Institution Building from the Bottom and the Top: Long-Term Consequences of Missionary Activity and Settler Colonialism in Madagascar

Abstract

There is broad agreement that the transfer of European institutions in the colonial period had important long-term consequences for developing regions. But how did ‘alien’ institutions that were introduced in an essentially top down and coercive manner become so deeply embedded in non-Western societies? This study from Madagascar exploits historical variation in the timing and organization of settler colonialism and missionary activity to test for long-term impacts of alternative ‘state-centric’ and ‘societal’ approaches to 19th and early 20th Century European institution building. Drawing on unusually detailed sub-national data, I find that colonial settlement and missionary work had distinctly different effects on formal and informal community-level institutions today. These differences appear to be explained by the higher degree of coercion in former settler districts and greater opportunities for social participation in missionary institutions. The results hold in a battery of robustness tests and in instrumental variable estimates.