inheritance regimes: medieval family structures and

OR I G I NAL ART I C L E

Inheritance regimes: Medieval family structures andcurrent institutional quality

Rasmus Broms1 | Andrej Kokkonen2

1The Quality of Government Institute, Universityof Gothenburg2University of Gothenburg

This study highlights the impact that medieval patterns ofintrafamily inheritance practices wield on contemporaryinstitutional quality. We argue that regions that practicedinegalitarian inheritance developed stronger institutionsthan regions that practiced egalitarian inheritance, for tworeasons. First, we argue that transmitting land to a singleheir resulted in a sense of personal ownership and, byextension, encouraged individual property rights. Second,we argue that the fact that disinherited children were incen-tivized to seek training and employment outside the familydomicile in regions practicing inegalitarian inheritanceresulted in trust-building social interactions. We test ourargument using data on medieval inheritance patterns andmodern-day institutional quality in European subnationalregions and across countries globally. Our results show thathistorical inegalitarian inheritance practices are stronglypositively associated with contemporary institutional qual-ity. We conclude that historical norms at the family levelare still affecting important modern-day societal functions.

1 | INTRODUCTION

Over the last decades, a growing literature devoted to the study of institutions has generated two pri-mary insights. The first is that institutions matter—for everything from economic growth (Acemoglu,Johnson, & Robinson, 2001) to individuals' happiness (Ott, 2010). The second is that most institu-tions have deep historical roots. The difficulties involved in tracing such roots have resulted in aplethora of studies proposing various determinants of institutional quality around the world. Themore prominent of these explanations include religion (Treisman, 2000), geography (Easterly &Levine, 2003), colonial heritage (Acemoglu et al., 2001), inequality (Engerman, Sokoloff,Urquiola, & Acemoglu, 2002), ethnic composition (Alesina, Devleeschauwer, Easterly, Kurlat, &Wacziarg, 2003), trust and social capital (Bergh & Bjørnskov, 2011; Putnam, 1993), legal origins(La Porta, Rafael, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1999), state antiquity (Hariri, 2012), tax raising (Tilly, 1992),

Received: 22 January 2018 Revised: 26 October 2018 Accepted: 10 January 2019

DOI: 10.1111/gove.12392

Governance. 2019;1–19. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gove © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1

http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gove

and education (Uslaner & Rothstein, 2012). Although these studies have contributed to advancementsin the field, they seldom address subnational differences in modern-day institutional quality, in largepart because subnational data on institutional quality have not been readily available until recently.

Utilizing a new data set on regional differences in institutional quality in Europe, the presentstudy attempts to explain these differences by focusing on what is arguably society's first and mostfundamental institution (Carmichael, Dilli, & Zanden, 2016): the family. Specifically, our argumentfocuses on long-standing norms and traditions—whose origins remain unclear, but stem from at leastthe 12th century—regarding intergenerational wealth transfers. Stressing the benefits of inegalitarianinheritance practices, we argue that regions where parents passed (most of) their inheritance to a soleheir developed stronger and better functioning institutions than in areas where inheritance wasdivided equally between siblings. Our argument rests on two parallel theoretical pathways: First, weposit that passing on land to a single heir spurred a sense of personal ownership and, by extension,encouraged individual property rights—itself commonly considered a central feature of institutionalquality (Adserá, Boix, & Payne, 2003; Chong & Calderon, 2000; Olson, 1996; Svensson, 1998). Sec-ond, in regions practicing inegalitarian inheritance, disinherited children were incentivized to seektraining and employment outside the family domicile, resulting in trust-building social interactionswith people outside of the kinship group and social trust. Both social capital and institutional qualityfeed and hinge upon honesty, fairness, and collaboration, and—despite a lively discussion regardingtheir causal relationship (Robbins, 2012; Rothstein & Stolle, 2008)—social capital has reliably beena powerful predictor of institutional development since the genesis of both fields (Bergh &Bjørnskov, 2011; Putnam, 1993).

Compared to conventional explanations of institutional quality, our argument is decidedly “bottomup.” Instead of focusing on rulers, kings, and political systems, it regards the customs and norms ofordinary people (see Dilli, 2016, for a similar approach). This is reflected in our empirical analysis,where we combine regional-level survey data of institutional quality in Western Europe with historicalinheritance patterns of the same regions.

The results suggest that a tradition of inegalitarian inheritance is a potent predictor of contempo-rary regional-level institutional quality, even after controlling for previously offered explanations andcountry fixed effects. We also find strong support for the proposed trust mechanism, whereas theproperty rights mechanism only finds support in some of our models.

Finally, we find that inegalitarian inheritance practices are only positively associated with institu-tional quality in regions where the corporation was introduced early in history (Greif, 2006b; Kuran,2005). In regions where it was introduced late—because Islamic law, which lacks even a concept ofthe corporation, dominated—the correlation is negative, suggesting that the availability of the corpo-ration was crucial for shaping the outcome of inheritance practices.

2 | FAMILY SYSTEMS, INHERITANCE RULES, AND INSTITUTIONALQUALITY

A long line of research has both theorized around (Grindle, 2004; Rothstein & Teorell, 2008) andempirically demonstrated (Adserá et al., 2003; Chong & Calderon, 2000; La Porta et al., 1999) theimportance of quality of government institutions for a long list of outcomes essential for human wel-fare.1 As noted earlier, an equally immense body of work has engaged in attempting to understandwhat causes good institutions.

