Anatomy of Religious Infrastructure in Authoritarian Regimes: Middle East Data

• In Event: Religion and Political Behavior in Arab Countries

Abstract

What explains the location of religious institutions in authoritarian contexts? Existing scholarship examines the effects of religious institutions on political outcomes in authoritarian regimes. In these studies, religious institutions serve varyingly as locations for opposition mobilization, distribution of goods and services to those left out of state-society pacts, and communal worship spaces that strengthen the salience of politically relevant identities. However, if religious institutions do indeed serve these roles in authoritarian contexts, it is plausible that regimes influence their placement, suggesting an omitted variable related to dynamics of political control. In this paper, we seek to uncover patterns of cross- and sub-national logics of religious institution placement in authoritarian political systems. To do so, we draw on a unique dataset of over 250,000 geolocated mosques from 13 Middle Eastern countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) to analyze the spatial relationship between religious institutions and governmental, educational, public, economic, and foreign institutions. We also draw on multi-method data from Tunisia to disentangle the sequencing of institutions in authoritarian contexts.

Authors

• Gordon Alexander Arsenoff, Princeton University

• Amaney Jamal, Princeton University

• Elizabeth R. Nugent, Princeton University

• Hani Warith

• Huseyin Emre Ceyhun, Princeton University