Last week marked the 93rd anniversary of woman’s right to vote, and when women exercise that right, exit polls and gender gap research by Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics proves it has a great influential power on the election results. However, other studies show women are less likely to claim they are politically engaged.
Recent research by Dr. Brian Calfano, associate professor of political science at Missouri State University, shows that Muslim women are more likely than their male counterparts to claim civic and political engagement, at least when the survey questions used don’t put Muslim identity in a limited number of categories.
“A lot of times people think about women being less engaged, feeling less enfranchised, and this is just in the general American population,” he said. “But you don’t see that (in Muslim women) because you’re in comparison to Muslim men in this country who are really worried about looking too politically active. Statistically, we see women Muslims indicating higher rates of donating to political campaigns and contacting public officials than their male counterparts.”
Using survey experiments, Calfano employed variations of existing Pew Research Center and Gallup questions. Using a computer algorithm, he randomized when Muslim subjects would be asked specific sets of questions at particular times during the course of a nation-wide Web survey in 2011. One question that he was particularly interested in was “Do you see yourself as more American or more Muslim?”
“This is what I call the identity tradeoff, and both Pew and Gallup have used variations of it over the years except that they didn’t randomize when the identity questions appeared in their survey. So, there’s no way of knowing how much it biased respondent answers to follow-up questions,” said Calfano. “The problem with the tradeoff is that it reduces an individual Muslim’s self-conception into two reductionist identity bins that impose a very non-Muslim perception of what Muslim identity in the U.S. should be.”
The terrorist acts of Sept. 11, 2001, noted Calfano, caused many to question Muslim Americans’ allegiance to the U.S.
“You’re living in the U.S., and the question of your loyalty or your allegiance to the country has been questioned profusely especially since Sept. 11, 2001, but even before that,” said Calfano. “When you’re asked a question about your national identity versus your religious identity, you wonder, ‘what if I do say I’m more Muslim than American? Are they going to perceive that as though I’m not loyal to the country?’”
Calfano noted that Muslim women suffer the greatest negative impact from the identity tradeoff. The average amount of reported political involvement among women in his experiment was significantly lower than for men when encountering the identity questions early in the survey.
He presented his research at Northern Illinois University’s Gender and Political Psychology Research Workshop on Aug. 28.
Preparing this study, he partnered with the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. After presenting his findings to policy makers in the Los Angeles area, he was hired to assist the Human Relations Commission there to look at possible solutions for improving some of the neighborhoods in depressed areas.
For more information, contact Calfano at briancalfano@missouristate.edu.
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