The Relationship Between Gender Equality and Democracy: A Comparison of Arab Versus Non-Arab Muslim Societies

Abstract

Inglehart and Norris argue that the core clash between the Islamic world and the West is over issues concerning gender equality rather than democracy. However, a comparison between Arab and non-Arab Muslim societies is essential before drawing this conclusion. Here, we compared nations from each society and found significant differences in attitudes toward gender equality, democratic governance and religious identities. We analyzed models predicting support for democracy including views toward gender equality in each set of countries. In non-Arab Muslim countries, there were higher levels of support for women's rights, and those who supported gender equality were significantly more likely to support democracy.The reverse was true in the Arab Muslim countries. We argue that for a complete and unbiased form of democracy to emerge in the Arab Middle East, a rule of law that would protect gender equality, minority rights and citizen inclusion would need to be instituted. KEY WORDS democratization / gender equality / Muslim world 1151 Sociology

Religion and Gender Equality Worldwide: A Country-Level Analysis

“…Macro forces influence religious beliefs and practices, gender beliefs and practices, and other attitudes and behaviors in important ways (Adamczyk and Hayes 2012;Adamczyk and Pitt 2009;Charles 2011;Gerhards et al 2009;Rizzo et al 2007;Stavrova et al 2013). State-level research in the United States has shown that the more religious fundamentalism in a state, the more conservative the individual gender attitudes of people who live in that state, even apart from the individual's own religiosity (Moore and Vanneman 2003).…”

Investigating preferences for patriarchal values among Muslim university students in southern Thailand

“…Concurrent with these findings, however, other empirical studies have found that although Muslims strongly support democratic political values and institutions, they maintain patriarchal social values (Alexander and Welzel 2011;Norris and Inglehart 2002;Rizzo et al 2007). Norris and Inglehart used World Values Survey items to compare support for political and social values in Islamic majority countries against western/non-Muslim majority nations.…”

“…These three questions have previously been used and validated as a scale to measure support for patriarchy among Muslim populations by Alexander and Welzel (2011). Both Rizzo et al (2007) and Asadullah and Chaudhury (2010) have also employed variations on these questions to measure support for patriarchy among Muslim populations. The three WVS questions on gender equality had different response scales, and were thus recoded into a uniform scale for consistency (0-1.0), using the same method employed by Alexander and Welzel (2011).…”

“…Finally, we wished to compare our sample against Muslimmajority Arab nations. We employed the same approach that Rizzo and colleagues used towards identifying this group, which was selecting Wave 6 participants that were members of the League of Arab Nations (Rizzo et al 2007). This included an aggregate of respondents from the country samples for Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia and Yemen (n = 3292).…”

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