The roles of gender and religion are both hot-button issues in the Arab world today and, many expect, will impact the prospects for democracy in countries undergoing transitions after the Arab spring. Scholars, policymakers and citizens express deep concern about the impact that gender has on participation and representation in the region. So, too, many fear that political Islam influences political behavior. The extent to which these forces matter for electoral outcomes—much less transitions--remains an issue of great debate. And, little has been done to understand their interactive effects on these outcomes. This paper aims to fill this gap. Using original survey data from a nationally-representative survey experiment of 1200 Tunisians conducted in 2012, this paper tests the relationship between gender and religion on citizens’ assessments of candidates. Respondents are shown pictures of potential candidates, male and female, in ‘secular’ and overtly religious dress, and asked to rate their willingness to vote for a candidate ‘like this.’ Comparing these groups, we ask: are male or female candidates, and religious or secular candidates, more likely to receive support? What is the interactive effect of these attributes? And finally, to what extent do respondents’ and interviewers’ religiosity and gender affect such assessments? Answering these questions takes us one step closer to determining the challenges that lay ahead, as Tunisia–and other countries within the region–work to enhance political representation. It also answers fundamental theoretical questions about the impact of gender, religion and the intersectionality of these factors on voter preferences and political outcomes.

A host of recent scholarship on gender empowerment in developing countries finds that women’s representation at the local level generates more tangible benefits for female constituents than does representation at the national level. The logic underlying this claim posits that female municipal level officials are more responsive and sympathetic to their female citizens. Women are also thought to trust local female representatives more due to their one-on-one interactions with respective officials. There are further claims that women’s representation at the local level translates into enhanced safety for female constituents. Studies conducted in India (Iyer , Mani, Mishra, and Topalova 2011) found that after the adoption of a municipal level gender quota, crimes against women rose 44 percent. Their research discovered this was due to an increase in the reporting of said crimes and an increased awareness that violence against women actually constituted a crime. The authors found municipalities with women at the helm had more responsive and sympathetic police and local administration, oftentimes eager to report and prosecute gender-related crimes. In fact, the number of criminal acts against women was not actually increasing, rather the political empowerment of women at the local level lead to better and more accurate reporting of those crimes. Insuring personal security and combating violence against women is certainly one of the most significant issues affecting women in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the globe more broadly. Has increased gender representation at the local vs. national level yielded differing results for Arab women’s personal security as in the case of India? This paper aims to statistically test whether women’s representation at diverse institutional levels has an effect on reported crimes against women. It further considers what those results reveal in terms of gender quotas' substantive contribution toward enhancing women’s personal security and status overall.

Quotas for women in politics have been adopted frequently throughout the Arab world in the past decade to compensate for the region’s low levels of women’s political representation. But who are the women that gain office through these quotas? Feminists and others that advocate for gender quotas do so because they believe that having more women in legislatures changes the type of policies that those legislatures enact as well as the way the public perceives women in politics. Yet other observers, including many feminists, worry that quotas may promote the election of “token” women or women who are already connected to elite men (e.g., as members of their tribes or families). Rather than enacting the sort of female-friendly policies that many feminists seek out, such “quota women” may uphold the existing socio-political status quo. This paper weighs in on the debate about quotas in the context of Jordan, which adopted a 20 percent quota for women on its municipal councils in 2007 under heavy international pressure to increase women’s political participation. Using newly collected data on the compositions of Jordan’s municipal councils and the backgrounds of its municipal councilors, this paper explores the effects of Jordan’s gender quota on descriptive representation at the local level. Preliminary analysis suggests that political elites in Jordan use the women’s quota strategically to gain representation on municipal councils, which can be important distributors of clientelistic benefits in Jordan. Indeed, socioeconomic modernization (e.g., levels of urbanization, poverty, and education) does not seem to make municipalities more inclined to vote for women. The paper’s findings give us insight not only into how local politics works in an authoritarian setting but also into the effects of gender quotas in the Middle East.