Friday Prayer and Support for Islamist Parties

• In Event: Using Experimental Methods to Understand Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

A variety of anecdotal evidence suggests that the local mosque plays a key role in the mobilization of voters and, further, that Islamist parties disproportionately benefit from this effect. I test a micro-level implication of this “mosque effect” by exploiting a natural experiment in two separate, high quality surveys of public opinion in Egypt - the third wave of the Arab Barometer and the sixth wave of the World Values Survey, both carried out in the spring of 2013. Treating the day of the week upon which a given respondent is interviewed as a case of plausibly random assignment, I find support for two key implications of the hypothesized “mosque effect.” Not only are aggregate levels of religiosity highest on Saturdays- one day after the communal Muslim prayer service (Juma’a)- so are levels of political support for the Freedom and Justice party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Beyond providing empirical support for theories connecting religious infrastructures to support for the Islamist parties, the results also suggest accounting for potential day-of-the-week effects in the analysis of large-scale survey data in Muslim-majority countries.

Author

• Steven Brooke, University of Louisville