A recent paper by Prof. Najeeb Shafiq, from Indiana University, titled “Do Education and Income Affect Support for Democracy in Muslim Countries? Evidence from the Pew Global Attitudes Project” studies the influence of education and income on support for democracy in five Muslim countries including Pakistan. The paper draws several conclusions, both surprising and expected. The study is based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project data:
“The data for this study comes from the PGAP 2005, collected in the spring of 2005. PGAP 2005 contains data on approximately 1000 ordinary men and women (of age 18 or above) from Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey. Efforts were made to ensure nationally representative samples, but the sample from Pakistan is disproportionately urban.”
With the rural majority of Pakistanis living in feudal societies, it is unfortunate that “the sample from Pakistan is disproportionately urban.” It would be interesting to know what sort of increase in traction for democratic reform would result from increased education in rural Pakistan; is education really the silver bullet, or is economic reform a better route to social reform. Nonetheless, the study indicates that, in Pakistan, support for democracy is a social benefit of primary and secondary education; and further than the trends in Muslim countries do not differ from the trends in countries around the world. However, when compared to respondents in Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan, and Lebanon,
“…there is low support for democracy in Pakistan (27.4 percent), arguably because General Pervez Musharraf’s regime was perceived as successful at the time of the survey.”
The recent IRI survey confirms this observation.
I also found it intriguing that higher education did not change views in support of democracy, and further that:
“…there is almost no statistical relationship between belonging to the richest groups and having an attitude towards democracy; thus, this study cannot confirm or reject suspicions that the most educated and richest members of society oppose democracy.”
The heterogeneity of the five countries, in language, culture, level of industrialization, and history, raises questions on whether meaningful conclusions can be made broadly about five countries bound only by religion. However, research of this sort is indispensable in creating policy informed by empirical data and analysis, rather than by political expediency.
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