A Measure of Political Islam and How It Relates to Political Attitudes in Iran

• In Event: Religious Identities

Abstract

Much of the analysis of Iranian politics, and the behavior of the Iranian electorate has traditionally suffered from two weaknesses: first, it has been based on anecdotes, rather than systematic evidence; second, it has been based on biased samples, especially focused on Tehran. From a different angle, while quantitative studies of religion Iran have proliferated over the past two decades, they are mostly concerned with various aspects of religion and have hardly engaged with how religiosity interacts with political behavior.

In a country where the state is a mixture of republican and religious foundations, religion has an important explanatory power in citizens' political behavior. Here we present the first systematic study of the dimensions of the Iranian voter's religious beliefs and show how it relates to their political attitudes. We use a series of nationally representative surveys of the Iranian adults. We show that religiosity is a multidimensional phenomenon, even when we look only at the subset of Shia Muslims. We develop an index which we call "political Islam" and show how it colors the citizens' worldview and seems to be strongly related to almost all of their political attitudes. In particular, we test important hypotheses about how political islam relates to support for the government, and how it relates to prominent foreign policy issues. This work adds to a body of scholarship about the interaction of the religion and politics and also helps us better understand Middle Eastern politics in a time when religion seems to play a significant part in the political arena.

Authors

• Ali Sanaei, Shahid Beheshti University

• Majid Hadavi, Sharif university of technology