![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
When does religion promote anti-democratic attitudes in the Middle East? A sizeable sub-literature assesses attitudes towards democracy among Muslims in the region, but less attention has been given to the attitudes of minority religious group members. Using data from original survey experiments conducted in Lebanon in 2014 and 2018, we test the effects of religious and political primes on attitudes towards democracy among different sectarian groups in Lebanon, with a particular focus on the attitudes of Lebanese Christians. We find that when presented with primes that frame democracy in majoritarian terms, support for democracy among Christians in the treatment group is dramatically lower than Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in the treatment group, and substantially lower than levels of support among Christians in the control group. For Christians, informing respondents of the potentially majoritarian features of democracy highlights the threats that democracy may pose to their relatively small, and likely shrinking, religious group. We argue that this reflects a posture of defensive minoritarianism, in which minority groups instrumentally adopt particular positions in order to maintain institutionalised protections and/or political dominance. These findings shed light on the enduring importance of religious identity in Lebanon in the context of immense social and political change.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. ‘Culturalist’ accounts have also been subject to considerable criticism (Anderson Citation1995; Browers Citation2006; Lust Citation2011).
2. See: https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/FreedomintheWorld2018COMPLETEBOOK_0.pdf
3. The Syrian Civil War has had enormous effects on Lebanon, of course, but mass mobilisation did not occur as it did in several other Arab countries, and the governing apparatus remained relatively intact (Wählisch and Felschand Citation2016).
4. Source: Author’s survey, 2018.
5. Indeed, virtually all Christian parties and leaders emphasise the need for ‘Christian unity’ as a means of protecting the community’s interests (Corstange Citation2017, 65–67).
6. See Chandra (Citation2012), among others.
7. Source: Author’s survey, 2014.
8. See Corstange (Citation2012) for a discussion of important distinctions between ‘religious’ and ‘sectarian’ outlooks.
9. An explanation of the origins of sectarianism in Lebanon is beyond the scope of this piece; see Makdisi (Citation2000) for a discussion of the political-legal foundations of Lebanese sectarianism.
10. See Salloukh et al. (Citation2015, chapter 6) for a detailed discussion of the effects of Lebanon’s electoral rules on the construction of sectarianism.
11. See Maktabi (Citation1999) for an extended discussion of the role of census-taking in maintaining Maronite dominance.
12. Though official numbers are impossible to render due to a lack of census data, the Christian population in Lebanon is thought to be declining relative to Muslim populations due to higher rates of emigration since the civil war and lower rates of birth among Christians as compared to Muslims.
13. See Cammett (Citation2011) for a discussion of sectarian differences in socioeconomic status and access to welfare benefits.
14. Importantly, Christian experience with the regime in Lebanon does not follow the model of most other religious minorities in the Middle East, who find themselves facing the choice of whether to align with an autocratic regime (Tadros Citation2017). Rather, Lebanese Christians have an incentive to favour the status quo which, while undemocratic, is different from the forms of staunch authoritarianism present in countries like Egypt and Syria, where Christians have navigated complicated relationships with autocrats.
15. The interests outlined here are similar to those of other relatively privileged minority groups in the region, who often have incentives to oppose democracy instrumentally (Farha and Mousa Citation2015).
16. The status quo itself is, in many ways, self-perpetuating: the gridlock caused by the sectarian system prevents virtually any substantial policy reform; thus, much of the Lebanese political arena is driven by clientelistic exchange rather than policy debate (Corstange Citation2017).
17. See Hoffman (Citation2019) for a discussion of these dynamics.
18. It is worth noting that in Lebanon, religious and political leaders are not always easily distinguished (as in the case of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, for example). However, in the Maronite community, religious leadership is centralised under the Patriarchate, the current patriarch being Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, while political leadership is split among a number of competing parties (see Baroudi and Tabar Citation2009).
19. Although small groups such as the Druze and ‘Alawi are not included in these surveys, the three included religious groups make up over 90% of the Lebanese population according to virtually all estimates.
20. For the purposes of statistical power (and following prior public opinion research on Christians in Lebanon), our analysis considers all Christian subgroups together. Since each of the smaller Christian groups (i.e., non-Maronites) accounted for less than 100 respondents, it is not possible to draw reliable inferences about each subgroup. This approach is used in many of the best-known studies of public opinion in Lebanon (e.g. Corstange Citation2012; Cammett and Issar Citation2010). All of the results presented below are substantively identical if the sample is restricted to Maronites, the historically dominant group and the only group whose numbers allow for plausible subgroup analysis
21. The Ta’if Accord shifted some of the powers of the presidency towards the prime minister but left intact a considerable amount of influence for the Maronite president.
22. It should be noted that there is widespread agreement with this statement because, in addition to non-democracy, the ‘sectarian system’ in Lebanon connotes corruption, conflict, poor governance, and any number of other negative outcomes. Thus, for most of our analysis, we prefer questions that ask about specific problems with the sectarian system, for which there is a clearer interpretation and more variation in responses. However, it is useful to examine the effects of key variables on responses to this general question, even if the effects are only at the margins
23. Coefficient estimates for the control variables are omitted here for the purposes of space, but are available from the authors upon request.
24. This estimate is derived from model 8, which includes controls.
25. Note that the sectarian differences reported above are calculated from the control group alone in order to ensure that the estimates are not contaminated by the priming experiment. However, results were virtually identical when including all respondents.
26. Unfortunately, this experiment did not include explicit references to democracy, so the connection to democratic preferences specifically is only implicit.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Michael Hoffman
Michael Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Hannah E. Bagdanov
Hannah E. Bagdanov is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a doctoral affiliate at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.