P16 | Macro Paper Warehouse

Religion, Education, and the State

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This paper studies how Indonesia’s Islamic education sector responded to one of the largest state-driven mass schooling expansions in history — the SD INPRES program (Sekolah Dasar Presidential Instruction) launched in 1973 — and whether that program achieved its secular nation-building objectives. The research question is three-part: Did Islamic schools enter or exit markets where the state built more primary schools? How did religious school choice shift across cohorts? And did the program advance secular identity formation among exposed individuals?

The empirical setting is Indonesia in the 1970s onward. Under SD INPRES, the government used windfall oil revenues to build more than 61,000 primary schools between 1973 and 1980, allocating construction across districts proportional to the non-enrolled primary-school-age population. Because Islamic schools were historically more prevalent in underserved areas, this rule produced a strong positive correlation between SD INPRES intensity and pre-existing Islamic school density — the same markets where the state expanded were precisely those with the greatest Islamic education presence.

The authors use several novel data sources: administrative registries covering nearly 220,000 secular and 160,000 Islamic schools with establishment dates; six rounds of the National Socioeconomic Survey (Susenas) from 2012–18; the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS, 1993–2014); a 2018–19 curriculum timetable registry (SIAP) covering nearly 20% of madrasa; and a 2016 political/religious attitudes survey. Identification relies on difference-in-differences (DID) exploiting cross-district variation in SD INPRES intensity, the synthetic DID approach of Arkhangelsky et al. (2021) for robustness to violations of parallel trends, and a staggered village-level event study using the Borusyak et al. (2024) estimator.

The main findings are as follows. First, Islamic schools did not exit markets where the state expanded — they entered in greater numbers. A one standard deviation increase in SD INPRES construction led to 1.4 additional Islamic school entries per district above a mean of 1.9 per district in 1972. Entry was competitive at the primary level, where new madrasa (MI) entered at twice the baseline annual rate in the years immediately following INPRES construction, and strategic at the secondary level, where Islamic junior secondary schools (MTs) peaked 6–9 years after INPRES entry as graduates sought continued education. The Islamic sector financed this expansion through waqf (inalienable religious endowments), informal taxation (infaq, zakat), and revenues from a concurrent rice price spike; entry responses were stronger in villages with above-median waqf endowments and above-median potential rice yields.

Second, rather than converging toward secular curricula, newly established Islamic schools in high-INPRES districts devoted more time to religious content. Each additional SD INPRES is associated with a 1.2 percentage point increase in the religious curriculum share among newly created madrasa, with increases of 1.3 and 2.4 percentage points at the primary and junior secondary levels respectively — the latter equaling 82% of the cross-school standard deviation. Some of this increase came at the expense of Pancasila/civic education and national language instruction.

Third, while SD INPRES reduced Islamic primary school enrollment by roughly 7%, it increased overall Islamic school attendance: each additional SD INPRES increased the likelihood of attending any Islamic school by approximately 5%, as demand for secondary education outweighed substitution at the primary level. Female students exhibited stronger secondary-level demand effects, amplified in districts with a concurrent state ban on the Islamic veil in public schools.

Fourth, SD INPRES did not advance its ideological objectives. In the 1977 and 1982 elections, Golkar’s vote share fell and the Islamic PPP’s rose by 0.5–1.0 percentage points per SD INPRES school in high-INPRES districts. Among exposed cohorts, SD INPRES did not increase Pancasila proficiency, national language use at home, or support for secular governance, but did increase Arabic literacy by approximately 3% per additional SD INPRES. Exposed cohorts also prayed more frequently, fasted more during Ramadan, gave more to charity, and expressed greater pilgrimage intentions. These religious patterns were transmitted to children of exposed cohorts, who were more likely to attend Islamic schools themselves.

