The determinants of voting for Islamists in Egypt’s first post-revolution elections 2011–2012

Abstract

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes for the first post-revolution presidential elections in Egypt. In the light of strong success of the Islamist candidate, Mohamed Morsi, I identify three dimensions which can affect voting outcomes: human capital stock, wealth and employment structure. I find that less educated, poorer and more unequal districts support more Islamists. I also find an effect of the employment structure of a district on voting. I test the results by comparing the determinants of voting outcomes of the presidential elections to those of the 2011 and 2012 constitutional referendums.

Keywords:

• voting outcomes
• Arab spring
• political Islam
• socioeconomic characteristics

JEL classification:

• D72
• D78
• O53
• Z12
• Z13

Acknowledgement

I sincerely thank Ishac Diwan, Mario Ferrero, Olivier L’Haridon, Fabio Padovano and Mohamed Saleh for their valuable comments. I would like also to thank participants in the annual conference of the Economic Research Forum 2015, the annual meeting of the European Public Choice Society 2015 and CREM doctoral seminar. I would like to acknowledge the statistical office that provided the underlying data making this research possible: Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics in Egypt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A related literature discusses the influence of Islam on attitudes toward democracy. According to this literature, Potrafke (2012) confirms the result of Rowley and Smith (2009) who found that countries with Muslim majorities enjoy less freedom and are less democratic than countries in which Muslims are a minority. Hanusch (2013) demonstrates that the effect between Islam and democracy found by Potrafke (2012) is spurious. Additionally, Maseland and van Hoorn (2011) explain the combination of observed relatively low levels of democracy in the Muslim world but positive attitudes towards it.

2. See The Carter Center (2012b)

3. See The Carter Center (2012a)

4. See note 3. Sharia is the moral code and religious law of Islam in the constitution.

5. See Egypt Constitutional Referendum Observation Report, April 2014.

6. See note 5.

7. http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/beyond/global/glossary.html.

8. The educational attainment is defined only for population above 10 years old in the 2006 census data.

9. http://www.ceeba.org/egyptinfo.asp and http://databank.worldbank.org/.

10. Minnesota Population Center (2013)

11. 1 USD = 6.96 EGP.

12. Zellner (1962).

13. Due to data limitations, I use these three events to check whether the determinants of voting outcomes are constant over time, although the dates are close to one another.