Tradeoffs between Religion and Democracy: Experimental Evidence from Muslim World

• In Event: Experimental Methods in Religion and Politics Research

Abstract

Citizens in most parts of the Muslim World report high levels of support for democracy while simultaneously expressing enthusiasm for Islamic law as a source of legislation and a central part of public and political life. Scholars who claim the presence of a compatibility between Islam and democracy have long noted that in the minds of most ordinary Muslims, there is no conflict between democracy and Shari‘a (Esposito and Voll 1996; Bayat 2007; Abou El Fadl 2004; Hashemi 2016). Yet equality under the law is a central feature of liberal democracy that is potentially inhibited by the enshrinement of the laws of one particular religion in a country’s legal system. Hence, the iconic culturalist arguments in the literature have proposed that a fundamental incompatibility between Muslim religiosity and democracy has prevented the emergence of democracy in Muslim-majority countries (Huntington 1996; Pipes 2002; Crone 2005; Kramer 2008).

Public opinion research in the Muslim-majority contexts has found that support for Islam in politics and support for democracy can, and often do, coexist (Tessler 2010; Ciftci 2013; Jamal 2006). However, these studies evaluate support for Islam in politics and support for democracy through separate survey questions and largely sidestep the question of tradeoffs between these two notions. Therefore, our knowledge is limited when it comes to how citizens in Muslim-majority countries evaluate the potential tradeoff between Islam and democracy.

Through a large-scale public opinion survey of more than 12000 Muslims in Algeria, Turkey, and Indonesia -- three distinct Muslim-majority contexts -- we seek to examine how ordinary citizens navigate these potential tradeoffs. Through a set of conjoint and priming experiments, we aim to understand how citizens prioritize each of these two ideals in environments where they may be at odds with each other.

Our findings suggest three main insights regarding the trade-offs between Islam and democracy. First, the Muslim public opinion is not monolithic when it comes to the evaluation of this tradeoff. Citizens’ evaluations vary across countries as well as different sections of the society. Second, the majority of respondents prefer not to choose one over the other, as support for a democratic but non-religious political system and a religious but non-democratic political system tend to be lower. They prefer a political system that is both democratic and religious. Finally, socialization in a secular system matters for Muslims, as citizens in Turkey which is more secular than the other cases, tend to prefer democracy over religious systems. Therefore, our findings highlight important new insights into a long-standing question of comparative politics research by tackling the tradeoffs between religion and democracy.

Authors

• M. Tahir Kilavuz, Harvard Kennedy School, Marmara University

• Michael Thomas Hoffman, University of Notre Dame

• Nathanael Gratias Sumaktoyo, National University of Singapore