Q: What was the allocation rule for SD INPRES and why did it create confrontation with Islamic schools? A: Presidential Instruction No. 10/1973 allocated school construction across districts proportional to the non-enrolled primary-school-age population in 1971. Because Islamic schools historically served underserved populations, this rule meant the state built more schools precisely where Islamic education was most prevalent. The paper shows graphically and in Table 1 that the number of SD INPRES schools built is strongly correlated with the pre-existing stock of Islamic schools, conditional on district population and enrollment.

Q: How large was the Islamic sector’s entry response to SD INPRES at the district level? A: In the standard DID specification (Table 2, panel a), a one standard deviation increase in SD INPRES schools led to 0.013 more Islamic schools per district-year per 1,000 children, equivalent to 1.4 additional Islamic school entries in the average district relative to a mean of 1.9 Islamic schools per district in 1972. The synthetic DID (panel b) delivers positive and slightly larger estimates, indicating the result is not an artifact of diverging pre-trends.

Q: What was the timing of the Islamic sector entry response at the village level? A: Using the Borusyak et al. (2024) estimator on a balanced panel from 1960 to 1999, the paper finds (Figure 4) that INPRES construction is followed by a jump in Islamic school entry. Primary madrasa (MI) entered at twice the baseline annual rate in the years immediately following INPRES construction and this elevated rate persisted for six years before reverting to baseline. Islamic junior secondary entry (MTs) peaked around years 6–9 after SD INPRES construction, consistent with newly graduated primary students seeking continued schooling.

Q: How did the Islamic sector finance its expansion? A: The sector relied on waqf endowments (inalienable religious land assets), informal faith-based contributions (infaq), and obligatory alms (zakat). Fortuitously, the initial year of SD INPRES coincided with a large spike in the global price of rice, Indonesia’s main agricultural commodity, boosting harvest revenues channeled through informal Islamic taxation. Table 3 shows that entry responses were significantly stronger in villages with above-median waqf endowments and above-median potential rice yields, and these heterogeneous effects did not arise in non-INPRES periods or for non-Islamic private schools. Survey data from 2007–13 further show higher rates of informal taxation in villages with Islamic schools built during this period.

Q: Did Islamic schools converge toward secular curricula under competitive pressure from SD INPRES? A: No. Table 4 shows that madrasa established in high-INPRES districts after 1972 devote more time to religious content, not less. Each additional SD INPRES is associated with a 1.2 percentage point increase in the share of classroom time devoted to religious subjects among newly created Islamic schools, with increases of 1.3 percentage points at the primary level and 2.4 percentage points at the junior secondary level — the latter equal to 82% of the cross-school standard deviation. Similar patterns hold for Arabic instruction, and the junior secondary increase comes partially at the expense of Pancasila/civic education and national language instruction.

Q: Did curriculum differentiation responses vary with local religious ideology? A: Yes. Appendix Table A.14 shows a stronger curriculum differentiation response in markets with greater historical support for conservative Islam, proxied by Islamic political party vote shares in the 1950s elections. The paper also constructs a school-name-based predicted ideology index using a ridge shrinkage estimator and finds (Appendix Table A.15) that madrasa entering high-INPRES districts after the program onset have a more religious ideology on this measure.

Q: What happened to the formalization of the Islamic sector? A: Figure 5 and Appendix Table A.6 show that formal madrasa entry increased as a share of all new school entry, while informal Islamic schools (pesantren, diniyah) declined as a share of all new schools and all new Islamic schools. This formalization mirrors the organizational structure of state schools (primary-to-secondary progression), facilitating switching between public and religious schools and providing option value to moderate but still religious families. Crucially, the newly entering formal madrasa introduced more religious curriculum than incumbent madrasa, so formalization did not reduce religious instruction.

Q: What was the net effect of SD INPRES on Islamic school attendance? A: Table 5 shows that SD INPRES reduced the likelihood of attending Islamic primary school by roughly 7% per additional SD INPRES school but increased Islamic secondary attendance, with the net effect being a roughly 5% increase in the likelihood of attending any Islamic school (column 4). This finding holds in both DID and synthetic DID. The IFLS validation (Appendix Table A.18) confirms decreased Islamic elementary attendance and increased Islamic junior secondary attendance, consistent with the Susenas results.

