When (Religious) Women Get Power: Evidence from Local Politics in the Middle East

• In Event: Power and Promotion: Local Governance in the MENA

Abstract

Compared with women of other world regions, those of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are often considered a marginalized social group, who rarely gain control over the levers of political power. Scholars see women’s marginalization in the MENA as a byproduct of the region’s patriarchy, social conservatism, and—particularly—its greater religiosity. Yet, exceptions have emerged in which women of the MENA have gained control over political institutions and meaningful power within them. This study inquires: When do women get power? And, particularly, when do religious women get power? To address these questions, this study relies upon an original dataset that codes the photos of nearly 4000 local politicians elected to councils governing local governments (i.e. communes) in Morocco’s Casablanca-Settat region. Such photos provide a very large, unique, and untapped data source that tracks the outward gender and religious traits of nearly every local politician elected in this region of over 6.8 million inhabitants. Whereas some electees to such local governments gain positions of power (i.e. the mayor or vice mayor positions on the council), others gain positions endowed with only advisory status. First, this study tests whether or not women are more likely to get real power in areas with greater modernization (i.e. less local illiteracy and poverty), less patriarchy (i.e. greater local female workforce participation), and more religiosity (i.e. greater local support for Islamist parties). Second, this study focuses specifically on religious women—those wearing outwardly religious clothing (the Islamic hijab)—to see if they are more or less likely to gain power in such areas. Preliminary results indicate that a community’s level of modernization matters for predicting when women get power, yet this does not generalize to women with outwardly religious traits.

Author

• Matt J. Buehler, University of Tennessee