Religion And Support For Democracy: A Comparative Study .

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Religion and Support for Democracy: AComparative Study for Catholic and MuslimCountries1Eduard J. BomhoffMary Man Li Gu21Final submission, Politics and Religion2Discipline Head, Economics, Monash University Sunway Campus, Malaysia, and PhD student at theUniversity of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus. E-mail: Eduard.bomhoff@buseco.monash.edu.my; Tele: 6035514-6564; Manli.Gu@nottingham.edu.my. Tele: 603-8924-82951Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract 1740133

1. IntroductionPolitical scientists have long exhibited an interest in the connection between religion and politicalculture. In particular, there has been a growing body of recent literature attempting to understandthe relationship between Islam and modernity. One question at the heart of the debate is whetherIslam, in the sense of a religion or a civilization, is compatible with democracy (Kubba, 1996; Lewis,1996; Najjar, 1958).Throughout history, overwhelmingly the most common type of regime in the Islamic world has beenautocracy (Lewis, 1996). Scholars have firmly established that the third wave of democratization hasnot yet reached the Muslim world, particularly in the Arab Middle East (Rizzo, et al, 2007). Accordingto the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2007 (Kekic, 2007) which provides a complete‘score card’ of democracy for over 160 countries, Muslim societies constitute the great majority ofthe fifty-five countries categorized as authoritarian regimes. A small number of countries fall into thehybrid regime and flawed democracy. No full democracy with an Islamic majority exists.There are different views on why democracy does not easily take root in Muslim countries. Fish(2002) studies the causal link between Islamic religious tradition and regime type, controlling for aset of potentially influential factors such as economic development and socio-cultural division. Helabels Muslim countries as ‘democratic underachievers’ and suggests that the subordination ofwomen helps account for part of the link between Islam and authoritarianism. In his paper titled‘Engendering Democracy and Islam in the Arab World’, Faqir (1997) shares the view that women’sliberalization, equality and democracy are intimately connected; the absence of participatorydemocracy in most Arab countries is closely associated with the under-representation of women inpolitics. Some observers, particularly Western observers attribute the type of democratic deficit tocultural factors.2Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract 1740133

Political culture theory argues that culture matters. Deeply rooted public values and attitudes affectcitizen’s acceptance of different types of regime (Nathan, 2007). Regarding Islamic countries inparticular, it is argued that the lack of resentment toward authoritarianism and the absence ofappreciation for democracy are inherent traits of the Islamic political culture (Huntington, 1993;Lewis, 1996). The Western and Islamic world, according to Samuel Huntington, remain deeplydivided in democratic values. Unlike Western Christianity, Islamic values are said to discouragerepresentative democracy and encourage non-secular authoritarianism (Chandler, 2006). Similarly,Fukuyama (2001) advances a cultural theory, arguing that Islam has very little in common withmodern democracy. Whereas democracy requires openness, pluralism, and tolerance of diversity,Islam, he and others argue, encourages intellectual conformity and an uncritical acceptance ofauthority (Tessler, 2003). Najjar examines the basic teachings and institutions of Islam and illustratesthe anti-democratic nature of Islam as follows:“In Islam the individual’s rights and freedoms are those prescribed by the [divine] law; he canonly choose to obey or disobey. The Western notion of individual freedom and natural rights,which is limited only by the freedom of others, is alien to Muslim theory [ ] A true Muslim willhave very serious difficulties resolving the conflict between his loyalty to the Koran and hisbelief in democracy. The absolute sovereignty of God cannot be reconciled with the sovereigntyof men.” (Najjar, 1958)Others reject the cultural allegation that Islam is resistant to democracy. Modernization theoristsposit that modernization encourages the spread of democracy. Successful economic developmenteventually brings pervasive cultural change which will produce a more liberal and tolerant public(Inglehart and Welzel, 2005). From a modernist perspective, Muslim nations are no exceptioncompared to other non-developed countries. The incompatibility between Islam and democracycannot be reduced to religion as the only factor. There are more factors to look at such asindustrialization, urbanization, literacy, distribution of economic and intellectual resources, etc (AlBraizat, 2002).3