Q: How does selection into secondary education affect the religious schooling results? A: The authors address selection using parametric (Heckman 1976) and semiparametric (Newey 2009) selection-correction procedures, using exposure to a 1960s pilot compulsory schooling program as an exclusion restriction. Table 6, panels (c) and (d), show that selection-adjusted estimates are broadly consistent with unadjusted estimates, with similar signs and magnitudes. The selection-corrected estimates approximately identify a local average treatment effect among compliers: those induced to attend elementary school were less likely to attend Islamic elementary; those induced to continue to secondary were more likely to attend Islamic secondary.

Q: How did gender shape the effects of SD INPRES on religious school choice? A: Table 7 shows that SD INPRES had more limited impacts on total schooling for women than men (consistent with Duflo 2001) but that the secondary-level demand effect toward Islamic schools was stronger for women. Table 8 shows that within high-INPRES areas, the SD INPRES-induced increase in Islamic secondary education is three times larger for women in districts with greater exposure to the 1982 state ban on the Islamic veil in public schools, and this differential is specific to Islamic schooling rather than total schooling.

Q: Did SD INPRES strengthen or weaken the secular ruling regime’s political standing? A: It weakened it. Table 10 shows that in the 1977 and 1982 elections, Golkar’s vote share decreased and the Islamic PPP’s vote share increased in high-INPRES districts, in the range of 0.5–1.0 percentage points per SD INPRES school. This represents a 1.5–3.0% change in PPP vote share and a 0.5–1.0% change in Golkar vote share per standard deviation in SD INPRES intensity. The PPP gained most in areas where SD INPRES had the greatest potential to draw students away from Islamic schools.

Q: Did SD INPRES produce a secular ideological shift among exposed cohorts? A: No. Table 11 shows that SD INPRES did not increase self-reported Pancasila proficiency, national language use at home, national language literacy, or attitudes in favor of secular governance. By contrast, Arabic literacy increased by approximately 3% per additional SD INPRES among exposed cohorts, indicating that Islamic schooling exposure rather than secular schooling drove literacy gains in that language.

Q: Did SD INPRES increase religiosity among exposed cohorts? A: Yes. Table 12 shows that SD INPRES increased prayer frequency, fasting during Ramadan, charitable giving, and pilgrimage intentions among exposed cohorts. These effects on prayer and fasting are stronger among women, consistent with the stronger shift toward Islamic secondary schooling found in Table 7. These outcomes are consistent with greater exposure to Islamic education increasing religiosity rather than the secular curriculum reducing it.

Q: Were the effects on religious identity and Arabic literacy transmitted to the next generation? A: Yes. Table 13 shows that SD INPRES increased Arabic literacy among the children of exposed cohorts, and that children of exposed cohorts were more likely to attend Islamic schools themselves. These intergenerational results confirm that the preference for Islamic education instilled during the SD INPRES era persisted into the next generation rather than converging toward secular norms over time.

Q: What are the key robustness checks for the school entry results? A: Several checks support causal interpretation. The Roth and Rambachan (2022) procedure finds no systematic pre-trends in the standard DID. Historical Podes data from 1980, 1983, 1990, and 1993 confirm the post-1973 increase in Islamic school entry, addressing survival bias in the 2019 registry. Results are robust to allowing differential trends in waqf endowments, Muslim population share, Islamic party vote shares, historical Arab immigration, Islamist insurgency, and Transmigration resettlement. The heterogeneous entry responses by waqf and rice yield do not appear in non-INPRES periods or for non-Islamic schools.

Q: What do the results imply for the political economy of education reform more broadly? A: The paper argues that state capacity to homogenize culture through education is limited when strong non-state actors can mobilize their own resources and provide differentiated alternatives. Rather than crowding out religious schools, state expansion triggered competitive entry, curriculum differentiation, and formalization in the religious sector, producing an equilibrium where both sectors expanded simultaneously with distinct clienteles. The findings imply that the long-run cultural effects of education programs cannot be evaluated without accounting for equilibrium responses by competing non-state providers.

