An “Arab” More Than “Muslim” Electoral Gap - Notes
Introduction
The "democracy gap" is wide in Arab countries, all of which have predominantly Muslim populations.
The 16 Arab countries underachieve in holding competitive elections relative to their GDP per capita (GDPpc).
In contrast, the 31 Muslim-majority but non-Arab countries overachieve relative to their GDPpc levels in competitive elections.
The study analyzes this pattern quantitatively and qualitatively, then highlights theoretical and political implications.
The essay focuses on electoral competitiveness, not a full range of democratic criteria.
Electoral competitiveness is defined by whether the government resulted from reasonably fair elections and whether the elected government can fill the most important political offices.
Electoral competitiveness is a necessary condition for democracy.
Assessment of political rights is subjective and controversial.
Two data sets are used: the Polity Project and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World.
Analysis begins in 1972, the first year both Polity and Freedom House have comparative scores.
Polity IV ranks countries from -10 (strongly autocratic) to +10 (strongly democratic); +4 or better is considered “electorally competitive.”
Freedom House uses a 7-point scale; a score of 3 or better signals “electorally competitive.”
Quantitative Analysis
Table 1 compares Arab and non-Arab Muslim-majority countries regarding political rights between 1972-73 and 2001-2002.
Of 29 non-Arab Muslim-majority countries, Polity IV found that 11 experienced significant political rights for at least three consecutive years, and 8 for at least five consecutive years.
Freedom House scores were similar: 12 of 31 had relatively high levels of political rights for at least three consecutive years, and 8 of 31 did for five consecutive years.
Countries like Albania, Bangladesh, the Gambia, Malaysia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey met the three-year criterion, with all but Albania and Niger meeting the five-year criterion.
Only Lebanon experienced three consecutive years of strong political rights on the Arab side, before its civil war (1975-1990).
No Arab country experienced five consecutive years of strong rights performance.
Arab Muslim-majority countries received an “electorally competitive” score in only 3 out of 434 possible country-years; non-Arab Muslim-majority countries received such a score in 97 of a possible 697 country-years.
Non-Arab Muslim-majority countries were almost 20 times more likely to be “electorally competitive” than Arab Muslim-majority countries.
Controlling for GDP
The “developmental thesis” suggests that as wealth increases, so does electoral contestation.
Six categories are proposed, ranging from “overachieving” to “underachieving” on political rights relative to GDPpc:
Great Electoral Overachievers: GDPpc below 1,500 and significant political rights for at least three years.
Electoral Overachievers: GDPpc between 1,500 and $3,500 and similar political rights.
Theoretically Indeterminate: GDPpc between 3,500 and $5,500.
Electorally Competitive as Predicted: GDPpc above 5,500 and substantial political rights.
Electorally Uncompetitive as Predicted: GDPpc less than 3,500 without significant political rights.
Electoral Underachievers: GDPpc above 5,500 with little electoral competition.
In the non-Arab Muslim-majority subset, 9 countries are rated as having experienced at least three years of substantial political rights; 7 of these are clear “overachievers,” and 5 are “great overachievers.”
20 of 29 non-Arab countries are rated as having no sufficient experience of political rights, but 18 of these have a GDPpc below 3,500 and so are “as predicted.”
Seven Arab countries exceed the 5,500 GDPpc level but have never achieved significant political rights for three years running; these states are electoral “underachievers.”
While 31% of non-Arab countries with Muslim majorities are electoral “overachievers,” not a single Arab Muslim-majority state is.
Among the 38 countries with extreme poverty (GDPpc less than $$1,500 per year), there's no Muslim gap in political rights.
32% of non-Islamic countries in this group have experienced three or more consecutive years of “electoral competitiveness,” compared to 31% for all Muslim-majority countries and 33% for non-Arab Muslim-majority countries.
Yemen, the only Arab country in the very poor group, is not electorally competitive.
In recent rankings, eight non-Arab Muslim-majority countries received scores indicating electoral competitiveness, while no Arab country did so.
16 non-Arab Muslim-majority countries rank higher than any Arab country.
Qualitative Analysis
Independent evaluation shows that competitive, relatively fair elections produced current governments in at least six non-Arab Muslim-majority countries as of March 2003:
Turkey: The Islamic-influenced Justice and Development Party won the 2002 parliamentary elections.
Senegal: The incumbent lost the 2000 presidential election.
Mali: The 2002 presidential race also saw the incumbent lose.
