Pro-Capitalist Trends in Muslim Attitudes: A Change-in-Change Analysis

Abstract

Islam’s compatibility with Capitalism was debated extensively, albeit not conclusively, during the middle of the twentieth century, when several Muslim-majority countries gained their independence from Capitalist colonial powers. The global rise of anti-Capitalist sentiments in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession presented a natural experiment to study how Muslims’ views toward Capitalism are evolving relative to the rest of the world. I study data from Waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey, which bracketed the revolutionary waves of 2009–2011, using Athey and Imbens’s (2006) nonlinear difference-in-difference methodology to compare shifts in distributions of attitudes between Muslim-majority and various comparator groups of countries, as well as within the Muslim-majority group between Arab and non-Arab countries. I conclude that despite starting with strong attitudinal biases in favor of egalitarian distribution and a larger economic role for government, Muslim-majority (especially Arab) countries have exhibited relatively pro-Capitalist trends in their attitudinal transitions. Thus, I conclude that data dynamics during this recent episode support the view that Islam is empirically compatible with Capitalism.