SD INPRES (Sekolah Dasar Presidential Instruction): Indonesia’s 1973 mass public primary school construction program, financed by oil windfalls, which built more than 61,000 elementary schools between 1973 and 1980 by allocating schools to districts proportional to the non-enrolled child population; the program’s explicitly secular nation-building objectives brought it into direct confrontation with the Islamic education sector.

Waqf: Inalienable Islamic religious endowments — of land, agricultural assets, or other property — that under Islamic law can only be used for religious or charitable purposes and cannot be seized or repurposed by the state; in this paper, the pre-existing waqf base in a village serves both as a long-run financing mechanism for Islamic school construction and as an index of Islamic sector organizational capacity.

Madrasa: Formal day Islamic schools operating at the same primary-to-secondary grade levels as secular state schools, teaching standard academic subjects alongside a religious curriculum (including Islamic law, doctrine, ethics, Qur’an, Arabic, and history of the Prophets) that averages 26% of total instruction hours; distinct from the more informal pesantren (boarding schools) and madrasa diniyah (afternoon Qur’anic study schools).

Curriculum differentiation: The strategy by which newly entering madrasa in high-INPRES districts increased the share of classroom time devoted to religious and Arabic instruction rather than converging toward the secular state curriculum; measured as classroom hours devoted to Islamic subjects, Arabic, Pancasila/civic education, and national language instruction from 2018–19 SIAP timetable data.

Pancasila: The official secular nationalist ideology of the Indonesian state, consisting of five principles (monotheism, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social justice) intended to transcend ethnic and religious divisions; SD INPRES sought to transmit Pancasila through civic education and national language instruction as part of its homogenizing nation-building agenda.

Synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID): The Arkhangelsky et al. (2021) estimator used throughout the paper, which reweights and matches pre-INPRES trends in Islamic school construction across high- and low-INPRES exposure districts to deliver estimates more robust than standard DID to violations of parallel trends; applied with a binary treatment indicator (districts above the 51st percentile in INPRES intensity).

Formalization: The documented shift in the composition of the Islamic sector after SD INPRES, whereby formal madrasa (organized along the same grade-level progression as state schools) increased as a share of all new Islamic school entry while informal pesantren and diniyah declined as a share; interpreted as a competitive response that expanded parental option value without sacrificing religious instruction intensity.

The Confederate Diaspora

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused Confederate culture and entrenched racial norms across the United States during a critical juncture of westward expansion and post-Civil War reconciliation. The central question is whether the “Confederate diaspora” — Southern white migrants who left the former Confederacy from 1870 to 1900 — causally shaped the geography of Confederate memorialization, white supremacist organizations, racial violence, and long-run racial inequity outside the South.

Using complete-count U.S. Census records from 1870–1900 and linked Census records from the Census Linking Project, the authors track nearly one million white migrants from former Confederate states, including more than 61,000 former enslavers and 127,000 of their household kin, who settled outside the South by 1900. By 1900, migrants from the former Confederacy comprised on average 2.2% of the population in destination counties. Four outcomes measuring Confederate culture at the county level are constructed: Confederate memorialization (monuments, place names, schools), United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) chapters, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapters, and lynchings of Black people.

The primary identification strategy is a shift-share instrumental variable (SSIV) that combines the cross-sectional distribution of Southern white migrants across non-Southern counties in 1870 (shares) with predicted migration flows out of each Southern state between 1870 and 1900 (shifts). The predicted shifts are constructed from origin-county economic and ideological push factors estimated via LASSO, insulating the IV from endogenous location sorting. Conditional on the 1870 Southern white population share, the SSIV identifies the distinct causal influence of the postbellum Confederate diaspora.

