02051nam a22001697a 4500999001900000008004100019100004300060245010500103260003500208300003200243520133000275650011401605773003501719906001301754942000701767952010701774  c521012d521012221207b           ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d  aAksoy, Ozan and Gambetta, Diego935799  aCommitment through sacrifice: How longer Ramadan fasting strengthens religiosity and political Islam  aAmerican Sociological Review    a87(4), Aug, 2022: p.555-583  aReligions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spurious nor endogenous. We use a natural experiment that rests on a peculiar time-shifting feature of Ramadan that makes the fasting duration—our measure of sacrifice—vary not just by latitude but from year-to-year. We find that a half-hour increase in fasting time during the median Ramadan day increases the vote shares of Islamist political parties by 11 percent in Turkey’s parliamentary elections between 1973 and 2018, and results in one additional attendee per 1,000 inhabitants for voluntary Quran courses. We further investigate two mechanisms, screening and commitment, that could explain the effects we find. By testing their divergent implications, we infer that commitment is the mechanism triggered by sacrifice, which drives up the intensity of religious beliefs and participation that in turn bolster the success of religious organizations. – Reproduced   aReligion, Ramandan, Religious fasting, Voting, Screening, Signaling, Commitment, Natural experiment.  934224  aAmerican Sociological Review    aRELIGION  cAR  00102ddc40709395064aIIPAbIIPAd2022-12-07h87(4), Aug, 2022: p.555-583pAR127572r2022-12-07yAR