The Gender Gap in Collective Political Mobilization in the Muslim World

• In Event: Women's Political Participation in Developing Countries

Abstract

The gender gap in nonviolent, pro-democratic, contentious collective mobilization remains significantly high in the Muslim-majority countries. What explains the gender gap in collective political activism in the Muslims World? Under what conditions do devout Muslim women actively engage in mass political activism? How do Muslims women negotiate tensions between supporting political Islam and engaging in elite-challenging collective political action?
Previous research on gender inequality in collective political participation has largely analyzed Muslim politics through macro- and micro-level theoretic lenses (Inglehart & Norris, 2003; Coffe & Dilli, 2015). Specifically, previous studies have largely focused on three state (macro-) and individual (micro-) level explanations of gender inequality: (1) socioeconomic conditions [shaped by modernization]; (2) cultural orientations and religious values [Islam]; and (3) political attitudes and interest in political affairs. From the value-systems perspective, previous accounts have so far observed that the gender gap is uniquely endemic in the Muslim-majority countries, implying a negative association between Islam and Muslim women’s political participation (Fish, 2002; Norris 2011). However, more recent cross-national empirical studies have found no direct evidence to substantiate the link between Islam and the gender gap with respect to political activism (Coffe & Dilli, 2015; Achilov, 2016). Individual-level interest in political affairs, or having strong political attitudes, are also positively associated with increased political participation among women (Coffé & Bolzendahl, 2010). Although previous accounts found women to show lower levels of generalized interests toward political affairs compared with men (Campbell & Winters, 2008; Coffe 2013), these studies have not examined the variation in polarized political attitudes (i.e., political views from the “left” [liberal] to the “right” [conservative]) as a subset of generalized political interest.
In this study, a high-risk collective mobilization is conceptualized as activities in which “ordinary people, often in league with more influential citizens, join forces in confrontations with elites, authorities, and opponents” (Tarrow, 1998: 2) that bear a high risk of persecution, arrest, and/or intimidation by contested elites.

Utilizing mixed methods, a combination of original (primary source) qualitative focused interviews and secondary structured survey data (the World Values Survey 2012; n =18,500), this study conducts a multi-level analysis to (1) chart and reassess the gender gap and (2) analyze the extent to which the gender gap shapes collective political activism and support for political Islam in 16 Muslim-majority states. Nested at a three-level analysis, the study probes the variation of protest engagement of Muslim women at individual, institutional, and state-levels along the following hypotheses:

H1: The gender gap in collective contentious participation is partly explained by support for Political Islam.
H2: Muslim women who are active members of civil society organizations are more likely to participate in high-risk collective protests
H3: Islamic religiosity is positively related with participation in high-risk collective actions
H4: The gender gap in collective contentious participation is partly explained by the variation in polarized political-ideological attitudes (from the left to the right).

The preliminary findings suggest that while men appear more likely, on average, to engage in collective action, religiously devout women with high associational social capital appear twice more likely than devout Muslim men to embark on collective protests. Attitudinal support for Political Islam yields inconsistent results. However, notably, active engagement in civil society social networks emerges as a robust predictor of political engagement, suggesting that associational social capital remains to be an important factor of motivation and vehicle for mass political activism, particularly among devout Muslim women. This study has significant policy implications and suggests directions for future research.

Authors

• Dilshod Achilov, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Renat Shaykhutdinov, Florida Atlantic University