism, city-year level solar eclipses predict Jewish expulsions across pre-Enlightenment European cities. (Vortragssprache Deutsch)
 

Referent
Prof. Dr. Tim Krieger, Universität Freiburg (D)

Dieser öffentliche Vortrag (Eintritt frei) findet im Rahmen der Veranstaltungsreihe Wirtschaftspolitisches Seminar Alpenrhein statt, welches als Kooperation des Liechtenstein-Instituts mit dem Zentrum für wirtschaftspolitische Forschung der Fachhochschule Graubünden durchgeführt wird.