Danielle N. Lussier

Indonesia: The Benefits of Civic Engagement

Indonesia’s successful democratization poses a puzzle. As a vast, lower-middle income country with scant tradition of open politics, Indonesia did not seem to be a good bet for robust democracy. But Indonesia enjoys an advantage: extraordinary levels of civic engagement. Indonesians participate in organizations at unusually high rates and display an exceptional level of interpersonal sociability. Spirited associational life has enabled Indonesians to constrain elites and sustain self-government by cultivating a sense of efficacy, fostering the cultivation and transfer of civic skills, and creating opportunities for individuals to be recruited into politics. Indonesia demonstrates how civic engagement can abet democratization.

Men, Muslims, and Attitudes toward Gender Inequality

Gender-based inequality is often regarded as a salient characteristic of Muslim societies, yet few works have systematically compared the status of women in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Fish (2011) finds a gender gap in structural indicators of inequality in Muslim-majority countries that cannot be explained by levels of economic development, raising questions about whether attitudes favoring inequality are more prominent among Muslims. We investigate the impact of structural-situational factors and religious identification on attitudes toward gender-based inequality using hierarchical-level models. We find that: (1) Muslim self-identification and the size of a countrys Muslim population predict attitudes supportive of inequality; (2) an individuals gender has a stronger effect on attitudes than does religious identification; and (3) measures of structural inequality also shape attitudes. The effects of these variables remain strong when we consider other contextual elements, such as gross domestic product per capita, education, age, location in the Middle East, and fuels dependence.