Women ‘s Electoral Participation in Muslim Majority and Non-Mulsim Majority Countries

This paper aims to look and discuss the association of Islam and women’s electoral participation in Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority countries. The dataset that was used for the analysis, entitled “Party Variation in religiosity and women’s leadership: A Cross National Perspective, 2008-2010”, was taken from the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research, University of Michigan who approved the use of their dataset. The unit of analysis targeted 329 political party lists in 26 countries. Women’s political participation was operationalized as electoral quota for women, internal party quota, percent share of women in decision-making bodies, interaction of percent female leadership with female membership, and percentage of female nominees. Test statistics, such as t-test, Pearson’s r, chi-square, and correlation were applied in analyzing the data in order to come up with empirical relationships. The results show that there is an association between Islam and women’s political participation, as well as difference in women’s electoral participation between Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority countries. However, the coefficient of determination was small which suggests that there are other factors that explain women’s electoral participation in these countries. Also, this paper illustrates two opposing views regarding secularist feminism and Islamic feminism.