Category: Readings

Toward Muslim Democracies–Reading Questions

Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leading advocate for human rights and democracy in Egypt (and the broader Arab world), and professor of political sociology at the American University of Cairo, delivered the annual Lipset “Lecture on Democracy in the World” in 2006. He makes a couple of interesting points regarding the link between Islam and democracy. Here are some questions related to the reading:

  1. What proportion of the world’s Muslims currently lives in states with democratic regimes? Are these states full liberal democracies?
  2. What does he term the “lagging third”, and where can it be found?
  3. What is ironic about some of the countries in the “lagging third?”
  4. What two historical events, according to Ibrahim, are responsible for putting a halt to democratization in the Middle East?
  5. What, according to Ibrahim, is the link between the creation of Israel and the presence of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world?
  6. Are Arab-Islamic regimes authoritarian due to Arab-Muslim cultural and religious exceptionalism?
  7. How does he characterize the Arab dictators’ “cynical appeal.”
  8. In the battle between “autocrats” and “theocrats” with whom should liberal liberal democrats (such as he) side? Why?
  9. How can the role of the Catholic in Poland during Communism inform the potential role of the mosque in the Arab world?
  10. What does the Arabic shura mean?
  11. How does Ibrahim view the the electoral victories of Hamas (in the Palestinian territory) and radical Shia groups in Iraq? Is the detrimental or beneficial to democracy in these places?
  12. What is the “one person, one vote, one time” phenomenon, and should we be worried about its potential appearance in the Arab world?

Ibrahim, Saad Eddin. 2007. “Toward Muslim Democracies,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 18, No.2, 5-13.

Informal Institutions and Democracy in Africa

Using results from the Afrobarometer surveys, Michael Bratton has written an article in a recent issue of Journal of Democracy (you must have access to JoD articles to read this) on the relationship between formal and informal institutions and democracy in a sample of African countries.

This is a blurb from the article about Afrobarometer: “[Bratton] is also founder and director of the Afrobarometer, a collaborative international survey-research project that measures public opinion regarding democracy, markets, and civil society in eighteen African countries.”

Assessing the Quality of Democracy

This is the title of a Journal of Democracy-inspired book co-edited, with an introduction, by Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino. Following the introduction, the book is divided into two sections: a thematic chapter dealing with such issues as (author in parentheses) the rule of law (O’Donnell), accountability (Schmitter), freedom (Beetham), equality (Rueschemeyer), and responsiveness (Bingham Powell, Jr.).

The second section comprises a series of two-country comparative case studies, which include the following: Italy and Spain, Chile and Brazil, Bangladesh and India, South Korea and Taiwan, Poland and Romania, and Ghana and South Africa.

I think I will use this the next time I teach Intro to Comparative.

Political Culture and Economic Outcomes

What kind of an impact does political culture have on political and economic outcomes and are there systematic differences across countries? In this new paper, Alberto Alesina and Paola Guiliano use data culled from the World Value Survey to demonstrate an effect between the strength of family ties (which they argue are different across cultures) and economic outcomes.

Here is the abstract and a link to the paper:

We study the importance of culture, as measured by the strenght of family ties, on economic ehavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from he World Value Survey regarding the role of the family and the love and respect that children eed to have for their parents for over 70 countries. We show that strong family ties imply more reliance on the family as an economic unit which provides goods and services and less on the market and on the government for social insurance. With strong family ties home production is higher, labor force participation of women and youngsters, and geographical mobility, lower. Families are larger (higher fertility and higher family size) with strong family ties, which is consistent with the idea of the family as an important economic unit. We present evidence in cross country regressions. To assess causality we look at the behavior of second generation immigrants in the US and we employ a variable based on the grammatical rule of pronoun drop as an instrument for family ties. Our results overall indicate a significant influence of the strength of family ties on economic outcomes.

You hopefully remember the graphic of the tripartite division of society that was shown in class last week. The family, as we mentioned, is one of the fundamental institutions of civil society and the level of involvement of the family in economic decisions and economic output varies greatly across countries. As Alesian and Guiliano observe:

Stronger family ties are associated with lower labour force participation, especially that of youngsters who stay at home longer, and that of women who have traditional roles in these societies as “guardians” of the household, fostering and protecting family ties. Thus stronger family ties mean more is produced at home and less in the market. Since official statistics only take market-production into account, countries with larger home production may have a downward bias in their measure of per capita GDP. This may also suggest that it is NOT the lack of child and care facilities that make women stay at home (an argument that one always hear as a self-evident truth, for instance in Italy), but it may be – right or wrong – the result of a family choice.

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