Authoritarianism and the Family

• In Event: Gender and Institutional Change in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Many government policies affect family life by changing incentives around work, fertility, and the division of household labor. In democratic regimes, such policies typically reflect the programs of parties elected to power and their relationships with civil society and social movements. How are policies that shape family life made in authoritarian settings, and why do they take the forms that they do? In this paper, I develop theoretical expectations about the interests, including but not limited to economic development motivations, that authoritarian regimes have in family structures and the nature of intra-household bargaining, building on insights from research on authoritarian politics, the economics of the family, and the expansion and retrenchment of women’s rights. I illustrate the theorized mechanisms drawing on interviews conducted in Morocco and archival work on the Ba’thist regime in Iraq, as well as secondary literature on the family in other authoritarian countries in the Middle East and North Africa. I test a set of hypotheses about the relationship between family structure and bargaining and political behavior in authoritarian settings using data from the Arab Barometer, World Values Survey, and household surveys from Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.

Author

• Carolyn Barnett, Princeton University