How Polities Shape Support for Gender Equality and Religiosity’s Impact in Arab Countries

European Sociological Review, 2019, Vol. 35, No. 3, 299–315 doi: 10.1093/esr/jcz004 Advance Access Publication Date: 12 February 2019 Original Article How Polities Shape Support for Gender Equality and Religiosity’s Impact in Arab Countries Saskia Glas*, Niels Spierings, Marcel Lubbers and Peer Scheepers *Corresponding author. Email: Submitted April 2018; revised January 2019; accepted January 2019 Abstract Previous public opinion studies argued that in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Muslim citizens support gender equality less than non-Muslims, due to Islamic-patriarchal socialization. Deviating from this Orientalist narrative, we formulate a context-dependent agentic-socialization framework, which acknowledges religiosity’s and gender equality’s multidimensionality along with the MENA’s political-institutional diversity. We expect that religious service attendance and devotion decrease support for gender equality in politics but not in education. Moreover, we theorize that open political structures allow citizens to express agency and dissociate from dominant patriarchal patterns. We test these expectations using WVS and AB data covering 50,000 respondents in 39 MENA country-years. Our results show religious service attendance indeed reduces support for gender equality. However, more devoted citizens support gender equality in education more than the less devoted, and in more democratic polities and in polities with more freedom of press, the same is found for political gender equality. Moreover, support for gender equality is greater in open polities than closed ones, but this gap closes when people frequent religious services. These results suggest MENA citizens are not univocally passively socialized by patriarchal religious views, but actively engage with other interpretations, provided these are not banned by oppressive governments. Introduction In Western public debates, the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is often depicted as a homogenous region in which support for equality between men and women is virtually non-existent due to Islam (as also observed by, for instance, Angrist, 2012; Moghadam, 2013: esp. p. 14–19; C¸avdar and Yaşar, 2014). Several quantitative studies echo this view; they have shown that MENA publics report the world’s lowest average support for gender equality in the public sphere, and attributed this to MENA inhabitants’ patriarchal religious socialization (Norris, 2009; Price, 2016). As scholars have noted (e.g. Said, 1979; Kongar, Olmsted, and Shehabuddin, 2014; Spierings, 2015; Alexander and Parhizkari, 2018), this general narrative implies Orientalism; the MENA is portrayed as one homogenous bloc—contrary to the progressive, secular West—inhabited by a passive populace perpetually subjected to patriarchal Islam. These Orientalist views hamper nuanced insights in at least three ways; they narrow religiosity, they confound gender attitudes, and they ignore (political) differences between MENA countries. The present study adds to the literature by addressing these three lacunae in its study of polities’ and religiosity’s impact on support for gender equality within the Arab MENA. C The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. V This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact Department of Sociology, Radboud University, 6500 HE, Nijmegen, the Netherlands 300 how MENA contexts directly influence gender equality attitudes, this is especially troublesome as the relation between individual religiosity and support for public gender equality seems to vary across MENA countries. Indeed, while cross-country studies have largely found that individual religiosity decreases support for gender equality, country-specific studies have found insignificant relations and even higher support for gender equality among the more religious (e.g. Moaddel, 2006; Meyer, Rizzo, and Ali, 2007; Alibeli, 2015). To address these possible contextual differences, the present study focuses on differences in MENA countries’ polities, as qualitative studies have repeatedly emphasized their significance but they have been conspicuously absent in large-scale MENA-specific studies (Owen, 2004; Charrad, 2011). To illustrate, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, and Tunisia have seen democratic currents, gender quotas in politics, and relatively progressive family laws, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s recent histories are coloured by Islamism and continued political oppression (Moghadam and Sadiqi, 2006; Charrad and Zarrugh, 2014; see Alexander and Apell, 2016 for similar arguments pertaining to Egypt). However, to our knowledge, no existing quantitative study has systematically addressed how these varying political structures across MENA countries shape their publics’ support for gender equality and religiosity’s impact on gender equality attitudes. Our second research question thus reads: To what extent are Arab MENA countries’ polities related to support for gender equality and to what extent do they moderate religiosity’s impact? Theoretical Background Religious Integration To explain publics’ support for gender equality in Muslim-majority countries, most previous studies have proposed a basic socialization perspective (Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Alexander and Welzel, 2011; Price, 2016). They proposed that people who adhere to an Islamic denomination are integrated in religious communities that socialize them to reject gender equality through internalizations of patriarchal views voiced by for instance parents, teachers, clergy, fellow mosquegoers, and governments (Al-Hibri, 1982; Lussier and Fish, 2016). However, existing studies on Kuwait show that varying dimensions of religion relate to support for gender equality differently, which implies that multiple and more direct measures of religiosity are needed (Meyer, Rizzo and Ali, 1998; Rizzo, Meyer and Ali, 2002). Additionally, adhering to a certain denomination is a rather obfuscated measure of religious integration We address the first lacuna by incorporating more direct measures of religiosity next to denomination. Previous quantitative studies have theorized that integration in patriarchal religions engenders socialization into oppressive views inducing less support for gender equality, but most have only empirically addressed denomination, comparing Muslims to non-Muslims (e.g. Inglehart and Norris, 2003). This is troublesome, as it is unclear whether this denominational dichotomy solely reflects religious integration; for instance, it also completely corresponds with being a member of the majority versus minority (Htun and Weldon, 2015; Spierings, 2018). Additionally, single-country studies (...truncated)