Religious competition and witch trials

Witch trials were a common feature of late medieval Europe, up until the Renaissance. These trials were less common in the early Middle Ages, and became much less common through until modern times. Why were witch trials so common during this period?

A recent article by Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ (both George Mason University), published in The Economic Journal (ungated here), provides a compelling answer. Leeson is known for using economics to investigate somewhat unusual research questions (such as those reported in the book WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird, which I reviewed here, or The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates).

In this case, Leeson and Russ investigated the factors associated with European witch trials over the period between 1300 and 1850 C.E. They argue that the witch trials were a response to intensified religious competition (predominantly between the Protestant and Catholic churches) following the Reformation:

Europe’s witch trials reflected non-price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom... By leveraging popular belief in witchcraft, witch-prosecutors advertised their confessional brands’ commitment and power to protect citizens from worldly manifestations of Satan’s evil...

The idea here is that the churches were competing for followers. One way that church leaders they could encourage followers to join their church was to convince them that their church was more active and successful in banishing evil. To do this, the churches engaged in witch trials. Leeson and Russ argue that witch trials should therefore be more common in areas that were more contested (that is, where there was more religious competition), and should become less common after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, because the Treaty permanently fixed the 'confessional geography' (that is, which areas could be claimed by Protestants, and which by Catholics), so that:

After 1648, it was no longer possible for Catholic or Protestant religious suppliers to change the denomination of any of the Empire’s territories, greatly reducing their motivation to compete.

Leeson and Russ assemble an impressive dataset of the dates and locations of European witch trials of over 43,000 people across 21 European countries, as well as the dates and locations of 424 religious conflicts (which they use as their measure of religious competition). They find that:

...each additional confessional battle is associated with an approximately 8% increase in the number of people tried for witchcraft; each additional confessional battle per million, with an approximately 11% increase in the number of people tried for witchcraft per million.

They then go on to test other theories from the literature. These included that weather shocks such as the 'Little Ice Age', or shocks to incomes, created incentives for scapegoating. Witches make handy scapegoats, so witch trials could increase when scapegoats are needed. Leeson and Russ are able to show that these alternative explanations are not as strong in predicting witch trials as religious competition is.

This is a really nice paper, underpinned by simple economic theory. For instance:

Of course, prosecuting witches was not free; it could be very expensive... The intensity of a religious supplier’s witch-trial activity thus depended on its benefit, which depended on the intensity of the religious market contestation he faced. The more intense the contestation, the higher the benefit of conducting witch trials, hence the more he would conduct.

However, one aspect was missing from the theoretical underpinning of the paper. Religion is, by its very nature, what economists call a credence good. With credence goods, some of the characteristics of the good (the 'credence characteristics') are not known to the consumer before they purchase, and they are still not known to the consumer even after they have consumed the good. [*] Health care is another example (because consumers can't know what the outcome would have been if they hadn't been treated, so they can't evaluate how much better the treatment is than the alternative).

In this case, it can be very difficult for a potential church follower to evaluate which church they should follow. Presumably, they want to follow whichever church will make them safer, 'in this life and the next'. The church leaders try to signal that their church is better through witch trials, but their signals cannot be credible, even to highly superstitious potential followers. To be credible, a signal must be costly (witch trials are costly to the church), but must be costly in a way that makes them unattractive for the lower quality church to attempt. Witch trials are not credible as a signal, because both churches presumably face the same costs of engaging in them. Instead, we see an escalation of intensity of witch trials, since whichever church engages in the most intense trial behaviour will be the church that appears to be the 'highest quality' church. Some further exploration of this point would have been interesting in the paper.

Leeson and Russ also note other periods of religious competition have led to increases in witch trials, such as the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, where there was competition between Puritan ministers. Given that we are currently in a new period of religious competition, it makes you wonder whether we might see witch trials reappear. And indeed, that does appear to be the case, as The Economist notes (in an article about the same Leeson and Russ paper):

The persecution of vulnerable folk on trumped-up allegations of witchcraft may sound like a horror story from a history book, but the practice is on the rise in modern-day Africa. The prime victims are now children, with orphans, the disabled and albinos particularly at risk. In 2010 Unicef, a charity, estimated that 20,000 children accused of witchcraft lived on the streets of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. Areas of intense religious competition between Christians and Muslims are hot spots. In Nigeria, for instance, Pentecostal Christian preachers fight for converts by offering protection from child witches.

The witch trials in Europe only ended after a treaty between the competing religious factions. What hope for such a treaty today?

[HT for The Economist article: Marginal Revolution]

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[*] Credence characteristics are therefore different from search characteristics, which the consumer can find out before purchase, or experience characteristics, which the consumer finds out after they purchase the good.