Social scientists have long been interested in how religious beliefs and practices impact and are impacted by socio-political and economic processes. Most recently, scholarly attention has focused on the interplay between religiosity and local actors, events, and institutions. Until now, measures of religiosity have relied heavily on self-reports in surveys, but these cannot always be safely collected and tend to be costly. Even where available, survey-based measures may be too obtrusive and are rarely representative of sub-national units. Here, I propose an inexpensive method that uses satellite imagery to unobtrusively estimate religiosity across small geographic units. I hypothesize that night-lights are affected by the behavior of fasting Muslims during Ramadan, especially in places where daytime activities are otherwise unchanged (i.e., where there is no “day-night inversion”). I explore and confirm the validity of this measurement strategy in the Turkish case, using a series of high-quality surveys and electoral results, representing 973 administrative districts. I conclude with a discussion of the external validity of this method and an overview of the ethical concerns raised by the use of remote sensing to estimate religiosity, in the Muslim world and elsewhere.
Before the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region was cited for its low levels of political mobilization, but recent events call for a more systematic study of “protest potential” in MENA and the broader Muslim world. Combining surveys from 141 countries, this chapter identifies a significant participation gap in Muslim-plurality countries: individuals living there are less likely to have participated in politics and are also less likely to self-report being willing to do so, a difference that holds across all demographic categories. After confirming the validity of retrospective and prospective self-reports using a survey of participants in Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests, the chapter explores the role of religion in the Muslim world’s participation gap: while Islam, as a doctrine, does not inhibit activism, certain forms of religiosity do undermine participation. In particular, private beliefs and practices limit protest potential in the Muslim world, while collective religious engagement bolsters it. The latter, the chapter argues, supports activism by helping address the collective action problem underlying mass politics.
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