Demosophia

Is Islam Compatible With Democracy?

I started out tapping out a comment to Rusty's post on this topic, but it grew to the point that I decided to publish it as a separate essayette. Rusty graciously establishes the empirical parameters of this thesis, but I don't think they necessarily address the issue:

If one were really interested in seeing whether or not there is a relationship between Islam and liberalism, I would suggest the following. In fact, I dare any one to run the following analysis.

Hypothesis: there is a strong correlation between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Null Hypothesis: there is no relationship between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Plot a simple OLS regression model with the two variables. The first variable would simply be % Muslim. The second variable would be the Freedom House numbers. Since the Freedom House Numbers are coded negatively the following results should be found.....

If we are agreed that the above is a moderately fair way of empircally testing the relationship between Islam and tyranny, then the gauntlet has been thrown. I personally do not have the time to run the numbers, but perhaps some enterprising blogger with moderate experience using SPSS would like to give it a go?

The problem with this method is that, while it's a reasonable way of testing the relationship between Islam and political freedom, that's not the research question that's being considered.

Dean's question is whether Islam is compatible with democracy, so unless Rusty is willing to propose and support the notion that all of these democratic nations are free only because of their non-Muslim population he isn't actually posing an alternative hypothesis. It's a useful analysis, but not one that's necessarily in opposition to Dean's.

That is, even if the correlation or slope turns out to be negative with respect to the % muslim that only suggests that there's muslim resistance to democracy, not that such resistance will ultimately dominate. In fact, such a finding of resistance would be trivial... since we can almost predict it will exist without doing the analysis. To illustrate what I'm saying, a similar empirical analysis would have supported the notion that Democracy in America was impossible in the late 1700s, since there were no other extant examples on earth where even a Schumpeterian democracy (competition between elites for public opinion supporting their "right to rule") had a foothold. The universe at the time was completely selected against democracy. The incidence was 0. However, one might have looked at some of the precursors, such as the rule of law, parliamentary forms of government, written constitutions with specifically described "negative individual rights," etc., and having seen a positive trend have decided that a breakthrough was more or less inevitable. But there were no correlates of democracy at the time, because there were no democracies. Conceptually it was Everest. Seen in this light the Founders' vision is nothing less than miraculous. That's right, miraculous.

Plus, as a rule data suffering from selection bias tends to underestimate the effect of treatment variables, rather than overestimate those coefficients. That's because the baseline is higher so it's more difficult to get a large positive relationship for the treatment. This isn't always the case, but it's more often true than not. (For those interested in issues of arcane method see Designing Social Inquiry King, Keohane and Verba, 1994.) In this case, though, the treatment variable would not be the percentage of Muslims, but various kinds of interventions or adjustments that neutralize muslim resistance, or even turn it to an advantage. What I'm saying is that precisely because the selected sample is biased with respect to the dependent variable the effect of those independent and instrumental variables will probably be underestimated, if we limit analysis to "less than or equal to 4" on the FH scale.

And finally, Ernest Gellner's analysis in Conditions of Liberty (which, after all, is what we're talking about) basically argues that there's a threshold effect that depends on the process of reformation within the Ummah, or actually on the proximate end of that process and the exponential growth of rationalization (in the Weberian sense). I'd say that what Rusty has identified as "Marxist tendancies" in Islam are actually what Weber would have called (with good reason) "traditionalist." They resist rationalization, but there's no reason to presume that such resistance will ultimately succeed any more than we could have concluded that predominantly Catholic countries in Europe would remain immune to democratic reform indefinitely. In fact, if there's a positive trend toward economic rationalization one can almost predict an eventual democratic outcome, unless everything blows up...

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Posted by Demosophist at February 6, 2006 04:01 PM | TrackBack