Do legacies of historical religious institutions matter today? The paper examines the role of one such institution, Sufi Khanaqah, in the villages of rural India. It theorizes that the historically decentralized religious institutions anchored stability in the uncertain agrarian frontier by provisioning premodern forms of public goods. Participation in the religious life of these institutions was barrier-free and maximized through religious entrepreneurship by the Sufi. Their premodern public goods acted as a safety net, accessible without barriers as well. Both these institutional characteristics generate behavioral legacy observable today in the higher voluntary provision of public goods. It also translates into broader voter preference indicated by higher electoral competition, which is effective in provisioning more public goods from the state.

Taha Rauf completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan last fall and is currently the Center for Asian Democracy’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Louisville. Taha studies the divergent implications of historical religious institutions for long-run development and democratic performance. His research involves the use of census-level administrative data from multiple sources across decades to develop large observational village-level datasets for religious institutions in India and Senegal. This allows for rigorous statistical analysis and causal inference with multiple placebo tests and instrumental variable analysis, illuminating the channels of persistence. In addition to quantitative methods, he employs multi-site and multi-method qualitative fieldwork, including archival research, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, to elaborate on the differences in the legacies of institutional coordination.