Adopting a new religion: The case of Protestantism in 16th Century Germany

By Davide Cantoni. 2012

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a rich dataset of territories and cities of the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, this paper investigates the determinants of adoption and diffusion of Protestantism as a state religion. A territory’s distance to Wittenberg, the city where Martin Luther taught, is a major determinant of adoption. This finding can be explained through a theory of strategic neighbourhood interactions: in an uncertain legal context, introducing the Reformation was a risky enterprise for territorial lords, and had higher prospects of success if powerful neighbouring states committed to the new faith first. The model is tested in a panel dataset featuring the dates of introduction of the Reformation.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d74bf972b5aaeda634a8423ecd357014cacc0262

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change (2017, unknown): “Sections A 5 and A 6 report additional figures and tables that were referenced in the body of the paper, but not reported there.”
• The long Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub Saharan Africa (2016, unknown): “Recent papers (Becker and Woessman, 2009; Cantoni, 2011) emphasize the role of education and literacy as alternative explanations for protestant regions growing and developing faster.”
• The role of human capital and innovation in economic development: evidence from post-Malthusian Prussia (2017, unknown): “See also Cantoni (2012).”
• Religious Competition and Reallocation: the Political Economy of Secularization in the Protestant Reformation* (2017, unknown): “…are linked to Protestant or Catholic regions based on the town of the event: as we did in the analysis of monastery closure, we assign towns to territorial lords following the “Euratlas” mapping provided by Nüssli (2008) and use information on the religion of territorial lords from Cantoni (2012).”