Shadowless Theocracies

What is the long-term effect of theocracy on religiosity and pro-religious political preferences? I exploit a quasi-experiment in Italy, where a large river constituted the border between the theocratic Papal States and a secular, progressive state for three centuries. However, inheritance norms also change discontinuously at the river. To disentangle the effect of theocracy from inheritance norms and other confounders changing discontinuously at the river, I propose a novel Difference-in-Geographic Discontinuities (DIG) estimator. Theocracy has no effect on attendance of Catholic classes in schools, on pro-Catholic votes in any XXth-century election, and on the opposition to the legalization of divorce and abortion. I then show that inheritance norms that pre-date theocratic institutions drive the observed differences in religiosity and voting patterns. In particular, they incentivized collective traits which prevented theocracy from affecting religiosity and political preferences and moved the latter towards socialism and communism