Effect of Religious Institutions on Gender Attitudes

• In Event: Authoritarian Governance in the Post-Soviet Space: Responsiveness, Control, and Institutional Legacies

Abstract

Scholars have varying opinions about what influences gender attitudes in the post-Soviet area. Some scholars point to the enduring legacy of Soviet gender-egalitarian policies, while others point to a widespread backlash against such policies after the Soviet Union's fall. We advance that the variation in gender attitudes (Y) can be explained by the nature of religious institutions (X). In Central Asia, Soviet repression and regulation of Islam led to a parallel system of formal and informal religious practice that remains in place today. Ironically, through forced secularization and controlling women’s religious participation, the authoritarian institutions created a more gendered formal religious institutions with conservative vertical cultural transmission, while less regulated and more inclusive informal institutions allowed for comparatively more gender-egalitarian horizontal value transmission. We argue that informal religious institutions known as public shrines encourage women’s participation in Islam, positively impacting the importance of women’s rights and respondents’ beliefs regarding the existence of equal rights, whereas formal religious institutions like mosques reify conservative gender attitudes. We explore a counterintuitive causal mechanism of the state-mandated forced secularization in Central Asia: how state-imposed secularization resulted in women’s ban from formal religious institutions like mosques and its modern-day effects. We exploit quasi-exogenous exposure to formal and informal religious institutions, where survey responses to gender attitudinal questions in the Life in Transitions Survey Wave 3 diverge by institutional exposure. Our work shows that variation in gender attitudes arises from institutional metrics rather than from 'Islam,' challenging previous studies that uniformly associate Islam with patriarchal gender views.

Authors

• Marika Olijar, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Khasan Redjaboev, U of Wisconsin-Madison