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Determinants of Democracy in the Muslim World

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Abstract

This article, which examines the factors and processes that account for the negative correlation between Muslim majority states and democratization, focuses on the institutionalization of Islam in the state. I assess the effect of this factor along with other determinants on regime type from 1990 to 2002 in the population of fifty-one Muslim-majority states, using a multilevel mixed effects linear regression model and path analysis. The analysis shows that although Islam is arguably the most conspicuous factor characterizing this set of states, the institutionalization of Islam in the state is not an impediment to democratization. Instead, factors particularly associated with the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a communist legacy, delay meaningful democratic reform. The results of various regression models suggest that the states in this region with a better propensity toward democratic change are Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen.

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Notes

  1. Manus I. Midlarksy, “Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational Conflict and the Democratic Peace,” International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998): 485–511; Robert J. Barro, “Determinants of Democracy,” Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999): 158–83; Michael L. Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53 (2001): 325–61; M. Steven Fish, “Islam and Authoritarianism,” World Politics 55 (2002): 4–37.

  2. Regime type refers to the type of government in power. I measure regime type using Polity IV’s twenty-one point measure for regime authority, with a −10 indicating fully institutionalized autocracy and 10 indicating fully institutionalized democracy. See Ted R. Gurr, Keith Jaggers, and Monty G. Marshall, “Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–2010,” Dataset version<p4v2010> http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm, accessed October 2010.

  3. Midlarksy, “Democracy and Islam;” Barro, “Determinants of Democracy,” Fish, “Islam and Authoritarianism.”

  4. At present, the data for the three major variables of interest are not available prior to 1990.

  5. Bueno De Mesquita and George Downs, “Development and Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 84 (2005): 77–86.

  6. The term Shari’a can also be used to refer to God’s laws as found within the Quran and Sunnah. When Shari’a is used in this way, it is often contrasted with the term fiqh, which refers to Islamic laws that are man-made but nonetheless based on interpretations and understanding of divine sources. However, dating back to the tenth century, formal legal literature has often used the term Shari’a to refer to all Islamic laws including man-made laws, or fiqh. See John L. Esposito, Oxford Dictionary of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). I choose to employ the term Shari’a in accordance with the broader usage.

  7. Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, Inc, 1994); Bernard Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy: A Historical Overview,” Journal of Democracy 7 (1996): 52–63.

  8. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992); Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights (Boulder: Westview Press, 2007).

  9. Valentine M. Moghadam, “Women’s Economic Participation in the Middle East: What Difference has the Neoliberal Policy Turn Made?,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1 (2005): 110–46; Rebecca Barlow, “Women’s Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran: the Contribution of Secular-Oriented Feminism,” in Islam and Human Rights in Practice, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh and Benjamin MacQueen (New York: Routledge, 2008), 33–51.

  10. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  11. Christian Smith, “The Spirit and Democracy: Base Communities, Protestantism and Democratization in Latin America,” Sociology of Religion 55 (1994): 119–43.

  12. Alfred Stepan, “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations,’ ” Journal of Democracy 11 (2000): 37–56.

  13. Stepan defines this dynamic between religion and the state as the following: “Democratic institutions must be free, within the bounds of the constitution and human rights, to generate policies. Religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives that allow them to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments. At the same time, individuals and religious communities, consistent with our institutional definition of democracy, must have complete freedom to worship privately.” See Stepan, “Twin Tolerations,” 39.

  14. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke, “Religious Persecution in Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Religious Economies?,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 633–58.

  15. See Stepan, “Twin Tolerations,” 39.

  16. See U.S. Department of State, Report on International Religious Freedom, 2009.

  17. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960); Larry Diamond, “Economic Development and Democracy Reconsidered,” in Reexamining Democracy, ed. Gary Marks and Larry Diamond (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), 93–139; Ronald Inglehart, “Culture and Democracy” in Culture Matters, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 80–97; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization.

  18. Larry Diamond, “Universal Democracy?: The Prospect Has Never Looked Better,” Policy Review 119 (2003); Mehran Kamrava, “Development and Democracy: The Muslim World in a Comparative Perspective,” in Modernization, Democracy, and Islam, ed. Shireen T. Hunter and Huma Malik (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 52–64.

  19. Adam Przeworksi and Fernando Papaterra Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics 49 (1997): 155–83.

  20. Theda Skocpol, “Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Theory and Society 11 (1982): 265–83; Hazem Beblawi and Giacoma Luciani, “Introduction” in The Rentier State, ed. Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (London: Croom Helm, 1987) 1–21; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Depoliticisation of a Rentier State: The Case of Pahlavi Iran,” in The Rentier State, ed. Beblawi and Luciani, 211–27; Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Kiren Chaudhry, “Economic Liberalization and the Lineages of the Rentier State,” Comparative Politics 27 (1994): 1–25; Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy;” Eva Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 36 (2004): 139–57; Benjamin Smith, “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960–1999,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004): 232–46.

  21. Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy.”

  22. Ibid., 332.

  23. Ibid., 336–37.

  24. Thad Dunning, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  25. Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo, “Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse,” American Political Science Review 105 (2011): 1–26.