Our focus on family structures in general, and inheritance systems in particular, is perhaps one ofthe more glaring omissions within this literature, at least until recently, as noted by Avner Greif

2 BROMS AND KOKKONEN

(2006a, p. 308). However, the past decade has seen a number of studies that explore how family sys-tems affect society. Much of the research has focused on the division between “strong” and “weak”family ties. While “strong ties” denote a culture where family loyalties and authorities are strong andwhere the family group is prioritized over the individual, “weak ties” instead denote a culture that pri-oritizes the individual (Reher, 1998). Alesina and Giuliano (2014) find that countries with strongerfamily ties are more corrupt and have less effective governments. Other studies show that strong fam-ily ties are negatively associated with a range of variables that are conducive to economic growth andinstitutional quality, such as geographical mobility, female and young adult labor force participation(Alesina & Giuliano, 2010), political interest and activity (Alesina & Giuliano, 2011), and trust instrangers (Ermisch & Gambetta, 2010). Recently and in a similar vein, Moscona, Nunn, and Robin-son (2017) show that segmentary lineage societies (i.e., societies that are organized around family tiesand lineages) have lower levels of social trust than societies that put less emphasis on family ties.However, Ljunge (2015) finds that individuals with strong family ties are more likely than those withweak family ties to disapprove of tax and benefit cheating and corruption.

A related strand of research has focused on the division between nuclear (households consistingof two adults, e.g., parents) and extended families (households consisting of many adults,e.g., grandparents, aunts, and cousins). This research differs conceptually and diverges empiricallyfrom the division between strong and weak family ties in that it primarily focuses on the compositionof the household and not on the strength of ties between its members (Reher, 1998). Greif (2006a)pairs the spread of the nuclear family, at the cost of clans and tribes, with the rise of the corporationin medieval Europe, a process he identifies as a key prerequisite for the long period of growth thatensued. With extended kinship groups no longer serving as the mode of societal belonging, new,impersonal, organizations and institutions were well equipped to protect individual property and pro-vide public goods. Meanwhile, nuclear families contributed to increased migration and, in turn,human capital. Duranton, Rodríguez-Pose, and Sandall (2009) employ Emmanuel Todd's (1985,1987, 1990) classification of family types in Western Europe—which differentiate between nuclearand extended families—to show that regions with a tradition of nuclear families have higher levels ofsocial capital, wealth, and education than regions with extended family forms.

A third strand of research has focused on the difference between egalitarian and inegalitarianinheritance practices. Most of this research has focused on the theoretical effects of primogeniture(i.e., a system where the oldest son inherits)—compared to more egalitarian inheritance practices—on income inequality. Early studies argued that primogeniture increases income inequalitywithin generations (see Chu, 1991, for a review of the literature). However, Chu (1991) argues thatamong poor- and middle-income groups, primogeniture increases upward mobility for the well-endowed child, because it allows a family to invest all of its meager resources in the well-endowedchild rather than spread them out among all children. As a consequence, the family may afford thewell-endowed child a proper education (or similar investment), which allows it to climb the socialladder, but which the family could never afford all its children. Even if primogeniture increasesinequality within generations, it may as a result actually reduce income inequality over generations.Chu substantiates his argument with anthropological research from medieval and early modernEurope and China.

However, Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison (2002) and Bertocchi (2006) claim that primogeniturefunctions to preserve and reinforce existing unequal wealth distributions and power relations also inthe long term and illustrate their case by showing how primogeniture helped the nobility preservetheir estates, and thus their political and economic power, in medieval and early modern Europe.Overall, the economic literature on inheritance practices seems to suggest that primogeniture contrib-uted to income inequality in the short term, whereas the long-term effects are unclear.

BROMS AND KOKKONEN 3

2.1 | Our argument

Although economic inequality is often seen as an impediment to institutional quality (Uslaner, 2008),we argue that the intrafamilial economic inequality caused by primogeniture—and other forms of ine-galitarian inheritance practices—may actually have benefited institutional quality in the long run.Specifically, we argue that inegalitarian inheritance practices are likely to have increased institutionalquality through two mechanisms. First, the need to limit disinherited siblings' influence over familyproperty instilled a sense of private property within the family that likely contributed to the develop-ment of property rights. Second, such practices fostered social capital formation, because disinheritedchildren were incentivized to seek a career and develop social ties outside the family. Both outcomesare, in turn, as noted in the Introduction, closely linked to institutional quality and can be seen as nec-essary building blocks for the performance of government institutions.

2.1.1 | The property rights mechanism

The modern notion of property rights is based upon the ability of the individual possessing property,along the lines of the Latin maxim nemo est heres viventis (no one is heir to the living), and freelyusing it as they wish without the consent of others, be it family or surrounding institutions. Asscholars have noted, this notion of property rights emerged during the medieval era (Macfarlane,1998). For example, Henry Maine (1901; see Macfarlane, 1998) suggests that the move to privateproperty was intimately linked with the introduction of primogeniture in the 12th century, as primo-geniture meant a break with a past where all members of the family had a say in the handling of fam-ily land. In many parts of medieval Europe, landowners were not allowed to sell, or in other waysalienate, land without the consent of all heirs (Macfarlane, 1998). If the family decided to sell its land,heirs had the right to buy it before it was offered to outsiders. Primogeniture did not mean that indi-viduals became free to pass on their property as they wished (the eldest son inherited), but it meantthat younger siblings were deprived of their right to family property. From an early age, they weretaught that they had to respect the fact that the eldest son had a right to property that they did not.This upbringing likely strengthened the notion of individual property rights. It stands to reason thatchildren who are inculcated to accept that one of their siblings has a stronger claim to family propertythan themselves are more likely to accept strangers' individual property rights upon adulthood. Con-trastingly, in areas practicing egalitarian inheritance children were not taught to the same extent toaccept that others had more right to property than themselves, while parents were not, as Todd (1987,p. 52) notes, free to dispose of their own property as they wished.

Primogeniture also kept family estates intact over generations and as a consequence raisedowners' and outside investors' incentives for long-term investments. Once these were made, society'sinterest in keeping individual property rights secure (i.e., keeping estates together) increased propor-tionally. The contrast to areas that practiced egalitarian inheritance is stark. Platteau and Baland(2001, p. 42) note that egalitarian inheritance was “extremely vulnerable to internal quarrels and ten-sions.” Such tensions easily spilled over to decisions regarding how to use, sell, and invest in land,and made long-term investments more difficult. Outside investors knew that an estate's economic via-bility only lasted as long as the current owner. When he (as was generally the case) passed away, theestate was inevitably divided between his heirs into smaller and less viable economic units. Thus,investments were riskier where egalitarian inheritance was practiced and society's interests in keepingproperty rights secure were proportionally lower. Especially, poor- and middle-income groups suf-fered from this, as their land plots were often small and paltry to begin with (Chu, 1991).

The link between inegalitarian inheritance practices and the development of property rights canbe readily observed across Europe and the world. Macfarlane (1998), drawing on a long line of


scholarship regarding the shift from communal to individual property (including De Toqueville,Marx, and Tönnies), identifies the transition to primogeniture as a decisive step in the particularlystrong individual property rights of medieval England. Indeed, soon after the introduction of primo-geniture the notion of “birthright,” that is, the notion that a child, by virtue of bloodline, can infringeupon a parent's property was abolished; “[s]trictly speaking it is not even a matter of ‘disinheritance’;a living man has no heirs, he has complete seisin of property” (Macfarlane, 1998, p. 109). Englandwas an extreme case but Macfarlane notes that also medieval Japan had a system of strong individualproperty rights linked to the instating of primogeniture (p. 114). In a similar vein, Kuran (2004,2011) notes that primogeniture spread to most of Northwestern Europe between the 13th and 17thcenturies and was followed by more secure property rights. As a contrasting case, Kuran describeshow Islam, which—unlike Christianity—prescribes an inheritance regime, severely limited parents'ability to disinherit children, arguing that this limitation restricted “large and durable enterprises.”Following a father's death, his lands and fortune were in normal circumstances partitioned betweenhis surviving children, which is why estates and business enterprises seldom lasted more than a gen-eration. This was accentuated by the fact that daughters also inherited and that rich Muslims hadcomparatively more children than other religious groups (Islam allowed men to have up to fourwives). Furthermore, the practice of sheltering wealth from partition by moving it to family-ownedfoundations (waqfs) was a common strategy, as a waqf could be passed on undivided onto anyonethe founder pleased. Income from its assets could also be channeled to relatives as the founderwished. Kuran (2004, pp. 82–83) argues that this dampened the commercial interest in protectingindividual property rights, while Kuran and Singh (2013) make the case that similar practices stifledMuslim economic activity under British rule in India.

An illustrative example of the relationship between property relations and inegalitarian inheri-tance practices on the level of everyday life can be derived from looking at intrafamilial contracts inareas of inegalitarian inheritance. Because intergenerational family transfers work in two directions—heirs receive land and/or property, while predecessors receive security at old age—wills in areas ofinegalitarian inheritance were used as leverage for the older generation to ensure that they would betaken care of. These “retirement contracts” often included detailed stipulations, such as whether par-ents were allowed to sit by the fireplace (Reher, 1998, p. 225). While common in areas practicing ine-galitarian inheritance, such contracts were unheard of in regions with egalitarian inheritance(Habakkuk, 1955, p. 2, citing 19th-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play), where more infor-mal agreements or custom prevailed. This variation can be found between different parts of Europe,but also within the same country, such as Spain (Brandes, 1995, p. 20; Reher, 1998, p. 211).

2.1.2 | The social capital mechanism

The second mechanism through which inegalitarian inheritance practices affect institutional quality isby generating social capital. Inegalitarian inheritance generally left disinherited children without a per-manent livelihood. For most people, this meant that they needed to find employment in servitude, asfarmhands, maids, or apprentices to support themselves (Duranton et al., 2009; Habakkuk, 1955, p. 9;Platteau & Baland, 2001, p. 44; Reher, 1998). We argue that these incentives had profound effects onmigration patterns. At a structural level, leaving home has been a regular occurrence in both egalitarianand inegalitarian inheritance systems. Still, the closer attachment to the family land in the former madeyoung people engage primarily in seasonal work, only to return to home. In contrast,

Primogeniture generated long-distance migrants who were to provide in due time theraw recruits for industry: it is only exclusive inheritance that “provides the steady, long-term migration necessary to a modern industrial labor force—one that will stay in cities


long enough to learn a skill and then remain to use it.” (Parish & Schwartz, 1972,p. 156, quoted in Platteau & Baland, 2001, p. 18)

Inegalitarian inheritance practices thus spurred long-distance permanent labor migration. We argue thatthe social exchanges that this labor migration gave rise to helped foster outgroup trust. Since GordonAllport proposed the contact hypothesis in 1954 (Allport, 1954), a vast literature has shown that inter-group contacts can reduce feelings of group threat, prejudice, and distrust toward outgroups, especiallyif the contacts are (a) intimate, (b) have broad institutional support, and individuals (c) are of equal sta-tus and (d) share superordinate goals (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Pettigrew (1998) has added the condi-tion that the contact situation should offer the contacting parts the opportunity to become friends.Although it would be unfounded to glorify servants' positions, we argue that the interpersonal meetingsthat resulted when disinherited individuals sought employment outside the family fulfilled most of theseconditions and that people as a result developed more trusting attitudes to nonrelatives in areas practic-ing inegalitarian inheritance. Farmhands, maids, and apprentices usually moved in with their employers,becoming part of their household, which is why contacts were intimate under ordinary circumstances.Servants also often shared their employers' work tasks and to some extent strived for common goals(e.g., bringing in the harvest). In addition, contacts had broad institutional support. Work contractswere, for example, often regulated by law and enforced by the authorities (Reher, 1998).

The only condition not fulfilled was that of equality between the contacting parts. However, thestatus difference between employers and employees should not be exaggerated. Many employershad, like a majority of the population, themselves served as servants before establishing their ownbusinesses (Reher, 1998). Indeed, the idea behind an apprenticeship was that the apprentice shouldrise to the employer's rank in the end. Servants also had contact with other servants and members ofthe employer's family who could often personally look forward to a future as servants. Thus, it islikely that affective ties were forged and that those ties fostered trust in people outside the family.

