Envy and the Islamic Revival: Experimental Evidence from Tunisia

The Islamic revival defined as the call for a resurgence of Islamic culture by opposition to Western culture and an increase in participation in political Islam, has become a widespread phenomenon in the Muslim world since the 1970s. It is often discussed in the literature as being motivated by psychological factors but with little empirical evidence. In this paper, I test whether envy, defined as a feeling of grievance caused by someone else’s possessions and/or qualities, is causing the Islamic revival. While testing the effect of envy on the Islamic revival is particularly challenging as envy is endogenous to a person’s social state, personal characteristics, and preferences, I exogenously trigger the feeling of envy by a 2 by 2 design experiment conducted in Tunisia. I ran a dictator game with 600 nationally representative Tunisians to test whether participants exposed to envy, which I capture by the interaction between a priming video triggering envy and a low stake, increases participants donation share to a religious charity affiliated with the Tunisian Islamic party, Ennahdha, which represents the Islamic revival. The effect is particularly strong among participants who declare themselves as highly religious. I also test for the external validity of my experimental results and find consistent patterns.