Religious Leaders' Compliance with State Authority: Experimental Evidence from COVID-19 in Pakistan.

This article reports on a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Pakistan that tested whether one-on-one, interactive telephone engagement with local religious leaders could increase their compliance with government COVID-19 regulations, specifically encouraging congregants to wear masks during prayers. The intervention, delivered by a non-governmental research organization, led to a 25 percent increase in religious leaders instructing congregants to wear masks, with effects driven primarily by leaders who already had correct baseline knowledge about COVID-19 transmission, indicating persuasion rather than information updating as the key mechanism. Adding explicit religious framing to the messaging did not enhance the treatment's effectiveness. The study highlights the potential of low-cost, personalized communication with informal community leaders to improve public-health compliance in low-trust, low-capacity state contexts.