Several scholars have also shown that social trust is higher in areas where modern labor marketsfirst emerged. Mackie (2001) notes that in places such as Southern Italy—a region where egalitariannuclear family forms dominate—generalized trust is relatively low. Here, according to Mackie (p. 47),leaving the family to find employment in servitude was considered shameful to the point where it wasalmost better to starve. The family—and its honor—was of paramount importance. Lipset and Lenz(2000, pp. 119–120), elaborating on Edward Banfield's conception of the “amoral familism” character-izing the values in this area, highlight the link to corruption, as it does not foster norms of merit, univer-salism, or loyalty toward the community. Although Mackie does not put much weight on inheritancepatterns, the areas dominated by working in servitude and having higher trust levels actually correspondquite closely to the areas practicing inegalitarian inheritance in the early modern period, such as North-western Europe and Northern Italy. Kuran (2016) furthermore shows how the waqf reduced incentivesfor people to pool their resources and collaborate around long-term projects, thus limiting the prospectsfor the development of a strong civil society and the generation of social capital.

2.1.3 | The availability of the corporation as a potential moderator

Our second mechanism builds on the assumption that disinherited children can find jobs outside thefamily. In the absence of a well-functioning job market that welcomes strangers, they will face pov-erty and forego the trust-enhancing social interactions with people outside the family described ear-lier. A growing literature (Berman, 1983; Greif, 2006b; Kuran, 2005, 2011) emphasizes corporations'importance for the emergence of such markets historically. To cite Avner Greif (2006b, p. 389):“[E]conomic and political corporations were central to the institutional underpinning of the late medi-eval European commercial expansion.” Besides being self-governed and interest based, medieval


European corporations distinguished themselves by being constituted by individuals unrelated byblood. They were also impersonal in the sense that their existence did not depend on a particular indi-vidual and therefore survived their individual members.

We argue that the availability of such corporations (including business corporations, guilds, univer-sities, confraternities, and similar entities) both increased disinherited children's job opportunities andhelped them take advantage of the social capital generated by the interpersonal contacts the jobs pro-vided. As documented by several researchers (Greif, 2006b; Kuran, 2005, 2011), corporations increasedincentives to invest in economic enterprises because they provided investors with long time horizons.The fact that corporations were not kin based also made them well suited to arbitrate in disputesbetween people unrelated by blood, protecting investors from arbitrary confiscations, theft, and fraud.These features of the corporation explain why it stimulated growth and the demand for labor—and as aconsequence is likely to have provided disinherited children with better job opportunities.

The fact that corporations were usually constituted by individuals unrelated by blood—and weredependent on their reputation rather than family ties—is likely to have been especially important fordisinherited children who had migrated to new areas. Without the protection of their families, suchchildren were dependent on other actors to protect their interests, so they could capitalize on thesocial capital their social interactions with strangers generated. Corporations could offer such protec-tion. Hence, we expect the historical availability of the corporation to moderate the relationshipbetween inegalitarian inheritance practices and institutional quality. Historically, inheritance practicesand the organization of public goods provision (such as the availability of the corporation) tend tocome as parts of larger institutional complexes. Hence, it might be difficult to know whether thereexist interaction effects between them. When borders shift between such complexes some parts may,however, change faster than others, and offer an opportunity for testing interactive effects. Later, weargue that shifting borders between Christianity and Islam in Europe offer such an opportunity fortesting the proposed interaction between inheritance practices and the availability of the corporation.

3 | EUROPEAN VARIATION IN FAMILY STRUCTURE ANDINSTITUTIONAL QUALITY

The world's supply of institutional quality is far from constant. While most of the industrialized worldenjoys reasonable effective governments, free from systemic corruption, the opposite is more oftenthe rule in developing states. Recent evidence shows that even within Western Europe the quality ofinstitutions varies considerably as well, and, furthermore, that much of this variation is found at thesubnational level. A new index, the European Quality of Government Index (EQI), measures institu-tional quality for the subnational analysis in Europe (Charron et al., 2015). The index was createdusing survey data from 85,000 citizens in over 200 European regions, including questions about theperceived quality, level of corruption, and impartiality of three core administrative functions: healthcare, police, and education.2 It reveals that, just as Northwestern Europe generally enjoys more high-functioning institutions than the Mediterranean region, the magnitude of this between-country varia-tion is matched within countries such as Italy and France. While hitherto largely overlooked, suchsubnational variation should not be surprising. First, a wide range of public services tend to be underthe purview of regional or local authorities, and even when the state is formally in charge, front-lineadministration rarely takes place centrally in the capital. Second, despite the dominance of the statein modern politics, the path-dependent nature of institutions (Gertler, 2010; Rodríguez-Pose, 2013)means that differing regional variation is likely to reverberate long after a state has formally estab-lished political primacy.


At first glance, this between- and within-country variation is largely reflected in long-standingdifferences in family structure, and particularly with regard to inheritance practices. Using Todd'sclassification of regional family structure (Todd, 1985, 1987, 1990), Figure 1 maps this variation inWestern Europe.3 Here, Todd identifies four main family types, which can be identified along twodimensions: the structure of the household and the partition of inheritance. The first differentiatesbetween nuclear and extended families, while the second distinguishes between areas where one(i.e., inegalitarian inheritance) or several (egalitarian inheritance) children would inherit parents' landand/or property.4 The British Isles, the German-speaking countries, and Scandinavia vary in terms ofnuclear versus extended family tradition. However, they—with the exception of eastern Finland—share the inegalitarian trait. The states adjacent to the Mediterranean—France, Italy, Portugal, andSpain—display more within-country variation, often containing several family types within their bor-ders: absolute- (inegalitarian inheritance) and egalitarian- (egalitarian inheritance) nuclear, complete/incomplete stem (extended families practicing inegalitarian inheritance), and communitarian (extendedfamily with egalitarian inheritance).

4 | ANALYSIS

We use the data on inheritance practices and the EQI of regional institutional quality described earlierto test our hypothesis that a legacy of inegalitarian inheritance is conducive to modern-day institu-tional quality.

EgalitarianMixedInegalitarian

FIGURE 1 Inheritance practices across Western EuropeSource. Duranton et al. (2009); Todd (1985, 1990)


Despite increasing calls for taking the regional aspect into account when analyzing institutionsand their quality (Gertler, 2010; Rodríguez-Pose, 2013), the type of comparative subnational analysison European regions that we conduct is still a recent occurrence, with the first study, by Charron andLapuente (2013), exploring regional quality of government in a very similar sample of regions inWestern Europe as ours. Our study differs from Charron and Lapuente's study by going much fartherback in time in the search of the roots of institutional quality, as the family systems we focus on werealready in place in the medieval era.

4.1 | Control variables

Designing a study that tries to explain contemporary outcomes with family patterns that stem fromsuch a distant past increases the risk of posttreatment bias if control variables that originate after theemergence of family systems are used. We address this problem by only including controls that pre-date, or are reasonably contemporary with, the origins of family systems. Beside the two family struc-ture variables, inegalitarian and nuclear family,5 we introduce a control for the related, but rivaling,hypothesis regarding strong family ties. This is the only control that violates the rule of avoidingposttreatment bias, included to show that our findings not only replicate earlier findings in the litera-ture on the negative impact of strong family ties (Alesina & Giuliano, 2014), but captures anotherdimension of the family. Family ties are operationalized in the same manner as in Alesina andGiuliano (2014, p. 209). The analysis uses the question, “A person's family should be the main prior-ity in life” from Round 2 (2004) of the European Social Survey (ESS), normalized to range from0 (disagree strongly) to 1 (agree strongly). Poststratification weights provided by the ESS are appliedbefore aggregating the responses from individual respondents to a Nomenclature of Territorial Unitsfor Statistics (NUTS) II level.6

In addition to the family ties variable, we also control for five historical factors that may explaincontemporary institutional quality. Urbanization, which functions as a proxy both for economicdevelopment and population density, is measured by the number of cities per square kilometer in theyear 1300 (Andersen, Jensen, & Skovsgaard, 2016). Using urbanization measures from earlier centu-ries does not alter our results.

Distance to coastline (Andersen et al., 2016) proxies regions' opportunities for communicationand commerce (which were helped by waterways in the era before modern communications).

Third, we control for succession arrangements in the polities a region belonged to during theperiod 1000–1500. Acharya and Lee (2017) show that the availability of male heirs made the succes-sion smoother in medieval Europe, and that the resulting stability has had a positive effect on contem-porary institutional quality and economic development. The effect primarily worked via theinstitution of political primogeniture (i.e., the practice of letting the oldest son inherit the throne)—afactor that has also been shown to increase political stability in other research (Kokkonen & Sundell,2014, 2017). To account for the stabilizing effect of political primogeniture we construct a variablebased on Kokkonen and Sundell (2014), which measures the fraction of years a region was ruled bypolities with political primogeniture between the year 1000 and the year 1500.

Finally, following Ketterer and Rodríguez-Pose (2018), we control for historical institutional leg-acies with two variables. The first measures whether a region was part of Charlemagne's empire athis death in the year 814. The second measures whether a region was part of the Roman Empire at itsgreatest extent in the year 117 (at the death of emperor Trajan). The institutional legacies theseempires left behind are likely to affect both medieval and contemporary institutional quality as wellas precede the inheritance practices that make up our main independent variable. By controlling forthem we can, therefore, in part circumvent the causality problem that inheritance practices may affect


institutional quality at the same time as institutional quality may also shape inheritance practices. Atleast, we can be sure that our findings do not only reflect a correlation between past and present insti-tutional quality. Summary statistics and correlations between variables are presented in SupportingInformation Tables S1–S2. It also includes Table S3 that illustrates the distribution of different familytypes across European regions.

We report both ordinary standard errors (the equivalent to standard errors clustered at the regionallevel) and standard errors clustered at the country level in our tables, to account for different practicesin the literature. The level of treatment is the region, which suggests clustering at the regional level.However, we also control for country fixed effects in our models, and studies doing so often clusterat the same level (Tabellini, 2010).7

5 | RESULTS

As is evident from Figure 2, which displays the bivariate relationship between inegalitarian inheri-tance (inegalitarian) and institutional quality (EQI), historically inegalitarian regions have noticeablyhigher institutional quality.

Table 1 displays the results of multivariate regression analysis on the relationship between inegal-itarian and EQI. When only including Todd's family dimensions (column 1) and country dummies,the relationship between inegalitarian inheritance and EQI is positive and significant. On average, aninegalitarian region scores 0.54 points higher on the EQI, compared with an egalitarian region, corre-sponding to about half of a standard deviation, equaling the difference between Stockholm (NUTSname: Östra Sverige) and London, or between Cantabria and Andalucía. The legacy of nuclear familyis not significantly related to the EQI, casting doubt on the theory about the institutional dividendsderiving from the nuclear family. Column 2 adds a control for the strength of family ties. The controlis not significant, indicating that the effect of inegalitarian does not work through the strength of fam-ily ties. Controlling for urbanization in the year 1300 (column 3), distance to nearest coast (column4), the legacy of primogeniture succession to the throne (column 5), the legacy of Charlemagne's

-2-1

01

23

Inst

itutio

nal Q

ualit

y

0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1Inegalitarian Inheritance

FIGURE 2 Institutional quality and inegalitarian inheritanceNote. Pearson's r = 0.60; p < 0.001.


empire (column 6), and the legacy of the Roman empire (column 7) does not alter the results. Theassociation between inegalitarian and EQI also remains intact and significant in column 8, whichincludes all controls simultaneously. Together, these findings lend strong support to the notion thatWestern European institutional quality can be traced back to medieval practices of inheritance.

