From Disaster to Risk: Exploring Impact of Earthquakes on Religiosity in Turkey

• In Event: Religious Authority, Religiosity, and Political Competition in the Middle East

Abstract

Exposure to disruptive natural events has been found to impact individuals’ religious beliefs and value systems, including their preferences towards risk-taking. The types of values and revealed preferences affected by instability are varied, from more “conservative” responses, such as increased household savings and a tendency to support incumbent political actors, to more potentially “radical” ones, including a sharp uptick in religiosity. Our ability to correctly identify the causal effect of instability on these different behaviors is often limited not only by data availability, but also by selection effects. I address both concerns with a novel assessment of earthquakes and religiosity in the Turkish case. Existing measures of local values come almost exclusively from survey data, in which a representative sample is polled about their views and behaviors. Because of the high cost of these surveys, they are almost always designed to be representative at the national level, making them less valuable for the measurement of preferences at the local level. For similar reasons, the temporal gap between successive surveys usually spans multiple years, making it difficult to assess changes over shorter time periods. For the safety of enumerators, surveys are also rarely conducted in countries with higher levels of ecological and political uncertainty, precisely where the data would be most valuable. As a result, survey-based estimates of religiosity and other cultural values are rarely available at the appropriate spatial or temporal scale, and are especially rare in countries with lower levels of state capacity. As an alternative, I use satellite imagery to generate estimates of religiosity across districts in Turkey: because observant Muslims abstain from food and water during daylight hours throughout the holy month of Ramadan, they gather with friends and families in the night time to eat, drink, and celebrate; as a result, there are significant increases in night-time luminosity during Ramadan in those communities with larger observant populations. Comparing the level of night-time luminosity before, during and after Ramadan, I calculate the relative levels of religious observance across space and time and validate these using fine-grained survey data. To address concerns about residential sorting based on the perceived risk of earthquakes, I combine detailed maps of local earthquake risk with the geo-location and magnitude of earthquake exposure in the Turkish case in order to leverage differences between events that occur in ostensibly low-risk zones from those that occur in predictably high-risk ones, assessing the impact of natural shocks independent of perceived risk. Combining this with estimates of religiosity, I am able to estimate the effect of natural disasters on a particular risk-avoidant behavior. I also explore their impact on “conservative” political preferences, measured as a preference for incumbent candidates in local and national elections, using vote counts from Turkey’s thousands of geo-located ballots boxes.

Author

• Avital Livny, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign