Protestant Road To Bureaucracy.

The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy
Valentı́n Figueroa∗
Department of Political Science
Stanford University
November 24, 2021
Abstract
After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted administrative re-
forms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success
of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate patrimonial
officeholders and recruit human capital into the state administration. I show with
historical microdata that the extent to which these administrative conditions were
met at the time of reforms depended on whether states experienced a Protestant
Reformation in the sixteenth century. A distinctive Protestant developmental path
hastened the demise of the patrimonial state, and by 1789 the only major territorial
states that were bureaucratic were Protestant.
JEL: N43, H1.

Key Words: Bureaucracy, early modern Europe, Protestant Reformation, political history
∗
Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. E-mail: valfig@stanford.edu. I am grateful to Avi Acharya,
Antonella Bandiera, Alejandro Bonvecchi, Davide Cantoni, Gary Cox, Ernesto Dal Bó, Germán Feierherd,
Vicky Fouka, Marcelo Leiras, Toby Nowacki, Jared Rubin, Marcos Salgado, Andres Schipani, Theo Serlin,
Cesar Vargas, and seminar participants at the ASREC Graduate Student Conference, Pontificia Universi-
dad Católica de Chile, and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella for valuable feedback. Research for this paper
was financed by The Europe Center at Stanford University, and by the Institute for Research in the Social
Sciences (IRiSS).
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3979922

1 Introduction
The role of the “professional bureaucrat” is a modern invention. In late medieval Europe,
most government functions were delegated to amateur private contractors. Tax collectors
autonomously raised taxes for private profit and paid monarchs a lump sum payment; and
judges administered justice independently in exchange for fees that the litigants paid. Many
of these offices became inheritable in the early modern period. I study the development,
over the long run, of the administrative conditions that permitted the extinction of this
private system of governance.
The transition from patrimonialism to professional bureaucracy was one of the deepest
political transformations of modern history. As such, scholars at least since Max Weber
(1978) have attempted to explain it. The dominant explanation emphasizes war. Intense
international competition after the military revolution (c. 1550-1650) provided rulers moti-
vations to build bureaucracies in order to boost tax collection to finance increasingly costly
military technology (e.g., Hintze 1975, Tilly 1992). Yet motivations alone were insufficient
to produce bureaucracies. Rulers across Europe attempted administrative reforms in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but only a handful succeeded. Some states, like Eng-
land and Prussia, began to replace patrimonial officials with professional bureaucrats by
the early eighteenth century. Others, like France and Castile, could only do so only after
the nineteenth century.
The success of bureaucratic reforms, as Thomas Ertman (1997) has shown, required
a set of basic permissive conditions. For state bureaucracies to be viable, rulers needed:
(i) a high supply of human capital that could be recruited into the state administration
for a wage, and (ii) the ability to compensate or defeat, during administrative reforms,
entrenched officeholders with a vested interest in the survival of patrimonialism. We know
little about the reasons why these conditions emerged earlier in some places than others.
This article fills this void.

I show that the extent to which these administrative conditions were met by the seven-
teenth century depended on whether states experienced a Protestant Reformation in the
early sixteenth century. The Reformation involved a package of policies that included the
confiscation of the Catholic Church’s assets. Through these policies, the Reformation acted
as a catalyst that magnified tiny initial differences across polities and accelerated the bifur-
cation of Catholic and Protestant polities along two different political development paths.
The Protestant path promoted the blossoming of administrative conditions that facilitated
bureaucratization more than a century later. I empirically document this slow-moving
historical process. I shall refer to it as “the Protestant road to bureaucracy.”
1.1 Outline of the argument
Figure 1 summarizes the theory. The Protestant Reformation involved ecclesiastical con-
fiscations that affected state development paths through two slow-moving mechanisms.
Figure (1) The Protestant road to bureaucracy: the argument
First, Protestant rulers used the windfall from ecclesiastical confiscations to partly fi-
nance the religious wars that soon erupted. Their Catholic adversaries, in contrast, financed
those wars with a traditional mix of tactics that included selling offices. Thus, war fueled
proprietary officeholding in Catholic realms but that link was broken in Protestant lands.

Selling assets and offices were not mutually exclusive financial strategies. Selling offices
was a decision of last resort: it came at the cost of administrative control and generated
inertia. Protestant rulers could refrain from it in the early sixteenth century because they
had access to confiscated resources. Catholic rulers could not use ecclesiastical resources,
and their initial rounds of sales of offices empowered a new class of patrimonial officeholders
who later used their new formal prerogatives to deepen their privileges. In the long-run,
this led to institutionalized venality in Catholic polities and to larger stocks of proprietary
officeholders who resisted bureaucratic reforms.
Second, the declining power of the Catholic Church and the growing job opportuni-
ties that stemmed from the development of commercialized economies profoundly affected
elites’ educational decisions. Anticipating where the jobs were, Protestant elites had their
university-educated children take secular, rather than theological, degrees. In the long-run,
this shifted the supply curve of “useful” human capital upwards, making it less expensive
to recruit talented bureaucrats for a wage.
These long-term effects of the Reformation helped to make it administratively feasible
for Protestant rulers to modernize the state administration and establish bureaucracies
under the stress of war, more than 100 years after the Reformation, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. By 1650, success in warfare had become a function of outspending
one’s opponent (Gennaioli and Voth 2015), so rulers across Europe attempted to modernize
their state administrations (Ertman 1997). Even the most patrimonial states in Europe
attempted administrative reforms. In France, ministers like Richelieu, Mazarin, and Col-
bert; and in Spain, Philip II and minister Olivares had reforming phases (Brewer 1989, p.
16). In Catholic states reforms failed because of the resistance of venal officeholders and
the difficulties involved in recruiting salaried bureaucrats (Ertman 1997).
During this phase of state-building, Protestant rulers had an administrative advantage.
Centuries after the Reformation, and as a consequence of a slow-moving historical process,

they had a smaller stock of officeholders to pension off, and they had access to a larger
supply of elite labor with appropriate training that could be recruited into the bureaucracy
for a wage.
1.2 Empirical approach
The empirical pattern that motivates this paper is simple: if one looks at the 13 major
territorial states in western Christendom in 1789, only Protestant polities had begun to
establish bureaucratic administrations. As it is hard to make conclusive inferences based
on this small sample, this paper provides evidence for the operation of two mechanisms
linking the Protestant Reformation to the development of administrative conditions that
facilitated state reform:
• Mechanism 1: The Reformation decreased the propensity to sell offices.
• Mechanism 2: The Reformation led to the reallocation of human capital from

religious to secular skills.
To provide evidence for the operation of these mechanisms, I will focus mostly on Eng-
land —a Protestant state that developed one of the most bureaucratic state administrations
in Europe after the late seventeenth century (Brewer 1988, Kiser and Kane 2001).
Between 1536 and 1540, in the context of the English Reformation, Henry VIII confis-
cated all the monastic houses in his kingdom. This process was known as the ‘Dissolution
of the Monasteries’ (see, e.g., Heldring et al. 2021). The annual revenue of the assets
transferred from religious to secular elites represented between 3.4 and 5.2 percent of the
English gross domestic product (Broadberry et al. 2015, p. 201). For reference, consider
that the Marshall Plan after World War II represented about 2 percent of U.S. gross do-
mestic product. The confiscations greatly increased the revenue available to the crown. In
1500, its total yearly revenue (which came mostly from royal lands) was £110 thousand

(Grummitt and Lassalmonie 2015, p. 121). The assets that secular elites seized from the
Church increased royal annual income between 118 and 180 percent. My empirical analysis
studies the consequences of these confiscations.
1.3 Overview of the data and findings
I offer various pieces of empirical evidence in favor of a distinctive “Protestant road to

bureaucracy.” I begin by establishing a simple stylized fact: Analyzing a sample of the 13
major European states in 1789, only Protestants had begun to build bureaucratic admin-
istrations, and all Catholic states were patrimonial. I also provide continuous measures of
different aspects of bureaucratization, based on expert surveys, and show that Protestant
states in 1789 relied to a greater extent on salaried workers and had more meritocratic re-
cruitment. The association between Protestantism and early bureaucracy is robust to the
inclusion of controls (like the intensity of early geopolitical competition and urbanization)
and to the exclusion of each individual polity from the sample. These basic patterns are the
starting point for the main focus of this article: an in-depth exploration of two processes
unleashed by the Protestant Reformation that produced conditions that previous research
has pointed to as favorable to bureaucratization: a high supply of human capital and a
small stock of venal officeholders who stood to lose from administrative reforms.
In the first step of my analysis, I document how the Reformation decreased the sales
of public offices in the early modern period. I begin by showing that, in a cross-section
of European polities between 1500 and 1789, the sale of offices as a financial instrument
was only widespread in Catholic polities. To my knowledge, this is the first paper to sys-
tematically document this pattern. Then I examine the association between participation
in warfare and the sale of offices in a Catholic polity in the early modern period: France.
I show that proprietary office-holding increased significantly upon the start of new wars.
This pattern contrasts with England’s, where the sale of offices never became widespread

because rulers could finance wars with ecclesiastical confiscations. Using annual data, I
show that between 1485 and 1640 rulers received more revenue from the sale of assets when
England was fighting wars.
In the second part of the analysis, I document how the Reformation led to the reallo-
cation of human capital from religious to secular skills. Using individual-level data on all
the graduates from Oxford from 1500 to 1714, I show that after the English Reformation
students became more prone to pursuing careers in law (as barristers) relative to careers
in the clergy. This change was more pronounced in counties more exposed to ecclesiastical
confiscations. I complement these findings with subnational level evidence on the founda-
tion of endowed grammar schools. In a difference-in-differences setting, I show that the
confiscation of a monastery led to the creation of more educational establishments.
Taken together, my findings show that the Protestant Reformation produced adminis-
trative conditions that were conducive to bureaucratization: a high supply of useful human
capital that could be recruited into the state administration for a wage, and a small stock
of proprietary officeholders with a vested interest in the survival of patrimonialism.
1.4 Related literature
This article speaks to two literatures. First, to the literature on state development. Second,
to the literature on the effects of the Protestant Reformation.
1.4.1 War, administrative conditions, and bureaucratization
Why modern states developed in Europe after the Middle Ages is a classical question in the
social sciences. A burgeoning literature has tackled several constitutive dimensions of this
historical process, like the definition of explicit international borders (e.g., Acharya and
Lee 2018), the stabilization of dynasties (e.g., Blaydes and Chaney 2013, Kokkonen and
Sundell 2014), the regulation of the private lives of subjects (e.g., Zhang and Lee 2020), and

the centralization of the fiscal system (e.g., Dincecco 2009, Johnson and Koyama 2014a)
and the legal system (e.g., Johnson and Koyama 2014b). I explore another dimension of
the rise of modern states: the establishment of professional proto-bureaucracies.
The rise of bureaucracy has elicited a lot of interest from scholars at least since the sem-
inal work of Max Weber (1978), who noted the historical significance of bureaucratization.
The most influential accounts of bureaucratization highlight warfare as the main causal
factor behind administrative modernization. These theories argue that rulers established
bureaucracies as a way to boost tax collection in a context of increasingly costly wars (e.g.,
Hintze 1975, Tilly 1975). These theories can explain broad patterns of aggregate change but
cannot account for heterogeneity in the timing of transitions towards bureaucracy across
states. The increasing cost of war affected all states to a similar extent, yet England and
Prussia started to develop professional bureaucracies in the seventeenth century and France
and Castile did not. Indeed, Catholic states became even more patrimonial as a result of
international warfare: they financed military mobilization with the sale of public offices.
Another explanation also accepts the importance of war but underscores the administra-
tive feasibility of bureaucracy. Thomas Ertman (1997) argues that for states to transition
into bureaucracy, they needed to be able to compensate or defeat entrenched administra-
tors and to recruit competent bureaucrats. In this sense, my account builds on Ertman’s,
yet he argues that these conditions were met in places that were latecomers to geopolitical
competition (i.e., that became entangled in warfare after 1450). When states became in-
volved in warfare before 1450, human capital to staff administrations was scarce, so in order
to recruit officials rulers had to give them proprietary claims over their offices, unleashing
a path dependent process of administrative appropriation. An explanation based on the
timing of military competition, however, fails to explain a few deviant cases: England was
exposed to war before 1450 and developed a bureaucracy, and Poland and Hungary were
latecomers to military competition but remained patrimonial. I take issue with Ertman’s

account of the development of the ideal conditions for bureaucratic reforms. I argue that
the two administrative conditions conducive to bureaucratization developed earlier in some
places than others not because of the timing of geopolitical competition but because of two
long term consequences of the Protestant Reformation: the erosion of the war-venality link
and the secularization of human capital investments.
As I will show later, a “Protestant explanation” for early bureaucracy is superior to
all other explanations in terms of its predictive power: it correctly classifies the types of
administrations of all 13 major territorial states in Europe in 1789. While others have also
stressed the importance of Protestantism for the development of bureaucracies (e.g., Gorski
2003), these previous works focus on doctrinal or ideological causal mechanisms. My theory,
in contrast, underscores the material consequences of the confiscations of the Catholic
Church, and offers two novel mechanisms linking Protestantism and the establishment of
bureaucracies.
1.4.2 The effects of the Reformation
Another related literature is that on the consequences of the Protestant Reformation. In a

seminal essay, Weber (1905) argued that ascetic Protestant beliefs embodied an ethic that
was more suitable for capitalism. Since then, the impact of the Reformation on culture,
politics, and the economy has been studied by scholars across the social sciences (see, e.g.,
Swatos and Kaelber 2005, and Becker et al. 2016 for reviews).
The economic effects of Protestantism have been widely studied (see, e.g., Becker and
Woessman 2009, Cantoni 2015, Dittmar and Meisenzahl 2019, Heldring et al. 2021). The
political consequences of the Reformation, however, have seldom been examined systemat-
ically —i.e. using quantitative data and modern tools of statistical inference (Becker et al.
2016, p. 18). A couple of exceptions are Rubin (2017), which convincingly argues that the
Reformation dramatically altered the political economy of European kingdoms; and Can-

toni et al. (2018), which documents a reallocation of skills and assets from the religious to
the secular spheres in the Holy Roman Empire. This paper contributes to this burgeoning
literature in two ways. First, by offering new empirical evidence. Second, by outlining how
two consequences of the Reformation affected the plausibility of administrative reform in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
2 The Protestant road to bureaucracy
The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform that broke the unity of European Chris-
tianity and ended the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly (Cameron 2006, p. 145; see
Becker et al. 2016).1 It is conventionally dated between 1517 and 1648. Rulers who adopted
the Reformation removed the Catholic Church from positions of political power (see, e.g.,
Cantoni 2015), reduced their reliance on religious elites as a source of political legitimation
(see, e.g., Rubin 2017), and expropriated physical infrastructure under the Church’s control
(see, e.g., Cantoni et al. 2018).
In the territories of the Holy Roman Empire that adopted Protestantism, such as the
Duchy of Saxony after 1539, virtually all monasteries were seized and sold to secular lords
between 1517 and 1600 (see, e.g., Cantoni et al. 2018, pp. 2059 and 2090). In Denmark
and Norway, the Crown confiscated the estates of the Catholic bishops and a large frac-
tion of the property of cathedral chapters, as well as the income from tithes that bishops
previously collected (Schwarz Lausten 1995). In Sweden and Finland, rulers confiscated
church property, the nobility was allowed to recover all the property it had donated to the
Catholic Church, and ecclesiastical elites lost their legal privileges (Kouri 1995). In Eng-
land, Henry VIII expropriated monastic properties and ecclesiastical assets between 1536
and 1541 (see, e.g., Savine [1909] 1974). These confiscations altered the balance of power
between the clergy and the state in favor of the latter.
1
For recent accounts of the spread of the Reformation, see Rubin (2014) and Becker et al. (2020).
10

Expropriations also happened, but were less common and much more limited, in Catholic
states. In Castile, a state that remained Catholic and aligned with Rome, the Habsburg
were authorized by popes to alienate the Church’s property. In the sixteenth century, the
crown converted the towns of military orders into liquid assets and heavily taxed cathedral
chapters (Espinosa 2006). However, these expropriations were authorized by popes, and
Castilian monarchs sold fewer assets than they were authorized to sell (see, e.g., Faya Diaz
1998). Therefore, in places where the Reformation did not take place, the Catholic Church
remained a central political player.
How did the Protestant Reformation affect long-term political development paths? This
section outlines this historical process.
2.1 The Reformation reduced the sale of offices —leading to a
smaller stock officeholders
The sale of offices was a common way for early-modern European monarchs to borrow
money on the security of future fees that office-holders collected (see, e.g., Stasavage 2003,
p. 65-67, Guardado 2018). Selling offices was an easy way of getting cash quickly during war
—when financial needs were pressing (see, e.g., Swart 1949). Catholic polities established
venality soon after the explosion of the wars of religion in the early sixteenth century,
as a way to partially finance these wars. In France, the government created the bureau
des parties casuelles, a branch of the royal government in charge of administering the
creation and sale of all royal offices in 1522 (Potter 2003, p. 127). In Castile, the Crown
institutionalized the sale of offices as a way of raising finance and created a secure secondary
market of state offices in 1543 (Gomez Blanco 2019, p. 154).
The initial sales of offices empowered a class of proprietary officeholders who later used
their new institutional power to deepen their privileges. Venality became self-perpetuating.
As a result of this method of financing war, the total number of proprietary offices in
11

Catholic polities grew with exposure to international competition. The patrimonial office-
holders who were incrementally added to the state administration upon the start of new
wars constituted a powerful vested interest in the survival of patrimonial rule.
While the sale of offices was widespread in Catholic states, Protestant polities succeeded
in breaking the link between warfare and venality. The expropriation of monasteries and
ecclesiastical lands gave Protestant rulers a windfall they could use to partially finance war
in lieu of selling offices. For instance, Lockhart (2007, p. 53) notes that, in the sixteenth
century, “Denmark’s newly active role in European affairs demanded a thoroughgoing of the
state fisc [and] the confiscations of the Catholic properties and incomes after 1536 helped to
offset some of these novel expenditures.” As a result, the growth of state administrations
in Protestant polities was less elastic to war, and patrimonial administrations remained
smaller than in Catholic states.
2.2 The Reformation affected educational investments —favoring
the acquisition of “secular” skills
The Catholic Church’s administrative staff enjoyed power and prestige. When individuals
in Catholic countries had to make choices about investments in education, such as when
they attended universities, they often chose to develop expertise in disciplines that allowed
them to pursue careers in the clergy, like canon law and theology. In sixteenth century
Castile, for example, the typical bishop had middle noble family origins and a university
background in religious fields (Rawlings 2005, p. 458). The same was true in England,
where in the mid-fifteenth century almost all bishops were university graduates; and in
France over 50 percent of university graduates pursued clerical careers (Thompson and
Verger 2015, p. 195). Religious skills were less useful for state administration. Even when
state administrations could absorb jurists with training in canon law, the fact that their
skills were transferable to the religious sector implied that the Church and the state could
12

compete with each other for scarce talent, raising the wages needed to recruit employees.
The Protestant Reformation altered the incentives that highly-educated individuals
faced when making occupational choices. As the power of the Catholic Church eroded and
other economic sectors grew, the relative availability of plum jobs in the “religious sector”
declined significantly in all Protestant states, and the clergy declined as an attractive
career-path for highly trained individuals (Cantoni et al. 2018). A large number of them
were diverted into other disciplines that were suitable for careers in commerce, industry,
and state administration. E.I. Kouri (1995, p. 69) put it bluntly, discussing the case of
Sweden-Finland: “After the introduction of the Reformation, the social composition of
the clergy changed: an ecclesiastical career, which had already become considerably less
attractive to the nobility ... towards the end of the fifteenth century, was no longer to be
seriously considered by members of this class.”
2.3 The changes introduced by the Reformation facilitated ad-
ministrative reforms
The two consequences of the Protestant Reformation outlined above became important
about a century later, as changes in the nature and the scale of warfare during Europe’s
military revolution increasingly made military success a function of outspending one’s op-
ponent (Gennaioli and Voth 2015). The increasing importance of finance made rulers
concerned about staffing administrative offices with competent and obedient employees
that could collect taxes, forecast income, and make inventories in order to fund standing
armies and police forces (see, e.g., Hintze 1975, Tilly 1992, Downing 1992).
In this critical juncture, rulers across Europe set to modernize their administrations.
Catholic and Protestant rulers attempted administrative reforms in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, yet only the latter succeeded. Protestant rulers faced a more favorable
administrative environment than Catholic rulers because the changes brought about by
13

the Reformation produced precisely the conditions that Ertman (1997) underscores as
permissive conditions for bureaucratization. About a century before the military revolution
pushed rulers to modernize state administrations, the Protestant Reformation had set in
motion a long-term process of human capital reallocation away from religious and towards
secular disciplines. As a result, a large mass of university-educated individuals with suitable
skills for state administration was available for recruitment. Furthermore, as Protestant
rulers had used expropriated Church assets to finance wars instead of selling offices, they
had smaller administrations and needed to compensate fewer officials during reforms.
3 Protestantism and early bureaucracy
To empirically document the “Protestant road to bureaucracy,” I start by providing ev-

idence for a cross-sectional association between Protestantism and early bureaucracy. I
focus on the 13 major territorial states of western Christendom in 1789. This allows me
to hold constant as many cultural, economic, and institutional factors as possible. The
states that I examine here are important on their own right —by virtue of their politi-
cal, economic, and demographic weight. They are also central case studies in comparative
historical research on state building.
Table 1 classifies states in terms of their religious denomination and of whether they
had proto-bureaucracies by 1789. As Gorski (2003) has noted, a clear pattern stands out.
All the states that had begun to develop bureaucracies by 1789 had undergone a Protestant
Reformation, and all the states that remained patrimonial were Catholic. We can confirm
statistically what is quite obvious just from looking at the table. Fisher’s exact test for
contingency tables rejects the null hypothesis that religious denomination and the types of
state administration are not associated at the 1-percent significance level (p = 0.001).
A dichotomous classification of state administrations smooths out significant variation
14

Table (1) Territorial states in western Christendom circa 1789
Type of state infrastructure
Successful Protestant Reformation Patrimonial Bureaucratic
France
Hungary
Naples
Papal States
No Poland
Portugal
Savoy
Spain
Tuscany
Britain
Denmark—Norway
Yes
Brandenburg-Prussia
Sweden—Finland
Notes: the type of state infrastructure is available from Ertman (1997) and religion from Gorski
(2003).
within the patrimonial and proto-bureaucratic camps. Thus, I also disaggregate bureau-
cracy into several continuous dimensions and compare Protestant and Catholic states in
terms of each of these dimensions. The Varieties of Democracy project provides data on
four attributes of Weberian bureaucracy constructed using surveys to political historians
(Coppedge et al. 2018). The database includes measures of the extent to which adminis-
trations were impartial, had meritocratic recruitment, were autonomous from rulers, and
recruited salaried employees. The input for the creation of these measures are the following
survey questions to political historians (from Coppedge et al. 2018):
• Impartial administration: “Are public officials rigorous and impartial in the perfor-
mance of their duties?”
• Meritocratic recruitment: “To what extent are appointment decisions in the state
administration based on personal and political connections, as opposed to skills and
merit?”
• Autonomy from rulers: “To what extent are day-to-day decisions made by state
administrators subject to intervention from political elites?”
• Salaried employees: “To what extent are state administrators salaried employees?”
15

After collecting answers on an ordinal scale from experts in the political history of
individual countries, V-Dem transforms the ratings using a Bayesian item response theory
measurement model, making the end result interval-level scores that are on the standard
normal scale (Cornell et al. 2020, p. 2256). Higher values in each measure indicate more
bureaucratic characteristics. I use data from this project available from Cornell et al.
(2020).
Table (2) The state administrations of the major European states in 1789
Country Protestant Impartial Meritocratic Autonomy Salaried Index
Denmark Yes 2.57 1.87 0.88 0.19 1.38
Sweden Yes -0.21 0.33 2.29 0.13 0.64
Germany Yes -2.21 1.63 1.66 1.43 0.63
Britain Yes 0.35 -0.66 1.49 0.17 0.34
Tuscany No 1.03 0.41 1.12 -1.78 0.19
Papal States No -1.02 -0.73 1.16 0.11 -0.12
France No 0.77 -0.19 -0.82 -0.76 -0.25
Spain No 0.58 -1.80 -0.91 0.11 -0.51
Poland No -0.93 -0.93 2.42 -2.68 -0.53
Portugal No 0.03 -2.24 0.07 -1.30 -0.86
Notes: Own elaboration with data from Cornell et al. (2020) for the year 1789. The Index
in the fourth column is a simple average of the four dimensions of bureaucracy.
Table 2 reports the raw data on each of the four dimensions of bureaucracy for 10 of
the 13 state in the sample in 1789, as well as their religious denomination and a simple
aggregate index of bureaucracy. To construct this index, I take the average of the four
dimensions. States are listed in descending order according to their score in the index. Some
historians might disagree about the specific values of some of these cases, but the overall
pattern is quite strong: all the states with the highest values of the index of bureaucracy
are Protestant and all the states with the lowest values of the index of bureaucracy are
Catholic.
16

3.1 Regression analysis
To examine more systematically the differences between Protestant and Catholic states, I
estimate a series of simple linear regressions with OLS. I estimate:
Bureaucracyi = α + β1 Protestanti + i (1)
where Bureaucracyi is one of the indicators of the degree of bureaucratic-ness of the state
administration of country i in 1789, and Protestanti is an indicator that i was Protestant.
In this equation, β1 is the Protestant premium, or, on average, how much more bureaucratic
were Protestant states relative to Catholics.
Table 3 shows the correlations. The results in Columns 1 through 4 indicate that the
public administrations of Protestant states, on average, relied more heavily on salaried
employees, had more meritocratic recruitment, were more autonomous from rulers, and
applied rules in more a impartial manner. However, the difference between Protestant and
Catholic states is only statistically significance with respect to salaried employees, mer-
itocratic recruitment, and autonomy from rulers. In Column 5, the outcome variable is
a simple index of bureaucracy. The Protestant premium is positive and statistically sig-
nificant when using this aggregate index as the outcome variable. Moreover, the R2 of
this specification suggests that variation in Christian denomination alone explains approx-
imately 70 percent of the variation in the index of bureaucracy of the 10 major territorial
states in Europe in 1789.
It is worth noting that the Protestant premium is largest in the two dimensions of
bureaucracy that are most connected to the long-term consequences of the reformation:
salaried employees and meritocratic recruitment. As I will show in the rest of this paper,
the Reformation decreased the sale of offices (thereby permitting salaried state employees)
and increased the supply of secular human capital (facilitating meritocratic recruitment).
17

Table (3) The Protestant premium
Salaried Meritocratic Autonomy Impartial Index

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Protestant 1.530∗∗∗ 1.705∗∗ 1.074∗ 0.051 1.090∗∗∗
(0.551) (0.703) (0.610) (1.020) (0.263)
Constant −1.050∗∗ −0.914∗∗ 0.505 0.077 −0.346∗∗

(0.457) (0.410) (0.541) (0.365) (0.153)
Observations 10 10 10 10 10
R2 0.437 0.436 0.226 0.0004 0.693
Notes: OLS models. Robust standard errors in parentheses. ∗ p<0.1; ∗∗
p<0.05; ∗∗∗
p<0.01.
3.2 Addressing omitted variable bias
Is the association between Protestantism and bureaucracy spurious? I cannot entirely rule
out the threat of omitted variable bias with cross-country regressions and this small sam-
ple. This is the reason why most of this paper will deal with quantitatively documenting
the operation of mechanisms that link the Reformation to the rise of administrative con-
ditions that were suitable for bureaucratization. For now, as a robustness test, I add three
theoretically important control variables to equation (1).
First, I include a variable measuring the number of battles within a state’s borders
between 1000 and 1400CE (per Dincecco and Onorato 2017). This variable captures a
country’s exposure to early geopolitical competition —which according to Ertman (1997)
was a key driver of patrimonialism. Second, I include a measure of urban population (per
Bosker et al. 2013). This variable captures Tilly’s (1992) idea that urbanized nations
were less likely to develop bureaucracies. Finally, I include an indicator of absolutism (per
Ertman 1997). This variable captures Downing’s (1992) notion that absolutism and bureau-
cracy were linked. Table 4 shows that the association between the Protestant Reformation
and early bureaucracy is robust to the inclusion of this set of control variables. However,
18

the Protestant premium is only statistically significant in the models with meritocratic
recruitment and salaried employees as the outcome variable.
Table (4) Regression saturated with controls
Salaried Meritocratic Autonomy Impartial Index

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Protestant 1.962∗∗∗ 2.058∗∗∗ 0.503 0.327 1.212∗∗∗
(0.509) (0.620) (0.443) (1.613) (0.283)
Urban population 0.001∗∗∗ −0.001∗ −0.001∗∗ −0.0002 −0.0003

(0.0003) (0.001) (0.0005) (0.001) (0.0002)
Num. Early battles −0.039∗∗∗ 0.046∗∗ 0.016 0.022 0.011

(0.009) (0.022) (0.018) (0.036) (0.008)
Absolutist 1.552∗∗∗ 0.741 −1.723∗∗∗ 0.606 0.294

(0.486) (0.577) (0.437) (1.307) (0.193)
Constant −2.766∗∗∗ −1.136 2.609∗∗∗ −0.588 −0.470

(0.612) (0.969) (0.532) (1.067) (0.302)
Observations 10 10 10 10 10
R2 0.785 0.666 0.836 0.100 0.789
p<0.05; ∗∗∗
p<0.01.
3.3 Small sample issues
A sample size of N = 10 raises concerns about potential small-sample bias. I address

this issue in two ways. First, I use randomization inference —an exact inference test
that is suitable for small samples. For this, I simulate the 210 possible permutations of the
treatment assignment vector (4 Protestant cases out of 10), estimate the difference in means
and difference in medians between “Protestant” and “Catholic” polities in each permutation
sample, and obtain a p-value by comparing the real differences to the distribution of those
210 simulated differences. If Protestantism and early bureaucracy were not associated, it
19

would be extremely rare to find differences as large as those we observe in the historical
outcomes. Such differences would happen randomly with probability 0.0047 and 0.0142 for
the differences in means and medians, respectively.
Figure (2) Are results driven by a single polity?
No controls All controls
United Kingdom United Kingdom

Tuscany Tuscany
Sweden Sweden
Spain Spain
Portugal Portugal
Poland Poland
Papal States Papal States
Germany Germany
France France
Denmark Denmark
0.0 1.0 2.0 0.0 1.0 2.0
Second, I drop each polity iteratively from the sample and estimate equation (1) as
well as the specification saturated with controls, using the index of bureaucracy as the
outcome variable. I present the coefficients for the Protestant premium in Figure 2. The
figure displays the point estimates (and 95-percent confidence intervals) when the state on
the y-axis is excluded from the sample. The estimates of the Protestant premium display
remarkable stability and retain their precision —suggesting that the results are not driven
by any individual polity.
3.4 Alternative channels linking Protestantism and bureaucracy
We have seen that the Protestant Reformation predicts the type of state administration
that the major European powers had by 1789. The explanation that I put forth in this
20

paper highlights two main mechanisms: (i) the erosion of the war-venality link, and (ii)
the secularization of human capital. These two processes produced, in the long run, the
ideal administrative conditions for states to transition into bureaucracy centuries after the
Reformation. Yet there are alternative mechanisms that could link the Reformation to
bureaucratization. I discuss these alternative mechanisms below.
An obvious mechanism worth noting is that the Reformation eliminated the clergy as
a veto on state power. The church’s size, wealth and hierarchical organization meant that
it could pose a significant constraint on many secular rulers’ actions (e.g., Grzymala-Busse
2020). Indeed, in the middle ages the clergy constituted the first estate and its assent
was necessary to tax ecclesiastical assets. After the Reformation, monarchs became heads
of the church and appeals to Rome were ruled out. Once the ecclesiastical veto player
was removed, resistance to higher taxes and administrative rationalization became weaker.
This mechanism is not inconsistent with my theory, but the available data are insufficient
to test it quantitatively.
Second, Philip Gorski (2003) has argued that the Reformation promoted bureaucrati-
zation because Calvinist doctrine underscored discipline and made people push for well-
ordered and disciplined states. I cannot rule out the importance of religious doctrine, but
the mechanisms that I propose are not inconsistent with Gorski’s. My focus on the impact
of ecclesiastical confiscations, however, can better account for subnational variation that
remains unexplained by theories that emphasize country-level factors like doctrine.
Finally, another corollary of Protestantism that might have been consequential for the
rise of bureaucracies was the strengthening of parliaments. Rubin (2017) convincingly
argues that after the Reformation rulers turned parliaments for legitimacy in lieu of the
Catholic Church (see also Greif and Rubin 2015), and parliaments were often strong ad-
vocates against patrimonialism (e.g., Ertman 1997). Nonetheless, a “parliamentary” ex-
planation for the link between Protestantism and early bureaucracy is inconsistent with
21

the historical record because some Protestant countries were bureaucratic and firmly abso-
lutist (like Denmark and Prussia), and some Catholic countries were patrimonial and had
relatively strong parliaments (like Hungary and Poland).
This is not to say that parliaments were not important for bureaucratization in some
cases. Indeed, there were two distinct political responses to the Reformation, one parlia-
mentary and one absolutist. To understand these divergent political responses, one needs
to understand that royal bureaucracies were feared as tools of absolutism by elites con-
cerned with constitutional balance. A monarch with an independent source of revenue to
fund a standing army could use those forces to overawe domestic opposition (see, e.g., Cox
2020). When Europe was uniformly patrimonial, the crown was constrained because the
assent of proprietary officeholders was practically necessary to raise taxes (e.g., Gonzalez
de Lara et al. 2008). As Protestant states transitioned towards bureaucracy and removed
officeholders as an executive constraint, the crown solved its credibility problem in two
alternative ways. In some cases, like England, elites authorized bureaucracy when parlia-
ments extended their grip on state finance (Cox 2020). In other cases, such as Denmark
and Prussia, intense geopolitical competition in the seventeenth century allowed the crown
to centralize power, knocking the state off the parliamentary path and giving rise to abso-
lutism. My account focuses on the commonalities of the Protestant experience rather than
their different domestic responses.
4 War and venality: a broken link in Protestant lands
The first mechanism that I document linking the Protestant Reformation to the rise of
administrative conditions suitable for bureaucratization is the erosion of the link between
war and the sale of offices.
22

4.1 Venality in the period 1500-1789
The Protestant Reformation inaugurated a period of religious wars, and international pres-
sure pushed rulers across Europe to strengthen state capacity in order to survive (see, e.g.,
Tilly 1975). However, Catholic and Protestant rulers financed warfare in different ways.
Catholic rulers were much more prone to resorting to the sale of offices.
Selling offices was functionally similar to a loan that monarchs raised on the security
of the future income associated with these offices. The practice was first instituted Pope
Boniface IX (1389-1406) during the Great Schism (Gorski 2003, p. 144).
Table (5) Sale of offices as a source of public finance, c.1500-1789

Religion Public venality? Secondary market? Secure property?
France Catholic Widespread Yes Yes
Castile Catholic Widespread Yes Yes
Papal States Catholic Widespread Yes Yes
Naples Catholic Widespread — —
Sicily Catholic Widespread — —
Savoy Catholic Widespread — —
Piedmont Catholic Widespread — —
Portugal Catholic Yes Limited Yes
Bavaria Catholic Yes — —
Duchy of Cleves Catholic Yes — —
County of Mark Catholic Yes — —
Bishopric of Mainz Catholic Yes — —
Austria Catholic Yes — No
Poland Catholic Limited — —
Tuscany Catholic No Limited —
England Protestant Limited No Yes
Dutch Republic Protestant No — —
Württemberg Protestant Yes — No
Prussia Protestant Yes No No
Sweden Protestant Limited — —
Denmark Protestant Limited No No
Palatinate Protestant Yes — No
Baden Protestant No — —
Hessen Protestant No — —
Notes: I coded this information from a number of secondary sources. See Appendix A for the
sources and a more detailed discussion of specific cases.
23

How widespread was the sale of offices? From the Papal States, the practice of selling
offices spread across Europe. No comprehensive work on venality in early modern states
has been attempted since Koenraad W. Swart’s (1949) Sale of Offices in the Seventeenth
Century. Using this volume and a number of secondary sources (listed in Appendix A),
I systematized the available information on the extent to which offices were publicly sold,
the extent to which there was a legal secondary market for offices, and the extent to which
the property claims over venal offices were strong in a cross section of states from c. 1500
to 1789. I display this information in Table 5 and classify polities by religion.
Historians might disagree about the coding of specific cases, but an undeniable pattern
stands out: the sale of offices was much stronger in Catholic than in Protestant states.
Indeed, it was only in Catholic states that this practice became a standard financial in-
strument, practically baked into the sinews of public finance. In Castile, France, and the
Papal States, the sale of offices was centrally managed by rulers, sales were done in public,
there was a healthy secondary market for offices, and the property claims over state offices
was almost as secure as property claims over land.
The difference between Catholic and Protestant polities can be quantified rudimentarily.
If one codes, for each polity, a rough ordinal measure of venality that takes the value of 3
if the sale of offices was widespread, 2 if it existed, 1 if it was limited, and 0 if it did not
exist, then, on average, Catholic polities had a value of 2.26 and Protestant polities a value
of one. Another way of conveying the difference in venality across religious denominations
is that the sale of offices was widespread in 46 percent of the Catholic states (7 out of 15)
in the sample and in none of the Protestant states. These differences are significant at the
5-percent level using simple t-tests and chi-square tests for contingency tables.
Catholic rulers were more prone to selling offices than Protestants. As venality was
practically inexistent in Europe before the modern period, the differences between Catholic
and Protestant states in the period 1500-1789 do not pre-date the Reformation. I argue that
24

what explains this difference is that Protestant rulers could tap into ecclesiastical resources
as a source of revenue in lieu of alienating state offices. To provide empirical support for
this specific mechanism, I show below that at times when Catholic France typically sold
more offices (during war) Protestant England typically sold more assets.
4.2 War and venality in France: secrétaires du roi, 1480-1789
I examine in a time-series how venality responded to war in France, a Catholic polity with
the most venal administration in Europe.2 I use data on the secrétaires du roi in the
chancelleries from 1484 to 1789, provided by Bien (1989, p. 445). These were ennobling
proprietary offices, and secrétaires were in charge of preparing, sealing, and sending all the
documents that emanated from the monarch’s authority (Bien 1989, p. 445). The data
allow me to track long-term changes in the rate of growth of the venal administration. For
this, I also use information on the wars in which France participated from 1480 to 1789,
available from Wright (1942, p. 641-645).
Figure 3 displays the growth rate of the stock of ennobling proprietary offices in the
chancelleries. Positive rates of change indicate creations of new offices, and negative rates
indicate the abolition of existing offices. Red circles indicate years in which France was
involved in wars, and black triangles indicate years of peace. Two patterns are clear from
the plot. First, the episodes of greatest growth of the number of offices occurred during
wars. Second, the largest observed episode of retrenchment occurred in peacetime.
In the years in which France was at war the total number of proprietary offices in the
chancelleries grew on average by 2.1 percent. In contrast, in the years in which France was
not at war, the total number of offices decreased on average by 0.03 percent. What we can
conclude from this results is that, in France, the state typically became more patrimonial,
not more bureaucratic, during wars. In the long-run, the larger stock of venal officeholders
2
For a comprehensive analysis of venality in France, see Doyle (1997).
25

Figure (3) War and venality in France, 1484-1789: the chancelleries
Rate of change of number of offices
France at war
France not at war
1.0
0.5
0.0
−0.5
1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800
Notes: the data on ennobling offices in chancelleries are from Bien (1989, p. 450), and data on
France’s participation in war are from Wright (1942, p. 641-645).
that resulted from frequent exposure to war created a strong vested interest in the survival
of patrimonialism.
4.3 War and ecclesiastical confiscations in England, 1485-1640
In contrast to France, in England the sale of offices never became a standard financial
instrument. Indeed, during Edward IV’s reign, in 1551-1552, a statute against the sale of
offices was enacted (Swart 1949, p. 50). This is puzzling considering the massive military
expenses that England had to finance around the time when France and Castile, for ex-
ample, were institutionalizing the sale of offices (c.1520-1550). How could England sustain
these financial efforts without the widespread sale of offices?
Like other kingdoms that had became Protestant, England was able to boost its military
spending and refrain from systematically selling offices in part because of the property it
seized from the Catholic Church. Military competition was not entirely funded by confisca-
tions. The sale of the crown’s assets represented a small fraction of total revenues. However
26

Figure (4) Sale of assets in England, 1485-1640
England at war
100 150 200 250
Net revenue from sales of assets
England not at war

