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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

This challenges the conception of path dependence as a fixed feature of historical processes. Persistence in our framework is conditional on the continued reproduction of specific practices, and the right kind of crisis can render even centuries-old legacies inoperative within years. 23/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

This asymmetry is consistent with our theoretical argument. The crisis reorganised the operational practices of medical professionals more directly than those of patients, and the demand side is the specific behavioural domain in which Ottoman-era norms of solicitation were reproduced. 22/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

We distinguish the supply side of corruption (patients offering bribes) from the demand side (professionals soliciting). In 2021, Ottoman exposure predicts both with coefficients near 0.12. By 2024, the demand-side effect has decreased to statistical insignificance while the supply side remains. 21/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Because the Patient Feedback Mechanism is opt-in, we cross-check the result against the European Quality of Government Index, a representative survey fielded in 2021 and 2024 with items asking whether respondents had been asked for, or had offered, informal payments for medical services. 20/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

The interaction term is negative and significant across specifications, with the relative effect ranging between 0.64 and 0.69. The Ottoman effect on healthcare bribery retains roughly two-thirds of its pre-pandemic magnitude after February 2020, exactly the pattern our framework predicts. 19/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

We test the crisis hypothesis directly through an interaction between Ottoman exposure and a post-February-2020 indicator. A negative coefficient would indicate that the Ottoman effect diminished once the crisis began, separating crisis-induced attenuation from the slower secular trend. 18/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

We identify four mechanisms through which the pandemic disrupted the legacy. These are heightened moral obligation among medical professionals, increased public scrutiny, international assistance with stronger transparency requirements, and emergent national solidarity around healthcare. 17/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

The question remaining is whether the effect attenuates substantially when a crisis directly reorganises the reproduction mechanism. COVID-19 arrived in Romania in February 2020 and shaped precisely the provider-patient interaction through which Ottoman norms had been sustained. 16/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

2SLS estimation capturing the strategic determinants of Ottoman occupation length, namely distance to Istanbul, distance to Vienna, wheat-cultivation suitability, and the density of early-modern trade routes, recovers slightly larger coefficients than OLS, consistent with mild attenuation bias. 15/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Spatial-econometric specifications address the Kelly critique that spatial dependence in residuals can inflate significance levels in persistence studies. The Ottoman coefficient remains significant across all spatial models we estimate. 14/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Selection-on-observables panel models with extensive geographic controls and Conley HAC standard errors recover a positive, significant Ottoman effect across five specifications, with Cinelli-Hazlett sensitivity bounds indicating the estimate survives moderate levels of unobserved confounding. 13/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Identification raises the standard concern that Ottoman selection into territories was non-random, with the same factors determining occupation length potentially correlating with present-day corruption through unobserved channels. We address this through triangulation across many strategies. 12/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Our outcome variable is monthly county-level bribery reports drawn from the Romanian Ministry of Health's Patient Feedback Mechanism, an opt-in anonymous survey administered to hospital patients, and our treatment is the share of years each county spent under Ottoman rule. 11/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Healthcare is where the legacy remains most visible today, because provision involves repeated low-oversight transactions that closely mirror the conditions under which informal payments first became normalised in the citizen-state interface. The maps capture this spatial co-occurrence. 10/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Wallachia and Moldavia operated as Ottoman vassal states from the early 16th century, under a regime of frequent official rotation and opaque legal procedure that made informal payments the standard interface between citizens and the state. 9/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

We test this on the Ottoman institutional legacy of corruption in Romanian healthcare, with COVID-19 as the candidate crisis. This is a typical case as the legacy is well-documented, and the pandemic struck precisely the domain in which it is reproduced, namely provider-patient interaction. 8/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Two predictions follow. In the absence of disruptive crises, legacy effects should decline gradually as the original juncture recedes and prevailing conditions move further from those that produced it. When a crisis strikes the reproduction mechanism, the decline should be abrupt and pronounced. 7/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Crises produce these abrupt shifts, but only when they impact precisely the behaviours through which the legacy is reproduced. If a crisis is generically "severe", but not precisely disrupting the causes underpinning the legacy, nothing will happen. 6/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Decay therefore depends on alignment between reproductive practices and present-day conditions. The relevant question becomes whether the incentive structure under which the practices originally emerged remains operative. When that structure shifts abruptly, the legacy becomes unstable. 5/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Our argument turns on a basic mechanical claim about how legacies arise in the first place. Critical junctures install practices that subsequently get enacted across generations, and the legacy continues to operate only insofar as those practices keep being reproduced in everyday interaction. 4/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Where decay is acknowledged, the implicit assumption is that it operates mostly across generations through slow secular processes of modernisation and convergence. We argue that this gradualist picture conceals a faster channel through which deeply rooted legacies can collapse within months. 3/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Across cases ranging from the slave trade to imperial rule, persistence findings consistently show that institutional shocks reshape culture in ways outlasting the institutions themselves. The termination of those legacies has been left largely outside main theories. 2/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

The persistence literature treats historical legacies as something close to a stylized fact. My new paper with amazing @letitiaroman.bsky.social challenges this view, theorising conditions under which legacies break and testing our framework on Ottoman corruption in Romanian healthcare. 1/

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Can a Catholic institution produce a Protestant-style development outcome? Yes, if the comparison group is Eastern Orthodoxy. My new paper in Studies in Comparative International Development uses an 18th-century Habsburg natural experiment in Transylvania to show exactly that. 📜🧵⬇️

