Am I equal? Internet access and perceptions of female political leadership ability in the Arab world

ABSTRACT

Can the Internet assist with the tearing down of barriers to female political empowerment in the Arab world? This article presents two alternative theories regarding the effect access to the Internet may have on perceptions of female political leadership ability in Arab countries. These theories are tested utilizing survey data drawn from twelve Arab countries and all three waves of the Arab Barometer, and I find evidence to support the hypothesis that access to the Internet affects female, but not male, perceptions of female political leadership ability in the region. It is my hope that this article can help shed light on how the Internet may affect politically marginalized populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative politics
• gender
• Internet
• Middle East

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jens Grosser, Eric Colemen, Brad Gomez, Xiaoli Guo, Eddie Hearn, Dmitry Ryvkin, David Siegel, Mark Souva, Michael Xenos, and the two anonymous reviewers for their help and useful suggestions with regard to previous drafts of this manuscript. Without them, this project would not have been possible. All errors remaining in this manuscript are the sole responsibility of the author.

Notes

^1. Survey statistics, information regarding survey question wording, and additional robustness checks are presented in this article’s online appendix. All survey data used in this article were drawn from the first wave of the Arab Barometer, which can be found online at http://www.arabbarometer.org (Jamal & Tessler, 2008). Access to the specific data set used for this article and the replication code(s) associated with it will be provided online on the publisher’s Web site on or before the date of this article’s publication.

^2. It is important to note that in many regards, and particularly with respect to female political participation and leadership, this Western ideal has fallen short of being actualized in the West (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Inglehart & Norris, 2003).

^3. I could potentially also present a third theory that would predict that Internet access decreases perceptions of female political leadership, particularly among men, due to a cultural backlash arising from the region’s increased exposure to foreign cultural paradigms, but find no empirical or theoretical reason to explicitly present this alternative theory within this particular article.

^4. Analyses were also conducted on each gender separately, and these can be found in the online appendix.

^5. Although ideally I would run regressions on a number of different measures for perceptions of the political leadership ability of women, the only survey question that invokes perceptions of the political leadership ability of women in the Arab Barometer was the survey question used. Nevertheless, my analysis utilized a number of different tests for the robustness of my results, and these robustness checks are located in the online appendix.

^6. Concerns regarding the use of country-level dummy variables should be tempered by the large number of observations present for each country analyzed.

^7. In addition to the analysis presented herein, I ran separate regressions on female and male respondents for each wave, the results of which can be found in the online appendix.

^8. It should be noted that in nearly all of the models run on waves 1 and 2, including my robustness checks, the interaction term between Female and Internet is actually significant at the p < 0.001 level.

^9. Alternatively, I could have also calculated the marginal effects of Internet access on women and men. This approach, however, would not be the most appropriate one to use because this analysis is not primarily concerned with the instantaneous rate of change when moving from 0 to 1 with regard to Internet access. Moreover, given that both of the independent variables that interact are binary, there is no substantive difference between presenting the first differences associated with the predicted probabilities and presenting marginal effects.

^10. Results regarding whether this result is in fact negligible at the m = 0.03 and m = 0.01 level were mixed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ammar Shamaileh

Ammar Shamaileh is serving a term appointment as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on collective action and political behavior in the Middle East.