The Future of the Past: Do Historic Protestant Missions Still Influence Democracy in the Global South?

• In Event: Faith, Law, and Liberty: Christianity in Global Politics

Abstract

In a previous article “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy” (American Political Science Review, 2012) I argued that Protestant missionaries helped spread democracy in the Global South by spreading religious liberty, mass education, printing, newspapers, voluntary associations, and colonial reform movements. Especially in Anglo-British colonies, early nationalist leaders drew on these resources to create pre-independence political parties and to pressure colonizers to devolve power earlier and more significantly than in colonies where Protestant missionaries had less influence. In former colonies with less exposure to Protestant missions, de-colonization was more likely to be violent, and the post-colonial elite was smaller, had less experience in government, and was more likely to be liked to a rebel military group. These social conditions influenced the stability of post-colonial democratic transitions.
Because of the controversial nature of this argument, several scholars have pushed back against it. In this paper, I extend the statistical analysis past 1994, test the results on a wide variety of democracy measures, and use various techniques to test the robustness of the model. My results are consistent with the previous analysis, although there is a graduate increase in the relationship between Catholic missions and democracy and a gradual decrease in the relationship between Protestant missions and democracy after 1990. Excluding small countries from the analysis also weakens the results.

Author

• Robert D. Woodberry, Baylor University