Islamic Constitutions and Democracy

Moamen Gouda and Shimaa Hanafy ()
Additional contact information
Shimaa Hanafy: Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

No 1429, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: There is an ongoing debate on the relationship between Islam and (lack of) democracy. Considerable literature shows that Islam, represented as an informal institution by Muslim population share, has a negative effect on democracy. This study examines the effects of formal institutions, specifically constitutions that prescribe Islamic law (Shari’a) as a source of legislation, on democracy. We use a newly developed coding of the degree to which Islam is incorporated in constitutions. Our empirical results show that the constitutional entrenchment of Islamic law has a negative and significant effect on democracy. Our findings are robust to using different estimators and instrumental variable regressions, employing alternative measures of democracy and controlling for Muslim population, natural resource wealth and additional control variables. While we show that Islamic constitutionalism is a reason for a democracy deficit in Muslimmajority countries, we find no evidence that Islam is inimical to democracy when not entrenched in the constitution.

Pages: 33
Date: 2020-11-20, Revised 2020-11-20
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
https://erf.org.eg/publications/islamic-constitutions-and-democracy/ (application/pdf)
https://bit.ly/2KwSMV4 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:1429

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().