50
0
1500 1550 1600
Notes: the data on revenue from sale of assets are from O’Brien and Hunt (1993), and data on
England’s participation in war are from Wright (1942, p. 641-645).
small, these confiscations relieved some financial pressure and helped the crown avoid the
systematic sale of offices. The initial avoidance of widespread office-selling was particularly
important because proprietary officeholders often used their institutional power to obtain
further privileges, sedimenting the sale of offices as an established practice.
What is the evidence for the link between war and sale of assets in Protestant states?
Historians often note how confiscated ecclesiastical assets helped Protestant rulers finance
war in the Dutch Republic (Fritschy 2017, p. 128), Denmark (Lockhart 2007, p. 53),
and Sweden (Grell 1995, p. 2). I complement these historical accounts with suggestive
quantitative evidence of this financial practice using O’Brien and Hunt’s (1993) time-series
data on English public finance.
Figure 4 displays the annual revenue from the sale of assets in the period 1485-1640,
distinguishing between years of war and peace. Three patterns in the data are worth noting.
First, there was a structural change in the propensity to obtain funds via the sale of assets
right after the Reformation. A formal statistical test for an unknown structural break in
27

the time series rejects the null hypothesis of no structural break and identifies the year
1537 as the year of the break (a year after the confiscation of the monasteries). The same
test for other sources of finance (indirect and direct taxes) does not identify a structural
break during the Reformation (the breaks are in 1523 and 1609, respectively).
Second, the revenue from the sales of assets was higher during years of war and upon
the start of new wars. In the period 1480-1640, during wars, the crown sold assets worth,
on average, £48.5 thousand. Upon the start of a new war, on average, revenue from the
sale of assets was even higher: £56 thousand. The average peacetime revenue from sale of
assets was £16.9 thousand.
Third, even though revenue in general, obviously, increased during wars, it is worth
noting that the proportion of revenue accrued from the sale of assets also increased during
wars. This proportion was 7.9 percent during war, and 4.3 percent in peacetime, on average.
The general conclusion that can be drawn from the empirical exercises in this section
is that while Catholic states relied on the sale of offices to finance war, Protestant states
could bypass this financial instrument by selling confiscated ecclesiastical assets. Of course,
some may consider that showing that France sold more offices and England more assets
during wars is comparing apples to oranges. One could argue that my analysis should also
show that war and the sale of assets were uncorrelated in France and that war and the sale
of offices were uncorrelated in England. However, such comparisons would require the sale
of assets to be frequent in France and the same for the sale of offices in England, which
was not the case.
5 The Reformation and human capital reallocation
The second mechanism linking the Reformation and early bureaucracy is that ecclesiastical
confiscations promoted the reallocation of human capital from religious to secular skills.
28

5.1 Oxford graduates, 1500-1714
I exploit near-comprehensive individual-level information on Oxford graduates from 1500

to 1714. This prosopographical information is available from Joseph Foster’s Alumni Ox-
onienses, a biographical dictionary.3 For each student, this volume contains a narrative
biography that allowed me to assign 58,337 individuals to a specific year of affiliation with
Oxford and 41,324 to a specific county of origin. Biographies allow me to measure the
students’ occupations upon graduation. I classified students as pursuing careers in law
if their biographies mentioned an Inn of Court (law schools) or the volume Judges and
Barristers; and as pursuing careers in the clergy if their biographies mentioned the Index
Ecclesiasticus or the Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae. Appendix B displays examples of coded
biographies. Using these data, I computed the proportion of students that pursued careers
in law rather than in the clergy, excluding students with unknown occupations.
Figure (5) Oxford graduates, 1500-1714

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
Proportion of secular careers
1550 1600 1650 1700
3
Available online at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/alumni-oxon/1500-1714
29

Figure 5 displays the time-series data. I present both the annual proportions of students
who pursued careers in law rather than in the clergy (the clear blue line, which is noisy),
and the 20-year moving average of this proportion (the solid blue line). The graph shows
that in the early 1500s, about 10 percent of the graduates pursued careers in law. After
the Henrician Reformation, however, students increasingly began to pursue careers in law.
By the late 1500s, more than 40 percent of the graduates pursued careers in law. The
proportion stabilized between about 30 and 50 percent in the period 1600-1714.
Now I turn to exploring subnational heterogeneity. I used the data to compute, for
each of England’s 39 counties, the proportion of Oxford graduates who were originally
from these counties and who pursued careers in law in the pre-Reformation (1500-1536)
and the post-Reformation periods (1536-1714); and relied on the Valor Ecclesiasticus to
measure the total monastic revenue confiscated in each country. I estimate a first-difference
regression of the form:
∆% seculari = α + β1 Log(1 + Monastic Revenuei ) + i (2)
where ∆% seculari represents the difference between the proportion of Oxford graduates
from county i that pursued careers in law (rather than the clergy) after 1536 and the
proportion of graduates from county i that pursued secular careers before 1536, and
Monastic Revenuei is the net yearly income confiscated from religious houses in county
i during the Henrician Reformation. β1 , therefore, can be interpreted as the difference-in-
difference estimate of the confiscations on the occupational choices of Oxford graduates. I
estimated the regression by OLS. The estimated β̂1 is 0.085 and it’s statistically significant
at the 5-percent level (β̂1 = 0.0848; N = 39; p = 0.01).
5.2 Confiscations and new endowed grammar schools, 1480-1640
The reallocation of human capital investments in England should also have increased the
demand for high-quality secondary education. Grammar schools were pre-university educa-
30

tional establishments. The typical educational trajectory of a lawyer began in a grammar
school, continued at Oxford or Cambridge, and ended with legal training in one of the four
Inns of Court in London. Grammar schools were appropriate for people who wanted to
enter the profession and trade. To examine the impact of ecclesiastical confiscations on
the foundation of grammar schools, I exploit sub-national panel data in a difference-in-
differences design.
An advantage of the difference-in-differences design (DD) with sub-national panel data
is that it allows to control for transformations that affected all districts at the same time,
such as the rise of a commercial class after Atlantic discoveries (see, e.g., Acemoglu et al.
2005), or the development of executive constraints (e.g., North and Weingast 1989). A DD
design also controls for fixed district-level traits, such as geographic characteristics like the
fertility of the soil. A threat to inference with DD designs is when outcomes do not display
parallel trends in the treatment and control groups over time. In this case, the parallel
trends assumption would be violated if districts with a monastery were on a different path
than districts without a monastery with respect to the foundation of secondary schools.
Nonetheless, I will show that districts in the control and treatment groups (i.e., with and
without a monastery) displayed similar trends before the Reformation in 1536, and diverged
rapidly after this date.
5.2.1 Data
To examine the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on the establishment of en-
dowed grammar schools, one needs data on the location of monasteries and on the estab-
lishment of secondary schools. I discuss the sources of these data in this subsection.
Monasteries. Savine (1909, p. 270-288) catalogued the 562 monasteries surveyed in

the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535. I digitized and geo-referenced the data and assigned
monasteries to their corresponding 1831 hundred —a subnational administrative division,
31

one level below the county. There are 968 hundreds in total, of which 348 had at least one
monastery in 1535 and 620 did not. The fact that only about a third of the hundreds had a
monastery provides the cross-sectional variation for my empirical analysis. Hundreds with
a monastery are the “treatment group” and hundreds without a monastery are the “control
group.” Figure 6 displays the distribution of monastic houses in 1535.
Figure (6) Distribution of monasteries in 1535
Notes: Monasteries in the Valor Ecclesiasticus reported by Savine (1909, p. 270-288).
Grammar schools. I relied on Carlisle (1818) to construct the variable Schoolsit , which
measures the total number of endowed grammar schools in existence in hundred i in year
t.4 I focus on the period 1480-1640.
4
Sometimes this source did not specify the exact date of foundation of the grammar schools. In these
cases, I proceeded as follows. When the text dated the will of the individual through which the school was
endowed, I used the year when the will was written. When the histories mentioned that the school was
founded during the reign of a monarch, I used the year in the middle of that monarch’s reign.
32

5.2.2 Graphical representation of results
Figure 7 displays the main patterns in the data. The solid line represents the average
number of grammar schools in hundreds with a monastery in 1535 each year from 1480 to
1640. The dashed line represents that same value for hundreds without a monastery. The
red vertical line indicates the year of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is clear from
the plot that before ecclesiastical confiscations, districts with and without a monastery had
similar trends regarding their number of grammar schools. After the Reformation, however,
the number of secondary schools started to grow considerably faster in districts where a
monastery was confiscated.
Figure (7) Number of grammar schools in hundreds with and without a monastery
5.2.3 Econometric specification and results
Let’s now turn to the econometric specification. I first document the baseline DD estimate
of the effect of the dissolution of the monasteries on the foundation of grammar schools.
33

The most simple conceivable specification equating the growth of grammar schools with
the dissolution of the monasteries is the following:
Schoolsit = β1 Monasteryi x Post-1536t + θt + λi + it (3)
where Schoolsit is the number of grammar schools in existence in hundred i in year t,