Indonesia: The candidate from the military’s long-ruling party lost the 1999 elections.
Bangladesh: Last two parliamentary elections led to a turnover of power.
Niger: The current president and prime minister came to office through a voting process recognized as fair by national and international observers.
Nigeria’s 1999 national elections are questionable regarding electoral competitiveness.
Albania has continuing problems with state power and electoral flaws.
In the 16 Arab Muslim-majority countries, the most politically powerful positions were not filled by a government that achieved office through a reasonably free and fair vote.
The 16 Arab countries are classified into three categories:
Completely autocratic states: Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the United Arab Emirates.
Liberalizing but not yet democratizing states: Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. Elections have begun to play some role, but the most important offices are not filled by free and fair elections.
States that once showed some degree of democratic opening but have since fallen further away: Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, and Algeria.
From 1972 through 1975, Freedom House gave Lebanon an impressive 2 ranking on respect for political rights. Subsequently, however, Lebanon began to deteriorate, and for each of the last ten years has received the second-lowest possible ranking (a 6) on political rights.
Jordan was probably closest to democratization in 1989–92, but since 1993, electoral malrepresentation has increased, press laws have been tightened, and in June 2001, King Abdallah II dissolved the parliament and has since issued more than 80 decrees.
Yemen is a clear case of reversal in electoral competitiveness. The 1993 parliamentary election was considered reasonably fair; the 1997 one less so.
In Egypt, the 1995 elections that gave the ruling party of Hosni Mubarak 94 percent of the seats in the People’s Assembly were heavily marked by fraud, coercion, and bans on many potentially competitive parties.
Algeria had “honest competitive elections” in the years 1989 to 1991, but the military coup following the first round of the National Assembly elections in late 1991 plunged the country into a brutal internal war.
Morocco is not a case of reversal so much as stagnation. The king can still appoint and dismiss the prime minister and the cabinet.
Theoretical and Political Implications
We should be more cautious in ascribing the electoral gap of Muslim countries to the nature of Islam.
The fact that 7 of the 31 non-Arab Muslim-majority counties are clear “electoral overachievers” relative to GDPpc suggests that electoral competition is possible at low levels of development.
All of the world’s religions are “multivocal” in the sense that they contain some doctrines and practices that are potentially harmful, and others that are potentially beneficial, to the emergence of democracy.
A particularly beneficial doctrine in Islam is the Koranic injunction that “there shall be no compulsion in matters of religion.”
Other potentially beneficial doctrines are the Islamic concepts of shura (consultation), ijtihad (independent reasoning), and ijma (consensus).
One of the oldest hypotheses in social science is that high levels of ethnolinguistic fragmentation are bad for democracy. The non-Arab countries that are electorally competitive began as politically independent countries with the highest levels of ethnolinguistic fragmentation.
If the findings of the present essay hold up when examined closely by scholars with a deep knowledge of the Middle East, then one may rule out high ethnolinguistic fragmentation, low scores on the Human Development Index, and Islam itself as causes of the Arab electoral deficit.
Most political cultures can and do change over time, because to some extent they are socially constructed by new opportunities, threats, and contexts generally.
Modern democracies are territorially bounded entities, each of which extends to its citizens a particular set of rights and asks them to meet a particular set of obligations.
Many contemporary Arab states have relatively new and arbitrary boundaries because they were cut out of the Ottoman Empire, and were afterward occupied and often reconfigured as European colonies.
The weakness of their “nation-state” or “state-nation” political identities has been compounded by the widespread use throughout the Middle East and North Africa of Arabic as the dominant language, and especially by attempts to privilege pan-Arabism (and more recently pan-Islamism) as core elements of national identities.
For many leaders of authoritarian Arab states, their proximity to, and involvement in, the geopolitical and military conflict with Israel is a key aspect of their—and the Middle East’s—distinctive political identity.
The United States contributes to the support of authoritarianism by subsidizing some Arab regimes such as that of Egypt.
Arab countries are also politically distinctive in that they spend a substantially higher percentage of their GDP on security than do the countries of any other region of the world.
If the international community were ever able to foster and support a peace in which Israel recognizes a viable and independent Palestinian state, and Palestine as well as most of the rest of the Arabic-speaking world recognizes Israel’s permanence and legitimacy, it is possible that Arab political culture might begin to change.
Against the background of the broad comparative history of democratization, finally, one may also predict that in the end, it will be less any imposition from outside and more the force of internal pressures and initiatives which will contribute most decisively to the emergence of democracies in the Arab world.