Main findings are large relative to the diaspora’s modest population share. Moving from zero to the mean Confederate diaspora share implies an 8 percentage point (p.p.) increase in the likelihood of KKK activity relative to a mean prevalence of 35% in non-Southern counties. Effects on post-1900 lynching events are even larger proportionally: a 4 p.p. increase in likelihood relative to a mean of only 5%. IV estimates for Confederate memorialization show that a 1 p.p. increase in the Southern white share in 1900 raised the likelihood of memorialization by 3.4 p.p. (after controlling for the 1870 share), relative to a baseline prevalence of 25% outside the South. Effects on UDC chapters are similarly large given the organization’s limited non-Southern footprint (present in only 10% of counties). IV estimates consistently exceed OLS estimates, consistent with economic sorting biasing OLS downward.

Beyond Confederate symbolism, the diaspora also contributed to a novel form of racial exclusion: the “sundown town.” A 1 p.p. increase in the Confederate diaspora share in 1900 led to a 2.4 p.p. increase in the likelihood of Black depopulation (defined as towns with at least 25 Black residents in 1870 having zero Black residents after 1900).

Former slaveholders, though only about 6% of Confederate migrants, played an outsized role. They disproportionately sorted into frontier counties and into positions of public authority — more than twice as likely to work as lawyers or judges and nearly three times as likely to work in public administration as the average non-slaveholding Southern white migrant. Their cultural influence was especially pronounced in frontier communities where institutions were weak and norms malleable. In Denver, first-generation Southern white migrants were 11% more likely to join the KKK than men with no Southern heritage, with a similar differential observed for second-generation migrants.

The diaspora’s effects persist into the 21st century: counties with larger Confederate diasporas in 1900 exhibit larger racial wage gaps, greater residential segregation, higher rates of Black incarceration, higher rates of police-induced Black mortality, and more conservative racial attitudes among whites, as measured in modern survey data. These long-run findings are identified using the same county-level SSIV strategy. Scope conditions: effects are larger in frontier counties (weaker institutions, more malleable norms), in counties with fewer Union Army enlistees, and in newly incorporated areas with fewer than 2 residents per square mile in 1860.

Q: What is the central research question and why does it matter? A: The paper asks whether postbellum Southern white migration causally diffused Confederate culture — memorialization, organized white supremacy, and racial violence — beyond the South, and whether this early cultural transplantation has persistent effects on racial inequity today. It matters because Confederate monuments and persistent Black disadvantage in labor, housing, and policing are often attributed to the legacies of slavery within the South; this paper shows the mechanism by which those norms spread nationally through internal migration at a critical juncture of westward expansion and post-war reconciliation.

Q: How large was the Confederate diaspora, and who comprised it? A: Estimates from linked Census records suggest that nearly one million whites left the former Confederacy for the rest of the U.S. in the three decades after the war, including more than 61,000 former enslavers and 127,000 of their household kin. By 1900, migrants from the former Confederacy averaged 2.2% of the population in non-Southern destination counties. The diaspora hailed primarily from the upper South — Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina — and later from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Q: How do the authors construct the shift-share instrumental variable, and what identifying assumption does it require? A: The SSIV multiplies each Southern origin state’s 1870 settlement shares across non-Southern counties (the shares) by predicted total Southern white outflows from 1870 to 1900 (the shifts), where the predicted shifts are constructed by summing LASSO-selected origin-county push factors — economic conditions, cotton and tobacco potential, Civil War battle locations, Black population share — rather than actual flows. The exclusion restriction requires that these predicted push-factor-driven outflows affect destination county outcomes only through the Confederate diaspora they deliver, not through direct economic linkages with origin counties. Conditioning on the 1870 Southern white share absorbs time-invariant destination heterogeneity correlated with antebellum settlement.

Q: What are the IV estimates for Confederate memorialization and UDC chapters? A: A 1 p.p. increase in the Southern white share in 1900 raised the likelihood of Confederate memorialization by 3.4 p.p. after controlling for the 1870 share (relative to a baseline prevalence of 25% outside the South). For UDC chapters, which were present in only 10% of non-Southern counties, IV estimates show similar or larger proportional effect sizes. IV estimates are consistently more than twice the size of OLS estimates, consistent with downward bias from economic sorting of Southern whites toward productive, culturally-diverse destinations.

