Vote for Your Family! Particularism, Support for Democracy and Support for Shari’a in the Arab World

Bakker, Femke E and Rotondi, Valentina (2016) Vote for Your Family! Particularism, Support for Democracy and Support for Shari’a in the Arab World. Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, 12 (2). pp. 115-137.

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Abstract

This paper examines the micro-foundations of the relationship between political particularism, support for democracy and support for Shari’a in the Arab World. Our hypotheses suggest that particularism reduces support for democracy whilst it increases support for Shari’a since, at the individual-level, in-group (family/clan) obligations are more binding than obligations towards the state (universal). We test our hypotheses using data from the Arab Barometer. Results suggest that, even when allowing for the correlation of the error terms, particularism significantly increases support for Shari’a whilst it decreases support for democracy. Our results are robust to alternative specifications of the model and to the use of techniques aimed at addressing the potential endogeneity of particularism.

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