Gender Egalitarian Attitudes and Support for Islamist Parties in the Middle East and North Africa

ABSTRACT

How do attitudes about women’s equality affect political support for Islamist parties? Women’s issues remain a key point of contention between religious groups and the government in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Given Islamists’ conservative stances on women’s rights, individuals who support gender equality may naturally be skeptical of Islamist parties participating in politics. Nevertheless, democratic stability in the region requires creating inclusive political institutions, including women’s movements and the Islamic opposition. Where democracy is inclusive and competitive, Islamist parties may moderate their positions to remain electorally viable, thus alleviating gender equality proponents’ concerns. To test these expectations, we draw on two different survey data sources from the MENA region. Our results, consistent across time and data sources, demonstrate that gender egalitarian individuals are less likely to trust Islamist parties or tolerate their inclusion in formal politics. Nevertheless, democracy mitigates this negative relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamist parties
• gender
• political support
• democracy
• Middle East and North Africa

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Diana Z. O’Brien, as well as participants at the 2019 American Political Science Association “Gendered Attitudes” panel, for helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. We also thank the editors of the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their constructive feedback and suggestions. Finally, we thank the Arab Barometer and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (Doha, Qatar) for making their data available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2022.2012994

Notes

1. A full list of countries and years for both sets of analyses can be found in Appendix A1.

2. A one-way ANOVA indicates that trust in Islamist parties differs significantly across countries in the analysis (F = 207.94; p < 0.001).

3. Reading religious texts is only one measure of religiosity. In Appendix A2, we show that our main results are robust to other measures of religiosity, including attending religious services and frequency of prayer.

4. In Appendix A3, we show that these results are robust to using Polity’s regime score as a measure of democracy.

5. To demonstrate that our results do not hinge on modeling choice, we estimate models with only random intercepts (Appendix A4 and Figure A1), as well as with country fixed effects (Appendix A5). Our results and interpretation are robust across model specifications.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anwar Mhajne

Anwar Mhajne is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Head Faculty Fellow for the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College. Her research focuses on feminist international relations and security studies, political Islam, Middle East, and Social Movements. Her peer-reviewed work has been featured in The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Religion and Politics among others.

Gregory W. Saxton

Gregory W. Saxton is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. His research is in the field of Comparative Politics with an emphasis on Latin America, class and inequality, corruption, gender egalitarian attitudes, and comparative political behavior. His dissertation, “Perceptions of Fairness and Political Support in the Face of Economic Inequality” was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation. His other peer-reviewed work appears in Governance, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, & Parties, Latin American Politics & Society, Politics, Groups, & Identities, and Political Research Quarterly.