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# Posted 4:45 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

FEMINISM VS. DEMOCRACY PROMOTION? In an unusual article in Foreign Policy, a pair of top-flight scholars of comparative politics argue that

A society’s commitment to gender equality and sexual liberalization proves time and again to be the most reliable indicator of how strongly that society supports principles of tolerance and egalitarianism. Thus, the people of the Muslim world overwhelmingly want democracy, but democracy may not be sustainable in their societies.

At the same time, the authors rely on data from the World Values Survey to argue that

...democracy has an overwhelmingly positive image throughout the world. In country after country, a clear majority of the population describes “having a democratic political system” as either “good” or “very good”...in the last decade, democracy became virtually the only political model with global appeal, no matter what the culture. With the exception of Pakistan, most of the Muslim countries surveyed think highly of democracy: In Albania, Egypt, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey, 92 to 99 percent of the public endorsed democratic institutions—a higher proportion than in the United States (89 percent).

As far as I can tell, what this data shows is that there is no significant relationship between democratic values and "less permissive [attitudes] toward homosexuality, abortion, and divorce." If those were serious problems, then Texas would probably be a dictatorship.

But seriously, I think the authors make far too much of the existing correlation between women's rights and democratic government. To be fair, they do admit that women's rights were a late development even in the world's most democratic nations. This suggests that democracy may be the cause of women's rights and not vice versa.

Still, the authors seem to ignore the greatest potential flaw in their data: that the correlation between dictatorship and a lack of gender equality is spurious. Fifteen years ago, the existence of a dozen or more Communist nations in which women had equal rights (in principle if not usually in practice) would have prevented quantitative studies from detecting any relationship between democracy and gender equality.

Thanks to political forces that had nothing to do with women's rights, the nations of the Soviet bloc (Central Asia excepted) made a tentative transition to democracy. One unexpected side effect of this transition has been the emergence of a (probably spurious) relationship between sexism and dictatorship in the Muslim world. It would be foolish to let such a statistical anomaly stand in the way of efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East.

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