Q: What are the IV estimates for KKK activity and Black lynchings, and how are they interpreted? A: A 1 p.p. increase in the Southern white share in 1900 raised the likelihood of KKK chapter presence by 3.5 p.p. (controlling for 1870 shares), relative to a mean KKK prevalence of 37% in non-Southern counties, implying that moving from zero to the mean diaspora share is associated with an 8 p.p. increase in the probability of KKK activity. For Black lynchings, the corresponding IV estimate is 1.5 p.p. (column 5), with the effect rising when earlier migration is controlled, against a mean prevalence of only 5% — implying moving from zero to the mean raises lynching likelihood by 4 p.p. Critically, the authors find no diaspora effect on white lynchings, which distinguishes racially-targeted violence from a generalized Southern culture of violence.

Q: What is a “sundown town” and what does the paper find about the diaspora’s role in producing them? A: Sundown towns, described in historical research by Loewen (2005), are all-white towns where Black residents and other minorities were excluded from residing after sunset, spreading throughout the non-South from 1890 to 1960 and representing a novel form of racial exclusion distinct from de jure Jim Crow institutions. The authors find that a 1 p.p. increase in the size of the Confederate diaspora in 1900 led to a 2.4 p.p. increase in the likelihood of Black depopulation — defined as towns with at least 25 Black residents in 1870 having zero Black residents after 1900 — changing the geography of Black settlement throughout the 20th century.

Q: What role did former slaveholders specifically play, and how are their effects separately identified? A: Former slaveholders comprised just over 6% of the Confederate migrant sample but played an outsized role: they were about 50% more likely than the average Southern white migrant to work in any public-facing authority occupation, more than twice as likely to work as lawyers or judges, and nearly three times as likely to work in public administration. Their effects are identified using an analogous SSIV that, conditional on the instrumented overall diaspora, draws on distinct identifying variation in slaveholder-specific push factors. Former slaveholders gravitated toward Western, lower-density, cotton-suitable counties with higher Breckinridge vote shares and fewer Union Army soldiers, consistent with seeking to reconstruct antebellum hierarchies in malleable frontier spaces.

Q: Why were effects stronger in frontier counties? A: The paper finds that diaspora impacts on Confederate culture diffusion were significantly larger in counties along the frontier, where state institutions were weak and cultural norms not yet deeply ingrained. Restricting the sample to counties with fewer than 2 residents per square mile in the 1860 Census yields somewhat larger estimates than baseline, and the differential sorting of Southern whites (especially former slaveholders) into these nascent communities suggests that institutional malleability amplified the cultural entrepreneurs’ influence. Fewer Union Army enlistees in destination counties also amplified effects, as those families might otherwise have opposed resurgent Confederate ideology.

Q: How did the diaspora transmit its norms to subsequent generations and non-Southern neighbors? A: In the Denver metropolitan area, using newly digitized KKK membership records, first-generation Southern migrants were 11% more likely to join the KKK than men with no Southern heritage, and a similar differential holds for second-generation migrants (born in the diaspora), with patterns holding within Census enumeration blocks. White men without Southern heritage living next door to first- or second-generation Southern whites were significantly more likely to join the KKK, consistent with horizontal cultural spillovers. For naming patterns, non-Southern white parents who moved to counties with a larger Confederate diaspora gave their later-born children names more evocative of Confederate heroes than those given to earlier-born children — providing direct evidence of cultural spillovers beyond the diaspora.

Q: What long-run effects of the diaspora are documented through the 21st century? A: Using the county-level SSIV strategy, the paper finds that a larger Confederate diaspora in 1900 is associated with larger racial wage gaps, greater residential segregation, higher rates of Black incarceration, and higher rates of police-induced Black mortality through the 21st century. These disparities are mirrored in more conservative racial attitudes among whites in these counties as measured in modern survey data. These persistent effects suggest that, despite racially progressive national policy reform since the 1960s, locally institutionalized mechanisms reinforced by a culture of racial animus continue to generate inequity.