Fares Al-Braizat for example, argues that socio-economic factors influence democratic beliefs morethan Islam. Using the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Survey (EVS) data, Fares(2002) suggests that there is no significant evidence that Islamic culture predicts attitudes towarddemocracy; instead, human development and political opportunity structures explain the absence ofdemocracy in the Arab world. Mark Tessler (2003), too, found no significant general relationshipbetween religion and democratic attitudes based on his empirical work from four Arab countries inwhich the WVS has been conducted, and concludes that strong Islamic attachments do notdiscourage or prevent the emergence of support for democracy. In addition, Inglehart and Norris(2004) examine WVS 1995 -2001 pooled sample data and suggest that far from a clash of values,there is a minimal difference between the Muslim world and the West in their political attitudes. Thedivide, instead, is over social values toward gender equality and sexual liberalization (pg. 154).The present study aims to contribute to the on-going debate on the topic by studying thecorrelations between religion and support for democracy of ordinary citizens with the latestavailable World Values Survey (WVS) 2005 data. We compare the nine Islamic nations for which datain the WVS are available to eleven predominantly Catholic nations. We selected the group ofCatholic countries in the WVS data set for two reasons. First, many of these countries are in LatinAmerica, making their level of economic development comparable to the richer Islamic nations. Theset of Protestant nations would consist of rich Western countries, much more different from theIslamic world in terms of economic development and liberal history. Also, Catholic nations have ahistory of strong Church involvement in their governance as well as explicit guidance in many of themoral issues such as abortion and sex outside of marriage that are used in the WVS to measuretolerance – arguably an important supporting factor for a healthy democracy.We ask two principal questions: (1) Does a strong Islamic or Catholic commitment encourage moreauthoritarian political views? Are pious Muslims and Catholics less open to democracy? (2) What doMuslims and Catholics associate with democracy: a tolerant society or an efficient and responsive4

government? The first question assesses how support for democracy varies with religiousorientation and individual religiosity. The second question attempts to understand the motivesbehind such support.Our empirical results confirm earlier findings suggesting that there is widespread support fordemocracy among both devout Muslims and practicing Catholics. But, democracy lovers from theCatholic countries conceive democracy differently. They consistently demonstrate greater toleranceof diversity, social trust, stronger support for gender equality and a more self-expressive valueorientation, while the reverse is true for the Muslims who have a more instrumental view ofdemocracy: they do not aspire to greater tolerance or civic engagement but rather hope that ademocratic government brings more prosperity to their country.5

2. Data and MethodologyWe employ data from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), conducted in 2005 and 2006.The WVS is an extensive, global academic survey which studies the worldviews and value profiles ofthe public on a wide variety of issues, including religion, gender roles, economy, government, familyand work relations, etc.3 In this paper, we focus on a small set of the WVS questions which relate toreligion and democracy. Nationally representative data sets of at least some one thousand adults aretaken from the nine Islamic countries and eleven Catholic countries for which the latest data isavailable. An overview of the countries is shown in Table 1.[Table 1 about here]Malaysia is the richest Islamic nation in our sample, somewhat richer than Turkey and Iran and muchmore developed than the other six Muslim countries. It is at about the same level of GDP per capitaas Argentina, Chile and Mexico. As a whole, the group of Catholic countries is more developed, butthe seven Latin-American countries and Poland are quite comparable to the richer Islamic countriesin the sample; it is just the three developed nations of France, Italy and Spain that are at a muchhigher level of GDP per capita.The empirical analysis is carried out for the individual respondents, both for each country separatelyand for aggregate samples created by pooling the unweighted national data sets. Since all the surveyquestions have ordinal answers – sometimes 0 for a no and 1 for a yes; usually a scale from 1 to 4 or1 to 10 for different degrees of agreement with a value statement – least squares techniques are notappropriate. Throughout the paper we use maximum-likelihood algorithms that have been designedfor processing categorical survey answers. The objective of our research is to identify and studydifferent groups of respondents on various issues related to governance and democracy. That makes3Further details on sampling methodology, questionnaire and data sets can be found at WVS homepagehttp://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.6

cluster analysis a natural way to describe and analyze such data. The “Latent Gold” software offers anew generation of cluster analysis that does not rely on arbitrary measures of “distance” to classifycases into segments. Instead, it defines homogeneity in terms of probabilities - cases in the samelatent class are similar to each other because their responses are generated by the same probabilitydistribution (Vermunt and Magdison, 2004). The algorithm extracts a number of clusters from thedata in such a way that inside each cluster the responses to the different questions (the indicatorvariables) have independent distributions. The algorithm allows also for additional variables forwhich that requirement does not hold but which are useful for assigning respondents to thedifferent clusters (the covariates)4.This way of modelling has advantages over the traditional approaches:1. It can cope with categorical data, whereas factor analysis and related techniques were designedfor continuous variables.2. There is no need to reduce the number of responses on each question to two.3. All models are the outcome of an optimizing process, thus avoiding the arbitrariness oftraditional cluster analysis or factor analysis in determining the number of clusters or factors.In addition, the Latent Class cluster models are able to identify distinct patterns of association in aneffective manner, regardless of whether the underlying relationship between the variables ismonotonous or not. In economics many relationships are monotonous in two related variables.Higher price, lower quantity demanded; higher inflation, weaker exchange rate. One step up in onevariable means, according to theory, precedent and practice: one interval down in the other variable.This can be easily and appropriately captured by the standard regression model, and if therelationship is not linear or log-linear, it would still be monotonous with some form oftransformation of the variables. In social science, on the other hand, important concepts have4Covariates influence the definition of the latent classes and thus are comparable to right-hand variables in aregression. See J. K. Vermunt and J. Magdison, Latent GOLD 4.0 User’s Guide (2005).7

multiple dimensions, and theories are often less precise in their empirical forecasts than the theoriesof economics. It has been demonstrated in sociological research that traditional factor models orleast square analysis often fail to pick up interesting features of the data which does not fit in aregression plane. By contrast, latent-class models provide a more faithful representation of theheterogeneity of attitudinal and behavioural patterns without assuming a monotonous relationshipbetween the variables (Yamaguchi, 2000).8

3. Religiosity and Importance of DemocracyIn this analysis, support for democracy is measured by a survey question asking ‘How important is itfor you to live in a country that is governed democratically?’ Respondents are to provide theiranswers on a 10-point scale, ranging from (1) ‘Not at all important’ to (10) ‘Absolutely important’.Figures 1 and 2 show the proportions of respondents attaching various degrees of importance todemocracy for the Catholic and Muslim pooled samples respectively. It is obvious that the responsedistributions do not differ much, consistent with the findings from several previous studies (Inglehart,2003; Tessler et al, 2006; The Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2005). Specifically, 60.3 percent of therespondents from the Catholic countries and 58.2 percent of those polled in the Muslim countriesconsider democracy to be highly important, giving an answer of ‘9’ or ‘10’ to the question. Bycontrast, only about one tenth of the respondents in both societies express a less favorable attitudetoward democracy, scoring 5 or less than 5 on the variable. Strong support for democracy isparticularly evident among the three Arab Muslim countries surveyed – the percentage of therespondents in such authoritarian nations who believe democracy to be ‘absolutely important’ranges from 64.3 percent in Morocco to 78.7 percent in Jordan, noticeably higher than in existing fulldemocracies like Spain and France, where 50.1 percent and 42.5 percent of the poll take the sameposition.[Figure 1 about here][Figure 2 about here]Support for democracy cannot be considered solid if people are just giving lip service to it (Inglehart,2003). It is important to assess whether such support is qualified by a rejection of alternativeregimes, particularly an authoritarian one characterized by undemocratic strong head ofgovernment. To provide a more stringent test of pro-democratic sentiment, we look at two9

additional survey questions5. The first one is an alternative measure of support for democracy,asking how people view a democratic political system. The second question taps respondents’attitude towards non-democratic regimes, measuring preference for a strong leader. Approval ofthese regimes is expressed in four categories: ‘Very good’, ‘fairly good’, ‘fairly bad’ and ‘very bad’.Figure 3 shows that a great majority of the population favors democratic governance, and there isvirtually no difference in the attitudes of the citizens between the Catholic and Muslim countries.Equally important, over half of the respondents in both types of society disapprove of strongleadership that is unaccountable to parliament or elections. Our empirical results thus suggest thatthere is no denominational difference in endorsing democracy as a form of government in theCatholic and Muslim sample.[Figure 3 about here]We now proceed to explore how religiosity (degree of personal piety), affects people’s attitudestoward governance. In countries like France and Spain, there are large numbers of progressiverationalists, opponents of organized religion with ‘modern’ attitudes in areas such as gender equality,tolerance of diverse social behaviours and strong supporters of a lively democracy. At the same time,amongst pious Catholics in these two countries, there has historically been a group that was veryconservative in its attitudes and more tempted by a strong leader than by a vigorous democracy. Butdo such patterns hold in other parts of the world, particularly Muslim states?With the question on ‘Importance of democracy’ as the indicator (“dependent variable”) in ourmodel we select religiosity as our first covariate (“explanatory variable”). The WVS includes a fewvariables that deal with various aspects of religiosity, two of which are commonly studied in the5Earlier waves of WVS (1995; 2000) also included additional questions on support for democratic ideals andperformance, measuring the extent to which people endorse statements such as ‘Democracies are indecisiveand have too much squabbling’, ‘Democracies aren’t good at maintaining order’, ‘Democracy may haveproblems but is better than any other form of government’. It would be desirable to also study these questionsas another indicator but unfortunately, such data are not available in the current survey for our sample.10

literature, one being religious participation/ involvement and the other strength of religious beliefs(Afkhami, 2008; Canetti-Nisim, 2004; Inglehart and Norris, 2004; Karpov, 2002; Tan, 2006). The firstcomponent captures the practice of religion such as participation in organized religious communitiesand attendance at places of worship (Ben-Nun Bloom and Arikan, 2009). It is measured by thefrequency of attending religious services (a 7-category variable) in which higher values representmore frequent attendance or involvement. The belief dimension refers to the ideological constructsof the religion, namely its theology. It may refer to belief in God, heaven, hell, life after death, ortendencies of people to describe themselves as religious (Ben-Nun Bloom and Arikan, 2009; Tan,2006). This is measured by a survey question asking ‘How important is God in your life?’ withanswers ranging from (1) ‘Not at all important’ to (10) ‘Absolutely important’.Results from our preliminary test indicate that the practice variable does not appear to be easonscometothefore.Participation in religious activities may not always reflect religious commitment. It might be thatpeople participate due to family or friendship circle influences or just as a matter of custom (BenNun Bloom and Arikan, 2009; Inglehart and Norris, 2004). Alternatively, there are two contrastingexplanations regarding the effect of religious practice on socio-political attitude. On one hand,empirical studies report that active church attendance, for example, positively affects politicalinvolvement and helps believers develop civic skills through active engagement, which generatesstronger support for democracy (Ben-Nun Bloom and Arikan, 2009). Clingingsmith et al. (2008)studied pilgrims who were selected by ballot to travel from Pakistan to Mecca for the Hajj. Theyreturned more religiously observant from Saudi Arabia and also more tolerant and sympathetic togender equality, as a result of exposure to and interaction with Hajjis from around the world. On theother hand, social identity theory suggests that a heightened attachment to a group throughinteraction may be accompanied by negative feelings toward the outside groups (Tajfel and Turner,1986). Participation in religious social networks that typically occurs between like-minded peoplemay reinforce a strong collective group identity. Group-oriented thinking in turn leads to moreaggressive attitudes or prejudice toward outsiders. Studies point to the evidence that frequent11

church attendance and prayer are positively correlated with the tendency to endorseauthoritarianism (Leak and Randall, 1995; Steiber, 1980). Hence, it seems that while religious socialinteraction may generate a liberalized effect that leads

Comparative Study for Catholic and Muslim Countries 1 Eduard J. Bomhoff Mary Man Li Gu2 1 Final submission, Politics and Religion 2 Discipline Head, Economics, Monash University Sunway Campus, Malaysia, and PhD student at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus.

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