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

What this means for the debate: 🏛️ The premium attributed to Protestantism seemingly doesn't require Protestantism. It requires a religious institution that invests in lay education and normalizes commercial activity. The Greek-Catholic case is a Catholic institution producing exactly that. 18/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

After partialling out everything running through Habsburg governance, a direct Greek-Catholic effect of 0.09 log-points on GDP survives. Firm density, medium employers, and patent activity all remain significant. The Church added something the imperial administration alone did not provide. 17/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Theoretically, the hardest alternative story to rule out is the Habsburg institutional legacy itself. The Empire brought cadastres, courts, and compulsory schooling to Transylvania simultaneously, and those reforms also had documented positive effects on long-run development. 16/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The effect is not confined to income. 💡 Parish presence predicts ~72 additional firms per 10,000 inhabitants, more medium-to-large employers, and substantially higher patent applications. This pattern is, therefore, consistent with a human capital channel, not a narrow fiscal privilege. 14/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Localities with a Greek-Catholic parish have ~8.3% higher GDP per capita today, roughly €553 per person at the mean. Notably, the IV estimates are consistently larger than OLS, telling us that, likely, the Church prioritized underserved communities rather than prosperous ones. 13/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Distance to Alba Iulia is uncorrelated with Ottoman trade routes, wheat suitability, land use, and time under Ottoman rule. It is, however, strongly correlated with parish presence in the first stage, with F-statistics well above conventional thresholds. 12/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

To identify a causal effect, I exploit a historical quirk. The first Greek-Catholic bishop established his seat at St. Michael's Cathedral in Alba Iulia in 1698, a choice driven by ecclesiastical considerations, not economic ones. Parishes then diffused outward from there. 11/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The raw correlations are striking: localities with a historical parish show higher GDP per capita, more firms, and more patents today. But as we know, correlation is not causation. The Church may have strategically placed parishes in prosperous communities, biasing OLS estimates. 📊 10/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

To test whether this 18th-century investment left a lasting economic imprint, I digitized all 1,211 Greek-Catholic parishes from the Habsburg period and matched them to 3,181 present-day localities. 📍 9/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

By the early 19th century, nearly the entire professional and intellectual class among Transylvanian Romanians had passed through Greek-Catholic institutions. The Church produced the Transylvanian School, which published the first Romanian grammar and argued for political emancipation. 📚 8/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The Greek-Catholic Church used its new capacity immediately. 📜 Bishop Inocențiu Micu-Klein founded the first institution of higher learning for ethnic Romanians in Transylvania in 1738. The Church built schools, printing presses, and sent clergy to study in Rome and Vienna. 7/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

This created the Greek-Catholic Church: Catholic in institutional structure, Orthodox in ritual. For ordinary Transylvanian Romanians, Sunday looked almost identical to before. What changed completely was the institutional environment behind the church. 6/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The Habsburgs seized the opportunity. Between 1698-1700, they brokered a union between Orthodox Romanian clergy and Rome. The clergy accepted papal authority and the main Catholic dogmas. In return, they kept the Eastern liturgy and were promised legal equality with Latin-rite clergy. 5/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

For this, I turn my attention to the case of Transylvania in the late 17th century. After the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), the region came under Habsburg rule. The ethnic Romanian population was largely Orthodox, marginalized since 1438, and the Orthodox Church had no legal recognition. 4/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

This omission has two consequences. First, we cannot make general claims about Christianity and development without understanding Orthodoxy's role. Second, if Catholicism had strong developmental effects relative to Orthodoxy, conclusions about Protestantism need to be revisited. 3/18

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The large literature on Protestantism and long-run development is almost entirely built on Western European data, comparing Protestant vs. Catholic regions. In Eastern Europe, the relevant divide was Catholicism vs. Eastern Orthodoxy. That comparison barely exists in the empirical record. 2/18

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Reposted by Vlad Surdea-Hernea

Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

1/18 🚨 Why do some far-right candidates succeed by openly praising fascist movements? In my (very new) working paper, I look at Romania’s 2024 presidential election, where Călin Georgescu won the first round. I argue that historical "consensual mobilization" creates persistent local memories. 🗳️👇

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

18/18 You can read the full working paper here (Appendix to come very soon): www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/c8hwa...

dropbox.com

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

17/18 These (preliminary) findings suggest we need to rethink how authoritarian legacies work. It is not just the violence that leaves a mark. By providing public goods, extremist movements can build a consensual legacy that lies in wait, ready to be weaponized by the right political entrepreneur.

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

16/18 But was this legacy always active, and did all far-right candidates benefit from it? Using the 2000 election, I show Georgescu unlocked a unique effect. His specific neo-legionary framing activated dormant sympathies that previous nationalists like Vadim Tudor failed to fully tap.

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

15/18 The key question, that we sometimes forget to ask in legacy studies, is then how did this memory survive for 80 years? I find three local carriers/mechanisms: Orthodox churches, nationalist NGOs, and street names. Places that hosted camps have significantly more of these "physical anchors".

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

14/18 Finally, extensive checks confirm the robustness of the main findings. The results hold when dropping any single spatial grid cell or trimming outliers. A placebo test using distance to 1936 universities shows no relationship, ruling out broad developmental confounders.

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Vlad Surdea-Hernea @vladsurdea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

13/18 But could unobservable factors explain this? Unlikely. Selection on unobservables would need to be 3x stronger than observables to nullify the result. I also control for key rival explanations, including interwar economic development and agrarian party strength, without altering the findings.

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