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In the societal and scientific discussions about the support for democracy and gender equality in the Arab Middle East, this study engages the triangular theory, which predicts that Islamic orientations influence gender equality attitudes and democracy negatively, and attitudes towards gender equality are also expected to lead to more democratic support, partly channelling the influence of Islam. This theory was tested on Arab Barometer data for seven countries, including three different dimensions of Islamic-religious identity: affiliation, piety, and political-Islamist attitudes. The analyses roughly back the triangular model, but for democratic support only the Islamist values seem important, partly working through economic gender equality attitudes. Attitudes towards women's position in politics and education seem unrelated to democratic support. In addition, this study applies the gender and postcolonial concept of 'othering' to the triangular model. Theoretically it predicts that in the current neo-colonial era, anti-Western feelings might create more Islamic and less democracy and gender equal attitudes simultaneously, making Islam's impact partly spurious. Empirically, this is modestly supported for the Islamist-democracy link only. However, anti-Western feelings do relate to gender equality, democratic support, and religious attitudes, and deserves more attention when studying democracy and gender equality in the Arab Middle East.

In the societal and scientific discussions about the support for democracy and gender equality in the Arab Middle East, this study engages the triangular theory, which predicts that Islamic orientations influence gender equality attitudes and democracy negatively, and attitudes towards gender equality are also expected to lead to more democratic support, partly channelling the influence of Islam. This theory was tested on Arab Barometer data for seven countries, including three different dimensions of Islamic-religious identity: affiliation, piety, and political-Islamist attitudes. The analyses roughly back the triangular model, but for democratic support only the Islamist values seem important, partly working through economic gender equality attitudes. Attitudes towards women's position in politics and education seem unrelated to democratic support. In addition, this study applies the gender and postcolonial concept of 'othering' to the triangular model. Theoretically it predicts that in the current neo-colonial era, anti-Western feelings might create more Islamic and less democracy and gender equal attitudes simultaneously, making Islam's impact partly spurious. Empirically, this is modestly supported for the Islamist-democracy link only. However, anti-Western feelings do relate to gender equality, democratic support, and religious attitudes, and deserves more attention when studying democracy and gender equality in the Arab Middle East.

Much is written about quantitative techniques and feminist and gender studies. Despite convincing arguments in favour of utilizing these methods, they are still largely absent in the heartland of gender studies. In this article, this is related to the observation that methods are tied to epistemological positions and consequently quantitative studies are a priori associated with overgeneralization. A new perspective – the diversity continuum – is presented in order to contextualize research and make it possible to judge it relatively. This shows that quantitative research can increase the understanding of differences and similarities. Subsequently, it is discussed how quantitative research can be utilized to understand differences between people using existing basic techniques. In line with the conceptualization of diversity, this includes techniques to study intersectionality and how developments have different effects on men and women. The continuum and techniques are illustrated by an example of political interest (in the Dominican Republic).

AbstractThis article examines the gap between the political engagement of Dutch citizens with an racialized immigrant background and those without one. Analyzing the effect of perceived cultural and religious inclusion and exclusion, we look into what citizens with an immigrant background make of politics—measured in what we call the evaluation gap—and their actual electoral behavior—measured in what we call the participation gap. Drawing from the 2021 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study and the 2021 Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study, we include a uniquely broad range of immigrant backgrounds in our analysis. This combination of studies lets us transcend typical migrant/non-migrant dichotomies and include smaller, often understudied immigrant groups. Our analyses reveal that the evaluation gap is most pronounced for the largest, most-frequently studied immigrant groups, while the participation gap is most pronounced among commonly overlooked groups. Embeddedness in religious communities does not correlate with the evaluation gap though it does seem to suppress a deeper participation gap. Perceived discrimination, including in the form of underrepresentation, mobilizes citizens with an immigrant background, which obscures an underlying participation gap while also partly explaining the evaluation gap.

Right-wing populist voices argue that Muslims do not belong in Western Europe because Islam opposes the "core Western value" of women's empowerment. Ironically, such hostilities could cause European Muslims to reject antagonistic natives and their "Western values," potentially creating backlashes in Muslims' support for gender equality. Delving into this possibility, this study diverges from simple conceptualizations of one inherently patriarchal Islam to study the diversity among Muslims in the gendered meanings they attach to their religion in different contexts. Empirically, we use a uniquely pooled dataset covering over 9,000 European Muslims in 16 Western European countries between 2008 and 2019. Multilevel models show that while mosque attendance limits support for public-sphere gender equality, religious identifications only do so among men and individual prayer only among women. Additionally, our results tentatively indicate that in more hostile contexts, prayer's effects become more patriarchal while religious identification's connection to opposition to gender equality weakens. We conclude that Islamic religiosities shape Muslims' support for public-sphere gender equality in far more complex ways than any right-wing populist claim on one essential patriarchal Islam captures.

