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National audience; Are religious believers more prosocial than other people? In a trust game field experiment with 774 subjects in Haiti, we elicit willingness to pay to play in the presence of religious images, and argue that this can be interpreted as a measure of the strength of religiosity. More religious individuals trust others more and reciprocate more than others, with effect sizes between 14% and 21% of mean behaviour depending on the measure. They do not reciprocate more in the presence of religious images than without them, nor towards members of the same denomination as themselves. The results support the view that religious affiliation is correlated with intrinsic trustworthiness. We show that lab behaviour correlates with intuitive measures of religiosity outside the lab and with participation in borrowing and lending networks.

National audience; We conducted an experimental study in Haiti testing for the relationship between religious belief and individual risk taking behavior. 774 subjects played lotteries in a standard neutral protocol and subsequently with reduced endowments but in the presence of religious images of Catholic, Protestant and Voodoo tradition. Subjects chose between paying to play a lottery with an image of their choice, and saving their money to play with no image. Those who chose the former are dened as image buyers and those who chose the latter as non-buyers. Image buyers, who tend to be less educated, more rural, and to exhibit greater religiosity, bet more than non-buyers in all games. In addition, in the presence of religious images all participants took more risk, and buyers took more risk when playing in the presence of their chosen images than when playing with other images. We develop a theoretical model calibrated with our experimental data to explore the channels through which religious images might a ect risk-taking. Our results suggest that the presence of images tends to increase individuals' subjective probability of winning the lottery, and that subjects therefore believe in a god who intervenes actively in the world in response to their requests.

Data from the first post-Arab Spring elections reveal that support for Islamic parties came from richer districts and individuals. We show that standard public finance arguments help explain the voting pattern in these elections and others in the Muslim world. Our model predicts that a voter’s probability to vote for a religious party (i) increases in income for the poorest voters, but possibly decreases in income for the richest; (ii) is greater for voters in richer districts; and (iii) increases with the voter’s religiosity. We test these predictions on original micro-level data in a nationally representative sample of 600 individuals in 30 districts in Tunisia. Our empirical results align with our predictions and suggest that belonging to the middle class and living in a richer district together affect voting decisions more than being a religious voter. We also test for other possible factors affecting voting decisions, such as education, or attitudes towards corruption or towards the West. Finally, we document similar patterns in other key elections in the Muslim world.

This paper analyzes the relationship between access to infrastructure services and support for religious parties based on the evidence produced by a recent democratic experience in Tunisia in which a religious political party, Ennahdha, governed from 2011 to 2014. The experience points to a complex relationship. In the 2011 election, areas with higher access are associated with higher support for Ennahdha than areas with lower access. In the 2014 election, however, infrastructure access is positively correlated with support for the party in areas where access had improved but negatively correlated with support for the party in areas that already had high access. A possible pragmatic general implication is that, to be politically competitive, religious parties, cannot bet solely on their religious commitment to provide basic services, including infrastructure, to the poor. They need to recognize the multiplicity of voter's concerns and their evolving agenda., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

I design and conduct a survey with an embedded lab-in-the-field experiment to test whether envy triggers popular support for the Islamic revival using a nationally representative sample of 600 Tunisians. Individuals exposed to high inequality may feel envious if they perceive that the success of others is granted rather than earned. Thus, envious individuals may be motivated to engage in religious and political activities to cope with their feelings. I trigger the sentiment of envy with a 2 × 2 design by interacting a priming video and low stakes. I find that individuals in the envy treatment donate a larger proportion of their endowment to a politically involved religious charity, my measure of support for the Islamic revival. Overall, my experimental findings, consistent with survey data, confirm the idea that envy is an important determinant of popular support for the Islamic revival, even after controlling for religiosity.

Whether it is men or women who suppress female sexuality has important implications for understanding gendered relations, ultimately providing insight into one widespread cause of female disadvantage. The question of which sex suppresses female sexuality more avidly, however, neglects that our interests are never unambiguously masculine or feminine; each of us has a combination of male and female kin which alters how much of our future fitness derive from each sex. Here we exploit a nationally representative sample of 600 Tunisians to test whether support for Islamic veiling—a proxy for female sexual suppression—is more common amongst one sex than the other, and is affected by the relative sex of one's offspring (i.e., the number of sons relative to daughters). We find that men are more supportive of Islamic veiling than women, but women with more sons are more supportive of veiling and more likely to wear veils than women with fewer sons. All effects were robust to the inclusion of religiosity, which was weaker amongst men and unrelated to the number of sons a woman had. The number of daughters affected neither religiosity nor support for veiling, but did increase women's likelihood of wearing contemporary, fashionable Tunisian veils compared with no head covering. We further found that men were more religious if they had more sons. Overall, these findings highlight that far from being the fixed strategy of one sex or the other, female sexual suppression manifests facultatively to promote one's reproductive interests directly or indirectly by creating conditions beneficial to one's descendent kin. These results show that both men and women can suppress female sexuality, although the function in either case appears more closely aligned with male rather than female interests.