<http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~blaydes/Women.pdf> The Political Economy of Women's Support for Fundamentalist Islam* Lisa Blaydes blaydes at ucla.edu Drew A. Linzer dlinzer at ucla.edu Department of Political Science University of California, Los Angeles
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* Acknowledgements: We thank James Honaker, Jonathan Slapin, and George Tsebelis for useful suggestions. Special thanks goes to Amaney Jamal for her extremely insightful comments. This research was presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, and is a substantially revised version of a paper we originally presented under the same title at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
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5.2 Latent class characteristics
The four groupings identified by the latent class model provide significant insight into the belief systems of Muslims worldwide. The primary division in the survey sample is between a class we term 'secular-liberal' and the other three classes. Individuals in the 'secular-liberal' class tend to both eschew traditional notions of gender roles and exhibit generally low levels of religiosity. They pray infrequently, object strongly to the veil, and oppose the implementation of Islamic law. Unlike those in the conservative subgroups, these individuals are divided on questions of whether having children is necessary for a woman and if, when jobs are scarce, men should be advantaged over women. While many of these individuals would not be described as strictly 'secular' or 'liberal' in the context of OECD countries, they represent the secular-liberal trend in the Islamic world.
At the other end of the spectrum, the 'fundamentalist' grouping combines traditionalist gender norms with high levels of personal and political religiosity. Individuals in this category believe overwhelmingly that women should be religious, veiled, obey their husbands, and must have children. They take comfort in religion, believe that religion and God are very important in their lives, and think politicians must believe in God as well. They also favor implementing Islamic law, and believe that men make better political leaders than women.
The two intermediate subgroups are both more traditional and religious than the 'secular' subgroup, yet they differ from the 'fundamentalists' in specific ways. The first of these classes consists of individuals who are similar to the 'fundamentalists' on issues of traditional gender roles, but are not as religious as the 'fundamentalists', nor believe that religion should be as involved in politics. We term this cluster of individuals the 'traditional' class. The other intermediate class, in contrast, consists of individuals who are very much religious and supportive of religious practices such as veiling and the implementation of Islamic law. However, this group is nearly indistinguishable from the 'secular-liberal' class on issues of traditional gender roles, including opportunities for employment and education, whether men make better political leaders, whether wives must obey their husbands, and whether polygamy is acceptable. We term this final cluster of individuals the 'religious' class.
5.3 Predicting belief system groupings
The effects of sex, education, social class, and employment status jointly predict which of the four belief system groups an individual is most likely to belong to. In order to interpret the estimated effect of these variables on the latent class membership of Muslim women, we calculate predicted prior probabilities for various hypothetical values of the covariates using the multinomial logit link function (Eq. 2).
Increased education reduces the propensity of Muslim women to hold strongly traditionalist beliefs (Figure 1). At the lowest levels of education, almost no women fall in the secular-liberal grouping, while approximately seventy percent are either 'fundamentalist' or 'traditional'. The probability that a woman will belong to the 'traditional' class declines at each subsequently higher education level. The falloff in the probability of belonging to the 'fundamentalist' class is even more precipitous at first, reaching a minimum once a woman has achieved around a university preparatory level of education, and then increasing slightly. At the minimum, however, for women, achieving a secondary school education _reduces by more than half_ the prior probability of falling in the fundamentalist group, compared to having only an elementary level (or less) of formal education. It is not that as women become more educated, they are necessarily becoming more religious; rather, they are believing less and less in traditionalist notions of gender roles, and hence moving from the 'traditionalist' and 'fundamentalist' classes into the 'religious' and 'secular-liberal' classes. This transition occurs in a slightly different manner depending upon whether a woman is in a high or low social class. Low-class women are more likely to adopt secular belief systems, while high-class women are more likely to retain their religious beliefs.
An economic explanation for the effect of education is that having at least a high school education creates opportunities for women to gain employment in the formal rather than informal or agricultural sectors where wages are low and often only serve to supplement a primary income. A possible alternate explanation is that education lowers women's propensity to hold fundamentalist beliefs because the education system is itself secular and encourages that type of thinking. We therefore re-estimate the model only for respondents in Iran, a country where women receive explicitly Islamic education. The estimated effect of education on fundamentalism and secularism in Iran follows the same pattern as in Figure 1, except without the increase in fundamentalism at the highest education levels.20
Muslim women who are not employed are roughly five percent more likely to possess 'fundamentalist' belief systems than those who work, regardless of education level and social class. Employment has similar effects on the 'religious' class for women with higher levels of education. As a result, women who work, are students, or are retired are far more likely to belong to the secular-liberal class; by as much as 12 percent for women with some university-level education (Figure 2). Overall, highly educated, low-social class Muslim women who work are the most likely to hold secular beliefs.
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Worldwide, approximately thirty percent of Muslims belong to each of the fundamentalist, religious, and traditional belief system groups; the remaining ten percent fall into the secular-liberal group. Once again, Muslim women are more likely to belong to the religious group, and Muslim men are more likely to belong to the fundamentalist group.
(pp. 12, 14-15) -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>