  26. Jorgen J. Anderson and Michael Ross, “Making the Resource Curse Disappear: A Re-Examination of Haber and Menaldo’s ‘Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism,’ ” Unpublished Manuscript (2011), at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/Making%20the%20Resource%20Curse%20Disappear%20-%20Andersen%20&%20Ross%20final.pdf, accessed June 30, 2012.

  27. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

  28. Ibid., 245–46.

  29. Ibid., 247.

  30. Andrew Reynolds, Designing Democracy in a Dangerous World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 168.

  31. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 248–49; Thomas Henry Rigby, “A Conceptual Approach to Authority, Power, and Policy in the USSR” in Authority, Power, and Policy in the USSR, ed. Thomas Henry Rigby, Leonard Schapiro, Archie Brown, and Peter Reddaway (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 12.

  32. Thomas Carothers, “The Rule of Law Revival,” Foreign Affairs 77 (1998): 95–106.

  33. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1997): 22–43; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003).

  34. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and the Danger of War,” International Security 20 (1995): 5–38; Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 273; Guillermo O’Donnell, “Why the Rule of Law Matters,” Journal of Democracy 15 (2004): 32–46; Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.”

  35. David R. Cameron, “Post-Communist Democracy: The Impact of the European Union,” Post-Soviet Affairs 23 (2007): 185–217; Steven Fish, “The Dynamics of Democratic Erosion,” in Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, ed. Richard D. Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip G. Roeder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

  36. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53 (2000): 1–37.

  37. Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Cameron, “Post-Communist Democracy.”

  38. M. Steven Fish, “The Dynamics of Democratic Erosion;” M. Steven Fish, “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies,” Journal of Democracy 17 (2006): 5–20.

  39. Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Herert Kitschelt, “Accounting for Outcomes of Post-Communist Regime Change: Causal Depth or Shallowness in Rival Explanations,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, Georgia, September 1–5, 1999.

  40. The Middle Eastern and North African states refer to the seventeen states located in the Middle East and North Africa. It excludes the Palestinian territories, Djibouti, Comoros, Mauritania, Somalia, and Sudan. I also have not included Turkey, which is excluded from both the World Bank and Freedom House definitions of the region.

  41. Alfred Stepan and Graeme B. Robertson, “An ‘Arab’ More Than a ‘Muslim’ Electoral Gap,” Journal of Democracy 14 (2003): 30–44, at 33.

  42. Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritariansim.”

  43. Ibid., 143–44, 148–49.

  44. Ibid., 149.

  45. Augustus Richard Norton, “The Future of Civil Society in the Middle East,” Middle East Journal 47 (1993): 205–16.

  46. Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism.”

  47. Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Civil Society as Social Control: State Power in Jordan,” Comparative Politics 32 (2000): 43–61; Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 56–67.

  48. Wiktorowicz, “Civil Society as Social Control,” 43.

  49. Amaney Jamal, Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  50. Joshua Landis and Joe Pace, “The Syrian Opposition,” The Washington Quarterly 30 (2007): 45–68; Reynolds, Designing Democracy, 176.

  51. de Mesquita and Downs, “Development and Democracy.”

  52. Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Haya Al-Mughni and Mary Ann Tétreault, “Citizenship, Gender and the Politics of Quasi States,” in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Suad Joseph (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 237–60; Soraya Altorki, “The Concept and Practice of Citizenship in Saudi Arabia,” in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Joseph, 215–36; Valentine M. Moghadam, “Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society: The Case of the Middle East and North Africa,” Women and Politics 25 (2003): 63–87.

  53. Suad Joseph, “Civic Myths, Citizenship, and Gender in Lebanon,” in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Joseph, 107–136.

  54. Al-Mughni and Tétreault, “Citizenship, Gender, and the Politics of Quasi States,” 238–39.

  55. See Gurr, Jaggers, and Marshall “Polity IV Project.”

  56. I used The Religion and State Project’s composite variable for “Specific Types of Religious Legislation.” See Jonathan Fox, “The Religion and State Project,” version RAS_v1.2.2, http://www.religionandstate.org, accessed October 2010.

  57. Although about half of the states in the sample do not have within-state variation of religious law over time, a likelihood-ratio test was performed to see if the within-state variation over time was statistically significant from 0. The test’s results indicate that the use of longitudinal analysis is still appropriate.

  58. I used The Religion and State Project’s dummy variable for the “presence of religious courts which have jurisdiction over some matters of law.” See Fox, “The Religion and State Project.”

  59. I used The Religion and State Project’s variable for whether a state has an established religion. See Fox, “The Religion and State Project.”

  60. I use the World’ Bank’s measure for “GDP per capita (current U.S.$).” See World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” http://data.worldbank.org/, accessed October 2010.

  61. The measure for “oil rents per capita” was provided by Michael L. Ross. See Michael L. Ross, “Oil, Islam, and Women,” American Political Science Review 102 (2008): 107–23.

  62. To ensure that there is no interaction between Islamic laws and courts, a separate model was run that included an interaction term. However, along with no significant main effects of the two variables, there was also no interaction effect.