Q: How robust are the main estimates to alternative specifications? A: The authors show robustness across: (i) alternative spatial standard errors using Conley (1999) distance-based clustering and Adao et al. (2019) shift-share inference corrections; (ii) Belloni et al. (2014) double LASSO control selection; (iii) replacing predicted shifts with actual shifts; (iv) a random-shifts placebo where fewer than 5% of coefficients are significant; (v) dropping individual origin or destination states one-by-one (all estimates remain significant with 97% positive Rotemberg weights); (vi) excluding border states with antebellum slavery (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, West Virginia), which actually increases estimates; and (vii) restricting to newly incorporated counties with near-zero 1860 populations, which yields somewhat larger effects.

Q: What is the paper’s contribution to the culture-institutions literature? A: The paper uses granular data on migration, occupational choices, and local governance to shed light on the historical process by which Confederate “cultural entrepreneurs” captured early institutions across America, illustrating how culture and institutions reinforce each other during critical junctures of nation-building. The findings suggest that laws to reduce racial discrimination may have limited impact where a culture of racial animus is ingrained in local institutions — an institutionalized persistence mechanism that helps explain the gap between formal legal reforms and observed racial outcomes. The paper also identifies a prestige-biased cultural transmission channel, consistent with Henrich and Gil-White (2001), wherein non-elite masses emulate former slaveowners in positions of power.

Confederate diaspora: The approximately one million white migrants, including more than 61,000 former enslavers and 127,000 of their household kin, who left former Confederate states for the rest of the U.S. in the three decades after the Civil War, comprising on average 2.2% of destination county populations by 1900 and retaining strong cultural attachments to the Confederacy.

Confederate culture: A cluster of symbolic and material expressions that coalesced in the postbellum South, encompassing Lost Cause narratives (glorifying Confederate figures and reframing secession as a defense of states’ rights rather than slavery), public memorialization (monuments, place names, school names), United Daughters of the Confederacy chapters, Ku Klux Klan activity, and lynchings of Black people — together functioning as technologies to transmit white supremacist norms and maintain racial hierarchies.

Lost Cause: A revisionist narrative emerging after the Civil War that sought to redeem the image of the South by offering noble rationalizations for secession — emphasizing Northern aggression and states’ rights while downplaying slavery — and portraying enslaved people as content and slaveowners as generously paternalistic; central to the ideology propagated by the UDC and to Confederate memorialization.

Shift-share instrumental variable (SSIV): An identification strategy that combines the 1870 distribution of Southern white migrants across non-Southern counties (shares, reflecting historical migration networks) with predicted total Southern white outflows from 1870 to 1900 constructed from origin-county push factors via LASSO (shifts), to isolate exogenous county-level variation in Confederate diaspora exposure that is insulated from endogenous location sorting.

Sundown town: An all-white municipality where Black residents and other minorities were excluded from residing after sunset, spreading throughout the non-South from 1890 to 1960, operationalized in this paper as towns with at least 25 Black residents in 1870 having zero Black residents after 1900 (Black depopulation), representing a novel form of racial exclusion distinct from de jure Jim Crow institutions associated with the Confederacy.

Prestige-biased cultural transmission: An evolutionary transmission mechanism, formalized in Henrich and Gil-White (2001), in which non-elite populations emulate culturally salient leaders; invoked in this paper to explain how former slaveholders in positions of authority could diffuse Confederate norms to non-Southern whites who had no direct connection to the Confederacy.

Cultural entrepreneur: A migrant (especially a former slaveholder) who, by sorting into positions of public-facing authority — judges, lawyers, law enforcement, clergy, public administrators — at early stages of community formation when institutions are most malleable, actively embeds cultural norms into nascent local institutions, amplifying influence beyond their small population share.