Monasteryi is a dummy indicating that hundred i had a monastery in 1535, Post-1536 is a
dummy indicating the post-Reformation period, and θt and λi are year and hundred fixed
effects, respectively. Thus, β1 is the difference-in-differences estimate of the effect of the
Reformation on the number of grammar schools at the subnational level. I estimate the
equation with OLS and cluster the standard errors by hundred.
Table (6) The English Reformation and the rise of grammar schools
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Schools Schools Schools Schools
Monastery X Post 1536 0.1502*** 0.0949*** 0.0522*** 0.0345*

(0.0273) (0.0258) (0.0183) (0.0188)
Monastery X Post 1536 X Time trend 0.0019*** 0.0012***
(0.0004) (0.0004)
Observations 155,848 155,848 155,848 155,848

R-squared 0.1474 0.2435 0.1542 0.2463
Number of hundreds 968 968 968 968
Hundred FE Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year FE Yes Yes Yes Yes
County trends No Yes No Yes
Notes: Models were estimated by OLS. Robust standard errors clustered at the hundred level in
parentheses. ∗p<0.1, ∗∗p<0.05, ∗ ∗ ∗p<0.01.
Table 6 presents the results. In the first specification, the estimate of β1 is positive and
statistically significant. In hundreds with a monastery, the average number of grammar
schools increased by 0.15 after the English Reformation relative to the same growth in
hundreds without a monastery. In the second specification, I control for county-specific
time-trends and the results remain substantively unchanged, although the size of β̂1 de-
creases to 0.09.
34

An alternative setup is to model the effect of the dissolution of the monasteries on the
number of grammar schools as a linear function of time. I use the following specification:
Schoolsit = β1 Monasteryi x Post-1536t

(4)
+ β2 Monasteryi x Post-1536t x Trendt + θt + λi + it
where Trendt is a continuous variable that takes the value of 0 at the time of the Ref-
ormation, and counts the number of years since the reformation in the period 1535-1640.
As before, I estimate this regression using OLS and cluster standard errors by hundred. I
present these results in Table 4. The positive values of β2 indicate that the impact of the
dissolution of the monasteries on the foundation of grammar schools was increasing in time.
Interpreting Model 3, the average yearly growth of grammar schools in hundreds with a
monastery was 0.0019 schools per year faster than that same growth in hundreds without
a monastery.
The results remain substantively unchanged when using a continuous independent vari-
able log(1 + Monastic incomei ) instead of an indicator for the presence of a monastery
in 1535. Also, the results are not driven by spatial autocorrelation —the coefficients are
statistically significant with Conley standard errors using distance cutoffs of 50, 100, and
200 kilometers.
The substantive conclusion that can be drawn from this empirical analysis is that the
dissolution of the monasteries at the local level increased the number of pre-university elite
educational establishments.
5.3 Relation to previous research
The results I presented in this section are closely related to the conclusions of two recent
economic history papers, so it’s worth spelling out how my results relate to theirs. The
first of these papers is Heldring et al.’s (2021) examination of the economic effects of the
35

dissolution of the monasteries in England. My empirical design is similar to theirs, but I
focus on a different outcome variable: the reallocation of human capital from religious to
secular skills.
The second paper is Cantoni et al. (2018), which argues and shows that the Protestant
Reformation spurred a process of secularization in the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). This
process included the secularization of human capital, which the paper documents with
information on the fields of study and occupations of university graduates from across the
Empire in the period 1250-1550. My results expand theirs in two main ways. First, I
examine another case, England, and a longer time period after the Reformation, showing
that the impact on patterns of human capital accumulation persisted at least until 1714.
Second, and more importantly, Cantoni et al. (2018) compare Catholic and Protestant
territories in the HRE to make inferences. In the context of the HRE, Protestantism was a
bundle of different treatments, including economic, doctrinal, and cultural transformations.
In this article, I isolate the impact of a specific dimension of the Reformation —ecclesiastical
confiscations— by examining sub-national variation in the extent of confiscations within a
Protestant country: England. This allows me to gauge the consequences of confiscations
independently of national-level doctrinal or cultural change.
6 Conclusion
The rise of professional bureaucracies was one of the greatest political transformations of
modern history. Rulers across Europe attempted administrative reforms to establish this
type of state administration under the stress of war in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies (Hintze 1975, Tilly 1992, Ertman 1997). Yet only a handful of European states suc-
ceeded in making this transition. To successfully abolish patrimonialism, Thomas Ertman
(1997) has shown, rulers needed two permissive conditions. First, they had to overcome
36

resistance from patrimonial officeholders who stood to lose from administrative reforms.
Second, they required access to a large pool of human capital that could be recruited into
the bureaucracy for a wage. In this paper, I documented the Protestant roots of these
administrative conditions.
Using several datasets, I empirically documented a long-term political development
path dubbed “the Protestant road to bureaucracy.” The Reformation involved the confis-
cation of a massive amount of wealth from the Catholic Church. These confiscations set
in motion two consequential processes. First, Protestant rulers could rely on the resource
windfall from these confiscations to finance warfare instead of resorting to a common fi-
nancial instrument in early modern Europe: the sale of office. Therefore, patrimonial
administrations in Protestant places remained tiny. In Catholic states, in contrast, rulers
did not have access to confiscated ecclesiastical assets, so they sold offices to finance war.
In the long-run, strong syndicates of officeholders who needed to be compensated during
administrative reforms resulted in a “patrimonial trap” from which Catholic states found
it hard to escape.
A second consequence of the Protestant Reformation was that employment in the clergy
became a less prestigious occupational choice, and a less effective path for upward social
mobility. Instead of developing religion-specific skills, thus, the forward-looking intellectual
elite began to invest in secular skills, such as law and the arts, which were more useful for
state administration. In the long term, Protestant kingdoms developed a larger stock of
useful human capital that rulers could recruit into state bureaucracies for a wage.
By documenting these processes, this paper speaks to the literature on state develop-
ment and the rise of state bureaucracies; and also speaks to a growing literature on the
political effects of the Protestant Reformation (e.g., Rubin 2017, Cantoni et al. 2018).
37

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Appendix A: venality across European polities
Sources
France (Swart 1949, p. 5-18, Doyle 1997; Gorski 2003, p. 144-146); Spain (Swart 1949, p.
19-44, Gomez-Blanco 2021; Gorski 2003, p. 144-146; Bonney 1991, p. 340); Naples (Gorski
2003, p. 144-146); Papal States (Gorski 2003, p. 144-146; Partner 1980); Sicily, Piedmont
(Swart 1949, p. 82-88); Savoy (Swart 1949, p. 82-88; Gorski 2003, p. 144-146); Tuscany
(Litchfield 1986, p. 157; Gorski 2003, p. 144-146); Portugal (Olival 2011, p. 345-347);
Bavaria, Ducky of Cleves, County of Mark, Bishopric of Mainz, Austria, Württemberg,
Palatinate, Baden, Hessen, and Sweden (Swart 1949, p. 89-96); Poland (Swart 1949, p.
89-96; Brown 1982, p. 64); Denmark (Jensen 2014, p. 7); Prussia (Swart 1949, p. 89-98;
Gorski 2003, p. 144-146); Dutch Republic (Swart 1949, p. 70-78; Fritschy 2017). The
classification of German territorial states as Catholic or Protestant follows Cantoni (2012).
Details
In France, the poster-child of venality, there were no legal constraints on the creation and
sales of royal offices, and the practice was a major source of royal revenue. In order to
manage the creation and sale of offices, the government created a special administrative
department, the bureau des parties casuelles, in 1522 (Potter 2003, p. 127). By 1789, about
two of three percent of the adult male population in France were office-holders (Doyle 1984,
p. 833), with offices worth above 870 million livres (Doyle 1984, p. 832).5
In Castile, the crown sold offices as a ready source of revenue (Bonney 1991, p. 340) and
created a secure secondary market of state offices in 1543 in order to make the acquisition
5
A survey of 1778 to put a capital value on offices estimated a total value of 584 million livres, but this
is probably an underestimate because it was based on declarations on the office-holders themselves for tax
purposes, so Doyle (1984) claims that this value should be raised by at least a half, and this would still be
a conservative estimate.
45

