Religious Minorities and Public Service Provision: Evidence from Khedival Egypt

• In Event: Historical Political Institutions in Africa and Asia

Abstract

This paper asks why do ethno-religious minorities succeed at providing extensive public services? Evidence in political economy suggests that ethno-religious diversity undermines public service provision. We argue instead that competition created through foreign influence in education, between missionaries and ethno-religious minorities can enhance non-state public service provision by minorities if they face an existentialist threat. Egyptian Coptic Christian elites engaged in rapid development of modern schooling in the 19th and early 20th century as a backlash to missionaries’ efforts to convert their followers through school provision. Employing original dataset of modern Egyptian schools (1825 – 1913) we show that competition created by American missionaries that held the most contentious conversion program caused a rise in the provision of Coptic schools and that had almost double the effect size in comparison with other missionary groups. We then employ a two-stage difference-in- difference design. Exploiting a change in policy in 1878 by the Egyptian Khedive that changes the religious landscape recognising Protestantism as a formal religious sect, we show that - post-policy - the competition initiated through oversupply of American Presbyterian missionary schools in areas with a high share of Copts, leads to a significant increase of Coptic modern schools.

Authors

• Ashrakat Elshehawy, Stanford University

• Mohamed Saleh, London School of Economics and Political Science