The plethora of pathways leading to family formation decisions has made the causal assessment of the influence of politics and religion on marriage and fertility difficult. The authors exploit the unique opportunity offered by the emergence of a new political party in Turkey, and the electoral features of the country's majoritarian system, to estimate the effect of politics and religion on marriage and fertility. The AK Parti (Justice and Development Party), with an explicitly Islamist platform, won Turkish elections in 2002, taking both a pro-natalist and pro-family stance, with increasing welfare expenditures and an explicit neoliberal agenda on macroeconomic issues. The authors analyze the results of the 2004 local elections using a regression discontinuity design and show that fertility and marriage rates have been significantly higher in districts where the AK Parti won. They argue that increased local welfare provision is the main explanatory mechanism, also discussing other alternative and complementary mechanisms.Marriage and fertility are crucial ingredients of social reproduction. Not surprisingly, therefore, they have long occupied a central role in political discourse and have at times become the direct aim of political action through 1 This article benefited from comments at the
Abstract:There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernisation should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using Structural Equation Modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countries, and one from Belgium where Muslims are a minority. We find that averagely religious women conform to the classical theories' predictions. But among highly religious women the modernising forces -education, occupation and higher income, urban living, and contacts with non-Muslims -increase veiling.We conjecture that for highly religious women modernising factors raise the risk and temptation in women's environments that imperil their reputation for modesty: veiling would then be a strategic response, a form either of commitment to prevent the breach of religious norms or of signalling women's piety to their communities. His latest book, with Steffen Hertog, is Engineers of Jihad. The curious connection between violent extremism and education (Princeton UP 2016). 1The various head-covers and dresses worn by Muslim women are collectively referred to as veiling. The names and styles differ across the Islamic world, but everywhere there is a range of veiling types of varying degree of strictness. 1Veiling is generally taken, by the public and by social scientists alike, as a sign of religiosity. Yet, much anecdotal evidence indicates that from the late 20th century onward veiling spread chiefly among the highly educated, young, urban, middle-class women (El Guindi, 1981; Hoodfar, 1991). If true, these accounts would pose a challenging puzzle as to why veiling should be increasing precisely among the women who are more exposed to such "modernising" forces. But, to our knowledge, there is no large-scale empirical study of veiling that corroborates or disconfirms these accounts.In this paper we investigate whether veiling is indeed more widespread among such highly educated, urban, middle-class women than the average Muslim women. In doing so, we test a number of theories, some of which explain why veiling, under certain conditions, could increase as the exposure to modernising forces increases. One such theory proposes that women decide to veil strategically, either with the intent to manage their impulses or to communicate their piousness to their communities, and that veiling would be a response to the "temptations" posed by social circumstances. We test this and other theories with an innovative approach, applying Structural Equation Modelling to three large scale datasets, one from Turkey, one from Belgium, where Muslims are a minority, and one covering 25 Muslim countries. We believe that this is the first systematic test of the theories of veiling.Veiling is not just an interesting phenomenon for social scientists, but the subject of extensive public contro...
The paper provides a micro-behavioral model and an experimental design to understand the effect of heterogeneity in social identities on cooperation while accounting for endogenous sorting.Social identity is induced exogenously using the minimal group paradigm. The experiment manipulates sorting with three treatments: having subjects interact with both in-and outgroup members, giving them the choice to interact either with ingroup or outgroup members, and isolating the groups from the outset. Cooperation is measured by the Prisoner's Dilemma Games at the dyadic-level and by Public Goods Games at the tetradic-level. The results show that heterogeneity hampers between-group cooperation at the dyadic-level. In addition, endogenous sorting mitigates this negative effect of heterogeneity on cooperation. Heterogeneity hampers cooperation at the tetradic-level most substantially if there is a commonly known negative history between groups.In the near future, the developed regions of the world will become much more heterogeneous ethnically and culturally, not only due to factors such as wars and conflicts that force emigration from developing countries but also due to the need in the developed world to attract more foreign labor (UK Office for National Statistics 2014). This increase in heterogeneity with respect to social identities may bring many challenges, including but not restricted to urban integration, interethnic conflict, and threats to social cohesion and social capital (Putnam 2001;Putnam 2007).Understanding the social consequences of heterogeneity is, thus, one of the most important questions in sociology.
Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey's Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly-or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is a more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is higher in AKP provinces not only because of a generic aim to conform to the stricter mores fostered by the victorious party. We find that those who veil, particularly those in AKP provinces who are not pious, are more politically active than those who do not veil. This may be an indication that veiling could partly be a strategic response to policies, which favour those who are or appear pious. Our study suggests that observable religious practices may have their independent dynamics driven by the pursuit of instrumental goals. Our results also suggest that parties with a religious ideology have an advantage over their secular counterparts in solving the clientelistic information problem, for they can rely on religious symbols for screening and signalling.
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