of offices in the primary market a tempting investment (Gomez-Blanco 2021). The data are
more sparse in Castile than in France, but estimates suggest that in the eighteenth century
about 23,000 proprietary offices at the municipal level changed hands —either via sale or
inheritance (Hernandez 2007, p. 94). Between 1558 and 1575 alone, the Castilian crown
sold alcaldı́as de fortalezas, regidurias, and escribanı́as worth over 970 thousand ducats
(Estrella 2004, p. 19-20). Between 1621 and 1640, 18 percent of all Castilian revenues
came from the sale of offices (Bonney 1991, p. 340).
In the Papal States, popes increased the number of saleable offices between the end of
the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, and popes allowed officials to
resign their offices and sell them, as long as they were in good health (Swart 1949, p. 85).
By 1590, the papacy devoted a sixth of its receipts to pay offices, which were worth a grand
total of four million gold scudi (Partner 1980, p. 24).
The sale of offices existed in Naples and Sicily since at least the thirteenth century,
but Habsburg princes developed these practices into a systematic policy in the sixteenth
century, just like they had done in Castile (Swart 1949, p. 87). By 1535, “all offices, except
the judicial and financial ones, were saleable” in Naples (Swart 1949, p. 88). In Savoy and
Piedmont, the sale of offices was introduced during the French occupation in 1630 (Swart
1949, p. 88), and when financial needs had to be met during the War of the Spanish
Succession, the duke of Savoy put all municipal offices for sale in 1704 (Swart 1949, p. 88).
In the Kingdom of Portugal, the crown did not engage in the widespread public sale of
offices, but sold specific offices when money was necessary; and the secondary market for
offices was subject to royal authorization (Olival 2011, p. 345-347).
The information on the extent of sales of offices in Catholic polities of the Holy Roman
Empire is more sparse. It is clear that the practice was more firmly established and dif-
ficult to eliminate in the (more Catholic) southern and western lands than in the (more
Protestant) east (Swart 1949, p. 94). Regarding specific territories, selling offices was an
46

established practice in Bavaria, the Duchy of Cleves, the County of Mark, the Bishopric
of Mainz, and in Austria in the latter half of the seventeenth century (Swart 1949, p.
89-96). These sales were not, however, a central part of public finance like they were in
Latin Christendom. Other two Catholic kingdoms in which the sale of offices did not make
much leeway were Tuscany and Poland. In Tuscany, there was no formal market for offices
(Litchfield 1986, p. 157), and in Poland the sale of offices was limited (Swart 1949, p.
89-96), more common in the capital and very rare in the provinces (Brown 1982, p. 64).
Even though it certainly existed in Protestant lands, the sale of offices was never a
central component of government finance as it was in Castile or France, and it was, in
general, rare. It was never instituted in the territories of Baden and Hessen (Swart 1949,
p. 93). In Württemberg, Prussia, and the Palatinate, venality took place and was very
common, but office-holders did not have secure tenure, and could be discharged without
dispensation (Swart 1949, p. 94), just as in Denmark (Jensen 2014, p. 7). There is evidence
that some offices were sold in Sweden, but the practice was undoubtedly not systematic
(Swart 1949, p. 95)
In England, the Protestant state that was most similar to Castile and France in 1500,
the crown never engaged in the systematic sale of public offices in the central government
(Swart 1949, p. 66). Henry VII, instigated by his minister Edmund Dudley, also sold offices
around the time when Louis XII of France was beginning to exploit this source of revenue
(Swart 1949, p. 48). From 1505 to 1508, the “sale of offices” (along with the “purchase of
the king’s favor” or the “sale of charters”) appeared in Dudley’s account books summarizing
the money collected by him (Dietz 1921, p. 40). Yet, whereas in France the sale of offices
rose exponentially after this period, in England it didn’t —at least at the central level.
This is not to say that no offices were sold in England. John Brewer has described ve-
nality as the “white noise” of English administration (Brewer 1989, p. 14). The aristocracy
did very often demand gifts or payments in exchange of patronage appointments, and in
47

county government “sheriffs sold subordinate offices of bailiffs and jailers although this was
forbidden by law” (Swart 1949, p. 63). As I will argue below, the crown did not lean on
venality as strongly as France and Castile because it could fund its wars, in part, with the
assets it confiscated from the Catholic Church during the Reformation.
In summary, the sale of offices was a common way of obtaining finance in the sixteenth
century. Even though the practice was not restricted to Catholic places, it was much more
common for these states to engage in the systematic sale of offices than for Protestant
states to do so.
48

Appendix B: Example of automatic coding of Oxford
students
Figure (8) Coding occupational choices
(a) Anthony Addison, clergyman, 1674.
(b) Humphrey Adderley, lawyer, 1599.

Source: Joseph Foster (1891), Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford,
1500–1714, Oxford and London: Parkey and Co.
49

Appendix C: Instrumental variables
I use an instrument for Protestantism —the distance to Wittenberg, the city from which
Protestantism spread (see Becker and Woessmann 2009). For this, I compute the distance
from the capital city of each polity in my sample to Wittenberg. Table X presents the
results. The first column shows the first stage regression, and indicates that distance
to Wittenberg is a strong significant predictor of Protestantism. Columns 2-6 show the
2SLS regressions with the index of bureaucracy in 1789 as the dependent variable and
with different combinations of control variables. The coefficient for Protestantism is large,
positive, and statistically significant across specifications.
Table (7) Distance to Wittenberg as an instrument

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Protestant Index Index Index Index Index
Protestant 1.5653*** 1.5131*** 1.5564*** 1.7146*** 1.5878***

(0.3508) (0.4014) (0.3648) (0.5516) (0.5687)
Urban population -0.0001 -0.0003
(0.0001) (0.0002)
Early battles -0.0017 0.0127
(0.0069) (0.0081)
Absolutist 0.5700 0.4348
(0.3475) (0.2948)
Dist. Wittenberg -0.0007***
(0.0002)
Observations 10 10 10 10 10 10
R-squared 0.3241 0.5613 0.6134 0.5690 0.6313 0.7184
Method OLS 2SLS 2SLS 2SLS 2SLS 2SLS
p<0.05; ∗∗∗
p<0.01.
50

Protestant Road To Bureaucracy.

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The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy

JEL: N43, H1.

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1.1 Outline of the argument

Figure (1) The Protestant road to bureaucracy: the argument

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1.2 Empirical approach

• Mechanism 1: The Reformation decreased the propensity to sell offices.

• Mechanism 2: The Reformation led to the reallocation of human capital from

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1.3 Overview of the data and findings

I offer various pieces of empirical evidence in favor of a distinctive “Protestant road to

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1.4 Related literature

1.4.1 War, administrative conditions, and bureaucratization

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1.4.2 The effects of the Reformation

Another related literature is that on the consequences of the Protestant Reformation. In a

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2 The Protestant road to bureaucracy

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2.1 The Reformation reduced the sale of offices —leading to a

smaller stock officeholders

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2.2 The Reformation affected educational investments —favoring

the acquisition of “secular” skills

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2.3 The changes introduced by the Reformation facilitated ad-

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3 Protestantism and early bureaucracy

To empirically document the “Protestant road to bureaucracy,” I start by providing ev-

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Bureaucracyi = α + β1 Protestanti + i (1)

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Salaried Meritocratic Autonomy Impartial Index

Constant −1.050∗∗ −0.914∗∗ 0.505 0.077 −0.346∗∗

3.2 Addressing omitted variable bias

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Table (4) Regression saturated with controls

Salaried Meritocratic Autonomy Impartial Index

Urban population 0.001∗∗∗ −0.001∗ −0.001∗∗ −0.0002 −0.0003

Num. Early battles −0.039∗∗∗ 0.046∗∗ 0.016 0.022 0.011

Absolutist 1.552∗∗∗ 0.741 −1.723∗∗∗ 0.606 0.294

Constant −2.766∗∗∗ −1.136 2.609∗∗∗ −0.588 −0.470

3.3 Small sample issues

A sample size of N = 10 raises concerns about potential small-sample bias. I address

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Figure (2) Are results driven by a single polity?

No controls All controls

United Kingdom United Kingdom

0.0 1.0 2.0 0.0 1.0 2.0

3.4 Alternative channels linking Protestantism and bureaucracy

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4 War and venality: a broken link in Protestant lands

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Table (5) Sale of offices as a source of public finance, c.1500-1789

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Bureaucracyi = α + β1 Protestanti + i (1)

Schoolsit = β1 Monasteryi x Post-1536t + θt + λi + it (3)

Monastery X Post 1536 0.1502* 0.0949* 0.0522*** 0.0345*

Protestant 1.5653* 1.5131* 1.5564* 1.7146* 1.5878***