Islamic constitutions and religious minorities

Abstract

Acknowledgements: Moamen Gouda acknowledges financial support from the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies research fund. We are grateful for comments by Mahdi Khesali, which helped to improve the paper.

Economic freedom and antisemitism

“…While antisemitism is lower when a relatively large share of the population in a country is Jewish, our measures of adherence to other religions are positive and often significant: A larger fraction of the population being Muslim or Christian is associated with more antisemitic views (although the significance is weak in the latter case). These results corroborate the findings of Gouda and Gutmann (2020), who show that discrimination against religious minorities is higher in Muslim countries (specifically those implementing Sharia law), but also the result in Berggren et al . (2019), which shows that tolerance towards gay people is lower among religious second-generation immigrants in Europe stemming from Muslim-dominated countries.…”

“…Interestingly, this also holds true for more urban populations. These results corroborate the findings of Gouda and Gutmann (2020), who show that discrimination against religious minorities is higher in Muslim countries (especially those with Sharia law), but also the result in , which shows that tolerance towards gay people is lower among religious second-generation immigrants in Europe stemming from Muslim-dominated countries.…”

Leader Characteristics and Constitutional Compliance

“…Regarding a leader's military experience, we find that it seems to undermine constitutional compliance, which is consistent with the more general observation in the literature that military regimes suffer from poor governance. Finally, extreme left-wing ideology of a leader is associated with a dramatic reduction in constitutional compliance, underlining the dangerous consequences of allowing supreme values into politics (see, e.g., Bernholz 2017;Gouda and Gutmann 2021). If interpreted as causal, these results raise the question whether constitutions could be more effective if access to political offices would be more rigorously regulated.…”

“…Supreme values, which are preferred lexicographically to all other goals and believed to be absolutely true (Bernholz 2004(Bernholz , 2017, may declare some duties of government to be more important than even the survival of the state or its citizenry (Congleton 2020). Adherents to such ideologies would place the implementation of their own values above the rights of others (Gouda and Gutmann 2021). Therefore, leaders who are supported by extremist (left-wing or right-wing) parties are not expected to respect constitutions.…”

Traditional law in times of the nation state: why is it so prevalent?

“…The legal status of social norms can have important consequences for public policy. Gouda and Gutmann (2019), for example, show that Muslim countries only display increased levels of minority discrimination if their constitutions formally recognize Islamic law.…”