  63. I also combine the three indicators of state institutionalized Islam into a single index and test them in a fourth model with the other control variables. The results are robust. The coefficient for the index variable is both statistically and substantively insignificant.

  64. Abdou Filali-Ansary, “Muslims and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 10 (1999): 18–31; Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy.”

  65. Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” 339.

  66. Stepan and Robertson, “An ‘Arab’ More than a ‘Muslim’ Gap.”

  67. Gurr and Jaggers categorize the regime authority spectrum into four groups. States with scores of 7 to 10 are defined as “coherent democracies.” States with scores of 6 to 1 are defined as “incoherent democracies.” States with scores of 0 to −6 are defined as “incoherent autocracies.” States with scores of −7 to −10 are defined as “coherent autocracies.” See Keith Jaggers and Ted R. Gurr, “Tracking Democracy’s Third Wave with the Polity III Data,” Journal of Peace Research, 32 (1995): 469–82.

  68. Another possible causal factor could be the interpretation of religion particular to MENA region. Some scholars have argued that the Arab interpretation of Islam is more rigid and, therefore, less conducive to democratization than are the more flexible interpretations found in regions where Islam was later adopted. Although this argument has an intuitive appeal, the empirical evidence does not support it. Variables for proximity to Mecca and an interaction term of Islamic Laws and Policies and MENA were included in alternative models, and no significant relationship was found.

  69. I used the World Bank’s variable “military expenditure (% of GDP),” which is derived from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. See World Bank, “World Development Indicators.”

  70. I used the variable “ ‘ASSN’ Freedom of Assembly and Association” from the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset. See David Cingranelli and David Richards, “Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project,” Dataset version 2010.08.15, http://www.humanrightsdata.org, accessed October 2010.

  71. I used the variable “ ‘SPEECH’ Freedom of Speech” from the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset. See Cingranelli and Richards, “Human Rights.”

  72. Mounira Charrad, “Becoming a Citizen: Lineage Versus Individual in Tunisia and Morocco,” in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Joseph, 70–87; Suad Joseph, “Civil Myths, Citizenship, and Gender in Lebanon,” Moghadam, “Women’s Economic Participation.”

  73. I constructed this variable by individually coding each Muslim majority state’s family code. I examined two issue areas to measure the degree to which a state integrates Shari’a into family law: divorce and custody law. Each state receives a score of one, two, or three for each issue area. The two scores are then indexed into a single continuous variable, measuring the degree of incorporation of Shari’a family law in the state’s legal code.

  74. The Comparative Fit Index (CFI) for the model, with the three causal conditions, is 0.901. The CFI is a good indicator of model fit because it performs well for relatively smaller sample sizes as well. The CFI ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, with greater values closer to 1, indicating a better fit.

  75. Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Jason Brownlee, “The Decline of Pluralism in Mubarak’s Egypt,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 6–14; Jillian Schwedler, “Yemen’s Aborted Opening,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 48–55; Mohamed Talbi, “A Record of Failure,” in Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, ed. Larry Diamond, Mark F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Laith Kubba, “The Awakening of Civil Society,” in Islam and Democracy in the Middle East.

  76. Due to data constraints, propensity toward reform could not be estimated for Lebanon.

  77. See Cingranelli and Richards, “Human Rights.”

  78. Marwan Muashar, “A Decade of Struggling Reform Efforts in Jordan: The Resilience of the Rentier System,” The Carnegie Papers (May 2011): 1–32.

  79. A third hypothesized mechanism is weak political institutions, such as political parties. However, I did not test this mechanism because it corresponds very closely with the measure of the dependent variable Regime Type and therefore would be tautological.

  80. I used the variable “ ‘INJUD’ Independence of the Judiciary,” from the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset. See Cingranelli and Richards, “Human Rights.”

  81. The CFI for the model, with the causal mechanisms, is 0.970.

  82. Mike Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, and Adam Przeworksi, “Classifying Political Regimes,” Studies in Comparative International Development 31 (1996): 3–36.

  83. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53 (2000): 1–37.

  84. See Pakistan Constitution, Preamble.

  85. See Pakistan Constitution. Part II, Chapter. 2, Articles 31(2)(a), 31(2)(c).

  86. See Qanun-e-Shahadat Order. Chapter 2, “Of Witnesses.”

  87. Siti Musdah Mulia and Mark E. Cammack, “Toward a Just Marriage Law: Empowering Indonesian Women through a Counter Legal Draft to the Indonesian Compilation of Islamic Law,” in Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia: Ideas and Institutions, ed. Michael R. Feener and Mark E. Cammack (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 130–31; Rifyal Ka’bah, “Islamic Law in Court Decisions and Fatwa Institutions in Indonesia,” in Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia, ed. Feener and Cammack, 86.

  88. Ka’bah, “Islamic Law,” 86.

  89. Dalia Mogahed, “Islam and Democracy,” 2006 Gallup World Poll Special Report: Muslim World (Princeton, The Gallup Organization): 1–3.

  90. De Mesquita and Downs, “Development and Democracy.”

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    Fatima Z Rahman

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Rahman, F. Determinants of Democracy in the Muslim World. Polity 45, 554–579 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.18

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