5.1 | Testing the mechanisms

To test the proposed mechanisms—that inegalitarian inheritance practices spurred property rights andsocial capital formation—we proceed by analyzing the relationship between inegalitarian inheritanceand proxies for these intermediary variables. The historical nature of this relationship makes accu-rately capturing such proxies a difficult task, but some approximate data are available. For historical

TABLE 1 Institutional quality and inegalitarian inheritance in Western European regions

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)Familytraits

Familyvalues Urbanization

Coastdistance Primogeniture Charlemagne Roman

Allcontrols

Inegalitarianinheritance

0.54 0.55 0.50 0.58 0.64 0.58 0.54 0.62

[0.16]*** [0.16]*** [0.16]*** [0.16]*** [0.14]*** [0.14]*** [0.16]*** [0.13]***

(0.22)** (0.22)** (0.21)** (0.24)** (0.17)*** (0.23)** (0.22)** (0.14)***

Nuclear family 0.01 0.03 −0.02 0.02 0.08 0.17* 0.00 0.14**

[0.13] [0.13] [0.13] [0.13] [0.12] [0.12] [0.13] [0.11]

(0.13) (0.16) (0.19) (0.17) (0.07) (0.08) (0.18) (0.05)

Family ties −1.29 −1.17*

[1.01] [0.86]

(1.00) (0.61)

Urbanization (1300) −324.77 −389.44

[146.19]** [120.05]***

(131.79)** (173.82)**

Distance to coast 0.00 0.00

[0.00]** [0.00]

(0.00) (0.00)

Primogeniture −1.19 −1.06

[0.19]*** [0.20]***

(0.41)** (0.26)***

Charlemagne 0.65 0.32

[0.13]*** [0.14]**

(0.33)* (0.11)**

Roman empire 0.12 0.04

[0.17] [0.15]

(0.10) (0.05)

Constant 0.21 01.20 0.42*** 0.08 0.51 −0.24 0.13 1.33

[0.15] [0.79] [0.18]** [0.17] [0.14]*** [0.16] [0.19] [0.72]*

(0.10)* (0.72) (0.12) (0.19) (0.09)*** (0.31) (0.13) (0.48)**

Observations 130 130 125 125 130 125 125 125

R2 (within) 0.14 0.16 0.18 0.18 0.36 0.31 0.15 0.49

Note. Standard errors in brackets. Robust standard errors clustered on country in parentheses. All models include country fixed effects.*p < 0.1, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01.


property rights, we follow Tabellini (2010) and Charron and Lapuente (2013) and use a regional mea-sure of executive constraints during the early modern era. While not focused on property rights perse, it measures the extent to which the ruler was held accountable to legislative powers and wasbound by the rule of law. Consequently, the variable captures an essential part of property rights,namely, the extent to which the ruler arbitrarily could infringe on ordinary peoples' domains. Thisvariable is only available for about two thirds of the regions in the full sample. For the social capitalmechanism, we employ a measure of general trust from the EQI.

As Table 2 shows, inegalitarian inheritance is positively related to historical institutional constraints.However, the association is only significant in the models that do not cluster standard errors at thecountry level. Thus, our first mechanism is only partially supported. This probably has to do with the

TABLE 2 Test of the proposed mechanisms: Political constraints

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)Familytraits



Allcontrols


01.03 01.05 01.10 01.08 01.19 01.13 01.05 01.31

[0.30]*** [0.30]*** [0.28]*** [0.28]*** [0.27]*** [0.27]*** [0.30]*** [0.24]***

(0.87) (0.87) (0.94) (0.88) (0.84) (0.87) (0.88) (0.86)

Nuclear family 0.28 0.30 0.31 0.28 0.39 0.61 0.29 0.59

[0.25] [0.25] [0.23] [0.22] [0.22]* [0.23]*** [0.25] [0.59]***

(0.21) (0.21) (0.25) (0.21) (0.37) (0.47) (0.21) (0.44)

Family ties −1.20 −0.84

[1.94] [1.57]

(0.92) (1.28)

Urbanization (1300) 491.71 461.21

[327.71] [295.11]

(381.58) (299.00)

Distance to coast 0.00 0.00

[0.00] [0.00]

(0.00) (0.00)


[0.35]*** [0.36]***

(0.47)*** (0.16)***


[0.28]** [0.29]**

(0.41)** (0.17)***

Roman empire −0.25 −0.16

[0.32] [0.27]

(0.19) (0.16)

Constant −0.67 00.24 −0.99 −0.84 −0.08 −1.71 −0.47 −0.39

[0.28]** [1.50] [0.33]*** [0.28]*** [0.27] [0.34]*** [0.38] [1.34]

(0.60) (1.04) (0.84) (0.69) (0.51) (0.97) (0.59) (1.64)

Observations 99 99 96 96 99 99 99 96

R2 (within) 0.14 0.14 0.19 0.19 0.34 0.31 0.14 0.48



fact that most of the variation in institutional constraints is at the national level in combination with thefact that there is only substantial variation at the subnational level for the focal variables in two coun-tries: Italy and Spain. In the first case, the association is strong and significant in the expected direction,whereas there is a null correlation in the latter case. When the model with standard errors clustered atthe country level is rerun without country dummies, there is also a strong and statistically significantpositive association between inegalitarian inheritance and institutional constraints.

