A growing body of scholarship on the political and economic subordination of women in the Muslim world has argued that widespread patriarchal attitudes toward women's roles in public life can be ameliorated by offering progressive reinterpretations of Islamic scriptures. In this article, we explore this hypothesis with a large-scale survey experiment conducted among adult Egyptians in late 2013. In the study, a subset of respondents were exposed to an argument in favor of women's political equality that was grounded in the Qur'ān, Islam's holiest text. We found that this group was significantly more willing to express approval of female political leadership than those exposed to a non-religious argument in favor of women's eligibility for political leadership. A further analysis of conditional treatment effects suggests that the religious justification for female political leadership was more likely to elicit agreement among less educated and less pious respondents, and when delivered by women and targeted at men. Our findings suggest that Islamic discourse, so often used to justify the political exclusion of women, can also be used to help empower them.
The Arab Spring startled all Arab autocrats but toppled few of them. We find there were no structural preconditions for popular uprisings, but two variables conditioned whether domestic opposition would succeed. First, oil wealth gave rulers the resources to preempt or repress dissent. Second, a precedent of hereditary succession signaled the loyalty of the coercive apparatus to the ruler. Consequently, mass revolts deposed incumbents in only the three non-oil rich, non-hereditary regimes of Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. Where oil rents or hereditary rule prevailed, regimes violently suppressed peaceful protests (Bahrain, Syria) and only lost power through foreign-imposed regime change (Libya).
The academic study of politics seems endlessly beset by debates about method. We hear of qualitative scholars versus quantitative scholars; of institutionalists versus students of political culture; of rational choice theorists versus everyone else. At the core of all these debates is a single unifying concern: should political scientists view themselves primarily as scientists, developing ever more sophisticated tools and studying only those phenomena to which such tools may fruitfully be applied? Or should we instead try to illuminate the large, complicated, untidy problems thrown up in the world, even if the chance of offering definitive explanations is low? Is there necessarily a tension between these two endeavors? Are some domains of political inquiry more amenable to the building up of reliable, scientific knowledge than others, and if so, how should we deploy our efforts? In this collection of essays, some of the world's most prominent students of politics offer original discussions of these pressing questions, eschewing narrow methodological diatribes to explore what political science is and how political scientists should aspire to do their work. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics is essential reading for anyone who cares about advancing rigorous understanding of the most important political problems and choices of our time. It is the first in a series of projected volumes growing out of the
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