By examining all speech in the 18th legislative period (2013–17) of the German Bundestag, including 6,598,831 words in 51,337 text segments, we compare women's and men's parliamentary speech. Our approach builds on the agnostic view on representation and follows a bottom-up approach, which avoids pre-set definitions of what is women's or men's language use. By analysing the frequencies of the most used words and keywords from semantic networks, we find four notable descriptive patterns. First, female members of parliament tended to talk more about stereotypical 'feminine' policy issues like, for instance, contraception. Second, female members of parliament put people more central in their language, while male members of parliament focused more on Germany as a country. Third, women focused more on procedures than men. Lastly, female members of parliament used a politer language style, for instance, by thanking others, more than male members of parliament.

Muslim migrants and their descendants in Western Europe have consistently been shown to hold more negative attitudes toward homosexuality, the more religious they are. In this article, we go beyond this mono-dimensional view of religiosity and develop a theoretical framework that combines (a) the role of different dimensions of religiosity in anchoring cultural attitudes and (b) the potential impact of destination hostility and discrimination on the retention of cultural attitudes toward homosexuality among Muslim migrants in Western Europe. For the analysis, we use eight rounds of the European Social Survey, enriched with country-level data. Findings indicate that Muslim migrants' mosque attendance, as a dimension of religiosity, has the negative effect that was expected. Particularly, Muslims who grew up in Western Europe are negative about homosexuality if they attended mosque regularly, whereas among first-generation Muslim migrants, origin-country norms are a strong predictor of attitudes toward homosexuality. In addition, we find that perceived group discrimination drives the maintenance of negative attitudes toward homosexuality, especially among mosque attendees. These results imply that the development of more liberal attitudes among European Muslims is held back by a combination of socialization in conservative religious communities and hostility from host-country populations.

Objective: This paper seeks to understand the changing roles of religiosity and gender attitudes in the employment of women in Europe between 2004 and 2016. Background: Religiosity and gender traditionalism are both considered to decrease the likelihood of women's employment. This study argues that this relationship needs to be decoupled, as religiosity and gender traditionalism have different underlying mechanisms. Method: We analysed rounds 2 (2004), 4 (2008), 8 (2010), and 10 (2016) of the European Social Survey (ESS), which include, among other data, information on employment, religious affiliation, religiosity, and gender role attitudes in 16 countries (N=39,233). Results: We show that taking religiosity into account further increases the already increased likelihood of employment for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women compared to women with no religion. We also find, however, that religiosity decreases the employment gap between Muslim and Orthodox women on the one hand and secular women on the other. Including gender role attitudes in the model only marginally explains the employment gap. Conclusion: Our findings support the idea that the mechanisms that underlie the relationships religiosity and traditional gender role attitudes have with women's employment differ. Over time, the likelihood of employment increases for women of all religions, except for Muslim women, among whom it drops.

Existing studies propose that anti-Americanism in the Arab region is fueled by American interventions, citizens' religion, and relative deprivation. However, these three have not been addressed simultaneously or integrated into one framework. This study does so by developing and testing a context-dependent framework. Empirically, we apply multilevel regression to 32 Global Attitudes Project and 34 Arab Barometer surveys that cover more than 58,000 respondents. Contrasting dominant understandings, we find that American interventions fuel both political and societal anti-Americanism and that relatively deprived citizens are not more anti-American. Moreover, our results show (highly religious) Muslims are more politically and societally anti-American than (less religious) non-Muslims, particularly in Arab countries with fewer (highly religious) Muslims and American interventions. Altogether, anti-Americanism is context-dependent and shaped by different but interconnected mechanisms.

Public opinion studies argue that in Middle Eastern and North African countries, Muslims support gender equality less than non-Muslims. This overlooks the diversity in religion–feminism relations. Highly religious Muslims who support feminism are disregarded, even though in-depth studies have repeatedly pointed to their existence. Grounded in a structured anthology of qualitative studies on Muslim feminism, we provide the first ever large-scale analysis of support for Muslim feminism. Conducting latent class analyses on 64,000 Muslims in 51 Middle Eastern and North African contexts, we find that a substantial one in five Arab Muslims combines high attachment to Islam with support for feminism.