In contrast, we find strong support for our second proposed mechanism in all models in Table 3:Inegalitarian inheritance is significantly and positively associated with regional trust levels. Theeffect persists also after including the full set of controls, and is substantial if not overwhelming:

TABLE 3 Test of the proposed mechanisms: Generalized trust

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)Familytraits



Allcontrols


0.05 0.05 0.05 0.05 0.06 0.05 0.05 0.06

[0.02]** [0.02]** [0.02]** [0.02]** [0.02]*** [0.02]** [0.02]** [0.02]***

(0.01)*** (0.01)*** (0.02)*** (0.02)*** (0.01)*** (0.02)*** (0.01)*** (0.01)***

Nuclear family −0.01 −0.00 −0.00 −0.01 −0.00 00.01 −0.00 00.01

[0.02] [0.02] [0.02] [0.02] [0.02] [0.02] [0.02] [0.02]

(0.02) (0.01) (0.02) (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) (0.01)

Family ties −0.30 −0.29

[0.13]** [0.13]**

(0.11)** (0.12)**

Urbanization (1300) 5.28 3.75

[19.16] [18.22]

(11.60) (15.67)

Distance to coast −0.00 −0.00

[0.00] [0.00]

(0.00) (0.00)


[0.03]*** [0.03]***

(0.05) (0.03)**


[0.02]*** [0.02]

(0.04) (0.02)

Roman empire −0.02 −0.03

[0.02] [0.02]

(0.01)** (0.02)

Constant 0.47 0.70 0.47 0.48 0.49 0.44 0.48 0.72

[0.02]*** [0.10]*** [0.02]*** [0.02]*** [0.02]*** [0.02]*** [0.03]*** [0.11]***

(0.01)*** (0.09)*** (0.02)*** (0.01)*** (0.02)*** (0.03)*** (0.01)*** (0.10)***

Observations 99 99 96 96 99 99 99 96

R2 (within) 0.09 0.13 0.10 0.10 0.16 0.15 0.10 0.25



Going from egalitarian to inegalitarian inheritance practices increases trust by about one third of astandard deviation. Thus, our second hypothesis is supported.

5.2 | The moderating effect of the availability of the corporation

To test how inheritance practices interacted with the availability of corporations in shaping institu-tional outcomes, we run models in which we interact inegalitarian with a variable that measureswhether a region was ruled by a Muslim polity in the year 1000. Classical Islamic law—in contrastto the law traditions of Western Europe—did not grant standing to corporations, but only to naturalpersons (Kuran, 2005). Individuals in regions dominated by Muslim polities therefore did not haveaccess to corporations to the same extent as individuals in regions dominated by Christian states.Although all Muslim polities in Western Europe were eventually conquered by Christian states,regions dominated by such states were given a late start with the corporation. The last Muslim stateto be conquered—Granada—was not conquered until 1492, and much of the rest of Portugal andsouthern Spain was Muslim long into the 13th century (Catlos, 2014).

The corporation is also unlikely to have become widely available immediately after the Christianconquest. The legal situation in much of Spain and Portugal was heavily influenced by the Moorishlegacy (Stein, 1999, pp. 65–66). Muslim regions were also relatively urbanized and prosperous, andsubstantial Muslim populations remained in the conquered regions until the forced conversions in the16th century and the expulsions of Moriscos (converted Muslims) from Spain in the 17th century(Catlos, 2014). Thus, established patterns of economic exchange are likely to have lived on after theconquest and hindered the development of corporations. Together with the fact that there is variationin inheritance practices among regions that were Muslim in the year 1000, this allows us to test howimportant the availability of the corporation was for channeling disinherited children's' economicactivity into good outcomes.

Table 4, in which we interact inegalitarian with the variable that measures whether a region wasruled by a Muslim polity in the year 1000, suggests that the availability of the corporation is crucialfor understanding the outcome of inegalitarian inheritance practices. The interaction term is signifi-cant and strongly negative, showing that inegalitarian inheritance is in fact associated with lower EQIand trust levels in regions that were Muslim in the year 1000, and consequently got a late start withthe corporation. At the same time, the positive association between inegalitarian inheritance practicesand the EQI and social trust in regions that did have access to the corporation increases in strength.Together, these observations firmly suggest that the corporation was essential for bringing about ine-galitarian inheritance practices' positive effects on institutional quality in Western Europe.

5.3 | Are the findings generalizable?

Our focus on Western Europe raises the question of how generalizable our results are. In the online Sup-porting Information we report findings from country-level models from a global sample with 75 countries,which are similar to the regional level models in Tables 1 through 3. The results in these models are verymuch like our subnational findings; inegalitarian inheritance practices are significantly positively associatedwith institutional quality as well as trust and respect for property rights. We interpret these results as tenta-tive evidence that our findings are not an artifact of the West European context.

5.4 | Causality

It is difficult to know for certain why the different family systems were adopted in the first case. Thismay be a problem for our study if the factors that explain their adoption coincide with other factors


that also may explain the quality of government. We have tackled this problem by controlling for fac-tors that have been argued to affect institutional quality in previous research. Doing so does not alterour results. However, even if other controls would make our findings spurious, it is our convictionthat they will help future research isolate the real long-term causes of institutional quality, as theypoint to factors that are correlated with (and probably part of the same parcel) as family traits.

6 | CONCLUSIONS

Existing research has made great strides toward understanding the historically embedded relationshipbetween family, culture, and institutions. Using subnational data for Western Europe, the findings inthis article introduce an important addendum to this strand of literature: Historically rooted normsand rules regarding intergenerational inheritance are of great importance for present-day institutionalquality. Areas where family wealth and property were given to a single heir are today better governedand less corrupt than are areas where several children would share. The proposed mechanisms inher-ent to this argument, inegalitarian inheritance spurring stronger historical property rights, alongsidegreater social capital, are generally supported, although there is only mixed evidence for the linkbetween property rights and inegalitarian inheritance. However, the positive effect of inegalitarianinheritance practices seems to hinge on the historical availability of the corporation. In regions wherethe corporation got a late start, due to Muslim domination, the effect of inegalitarian inheritance prac-tices is actually negative. Three mechanisms stand out as important for understanding why the corpo-ration was better than its Islamic counterpart, the waqf, at incorporating disinherited children insociety (Kuran, 2016). First, the corporation offered greater managerial flexibility and could thusadapt better to changing conditions and needs than the waqf, which was supposed to follow its

TABLE 4 Interactions between inegalitarian inheritance and Muslim heritage

(1) (2) (3)DV: Institutional quality DV: Political constraints DV: Generalized trust

Inegalitarian inheritance 0.68 01.18 0.06

[0.17]*** [0.32]*** [0.02]***

(0.23)** (0.99) (0.02)***

Muslim 00.38 00.48 00.00

[0.23] [0.43] [0.03]

(0.30) (0.58) (0.02)

Inegalitarian * Muslim −1.32 −0.82 −0.19

[0.54]** [0.99] [0.07]**

(0.38)*** (0.88) (0.02)***

Nuclear family −0.05 00.22 −0.01

[0.13] [0.25] [0.02]

(0.19) (0.16) (0.01)

Constant 00.11 −0.79 0.47***

[0.16] [0.30] [0.02]

(0.13) (0.70) (0.01)

Observations 130 99 130

R2 (within) 0.20 0.16 0.15



founder's will in perpetuity. Second, the corporation often involved large segments of society in itsdecision-making process, with shareholding companies and artisan guilds being two examples.Waqfs were, in contrast, only run by the caretaker, and sometimes overseen by a judge, and weretherefore less able to respond to the society's needs. Third, corporations could cooperate with eachother, for example, to constrain rulers. Waqfs were in contrast forbidden to cooperate with each otherif not explicitly allowed to do so by the founder. Together, these factors can explain why the corpora-tion was better suited than the waqf to exploit the creative potential inegalitarian inheritance practicesoffered society.

Our results have broad implications. First, they provide further evidence to the debate on thelong-term effects of inegalitarian inheritance practices, showing that short-term inequality actuallycan contribute to good outcomes in the long run (Chu, 1991). It was the disinheritance of childrenthat spurred social capital formation and possibly even instilled respect for property rights by forcingdisinherited children to seek employment away from home.

Second, the results add to a growing literature on how important inheritance systems, rather thanthe strength of family ties and the nuclear family (Alesina & Giuliano, 2010; Greif, 2006a), have beenfor bringing about high-quality institutions. This literature originates in the works of Timur Kuran, whoargues that differences in inheritance practices can explain both why the Western world eventuallyeclipsed the Muslim world economically (Kuran, 2005, 2011) and why Hindus fared better economi-cally than Muslims in late Colonial India (Kuran & Singh, 2013). Our study shows that similar cleav-ages in inheritance practices coincide with a rift in institutional quality and social trust within WesternEurope, broadening both the geographical scope and the theoretical focus of the argument.

Third, our findings decidedly shift the focus from high politics—that is, kings, parliaments, and greatreforms—to the customs and norms of ordinary people. If we are correct, it is slow-moving and arduousprocesses among ordinary people that over long periods of time have helped produce the institutions wehave today, processes that may be difficult to emulate in a short time frame. However, the laggards arenot starting from square one. The corporation has entered virtually every legal system. The conditionsfor progress are thus much better today than they were in the period our study focuses on.

Finally, several important questions remain unanswered. The origins of inheritance practices inEurope remain murky. It is also difficult to disentangle their relationship with the corporation. Was theadoption of inegalitarian inheritance practices facilitated by the existence of the corporation in the firstplace? Or can the success of the corporation in Western history be explained by the fact that it helpedthe society to handle the needs of disinherited children? Only by answering such questions can weunderstand the specific mechanisms that bind past to present. It remains for future studies to do so.

7 | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Sebastian Lundmark.

ENDNOTES

1Institutional quality is an expansive and nebulous concept and is often used interchangeably with terms such as quality of gov-ernment and good governance (Charron, Dijkstra, & Lapuente, 2015; Ketterer & Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). The terms usuallyalso encompass the same subindicators, like property rights protection, rule of law, impartiality, absence of corruption, andgovernment effectiveness. While space does not allow for a full terminological discussion, we define it in a manner that hasbeen attributed to both institutional quality and quality of government, in terms of the public sector providing public goods in a


fair and effective manner. This definition, as most others, owes much to North's (1990) definition of institutions as the societal“rules of the game,” which as noted by Rodríguez-Pose (2013) skews somewhat toward a focus on formal institutions.2The creators of the index motivate the choice of functions on the grounds of being both important in themselves and generallyunder regional purview (Charron et al., 2015, p. 321). As noted earlier, quality (or effectiveness), corruption, and impartiality arethree of the most commonly used characteristics used to capture institutional quality and its conceptual twins. Furthermore, theycollectively do a fairly good job of capturing our preferred notion of public goods being provided in a fair and effective manner.In sum, we posit that this is the most appropriate available measure of institutional quality on a European regional level.3Todd's (1990; see also Duranton et al., 2009) family classification was recoded along the egalitarian/inegalitarian cleavage toproduce the variable inegalitarian. Regions with egalitarian nuclear and communitarian family types were coded 0 and absolutenuclear and stem families were coded 1. The intermediate category, incomplete stem family—characterized by conflictingmedieval rules and norms relating to inheritance, where the formal rules prescribed egalitarianism, while in practice inheritancewas often awarded to a sole heir—was coded 1, as the customs and traditions prescribed inegalitarianism. If a region includessubregions with different inheritance practices, the total value for these regions was weighted according to the present popula-tion of the subregions. For the German regions in the former German Democratic Republic, along with Algarve and Corsica,Todd (1985, map 2) was used to fill in outstanding data on family type.4Todd (1985) notes that the absolute nuclear family was more flexible regarding division of inheritance than the stem family.Nevertheless, as Todd notes, “[w]hile not systematically inegalitarian like the stem family, this type is not egalitarian” (p. 9).As a result, both stem and absolute nuclear families accept division between brothers, a crucial factor for both spurring propertyrights and social capital.5The variable nuclear family was constructed similarly to inegalitarian (see note 3), with egalitarian and absolute nuclear fam-ily types coded as 1, and stem, incomplete stem, and communitarian coded as 0.6ESS data are missing for five regions. These regions' values have been imputed accordingly: Valle d'Aosta receives the scorefor neighboring Piemonte; Molise the mean score for Abruzzo, Lazio, Campania, and Apulia; Bolzano the mean score forTrento and Tirol (Austria); Nord-Pais de Calais the score for Picardy; and Åland the score for Itä-Suomi.7Replication data are available at https://pol.gu.se/english/about-us/staff?languageId=100001&userId=xkokan

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