Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

An abundant literature focused on the determinants of the support for political Islam in Arab societies, as well in macro as in micro levels. Indeed, some searchers chose to highlight national economic indexes, religious institutionalization and rates of literacy as explaining factors for these religious platforms, whereas others tended to underline individual variables, such as social situation, personal grievances against the incumbent regimes and hostility towards corrupted administrations. However, focusing only on support for Islamism tends to hide a general context in which religion is a consensual reference, whatever the ideological orientations of political actors: even secular and opponents to Islamist movements often argue their opposition to political Islam by religious justifications. That is why we take support from the fourth wave of the Arab Barometer (2016-2017) to explain mass attitudes towards a religious party compared with a non-religious one. Therefore, to investigate what determines support for religiously inspired parties, we opted for an individual level of analysis, utilizing available data from eight Arab countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen. We hypothesize that higher levels of existential insecurity would predict strong preferences for religious parties (I). Besides, as for right-wing conservative parties in Western societies, the support for religious parties would be driven by authoritarian values (II) and religious intolerance (III). Similarly to support for political Islam (IV), hostility towards gender equality in the political arena (V) and higher level of religiosity (VI) would be deep explanatory factors of the attachment to confessional parties. Finally, some opinions about external actors and international issues would favor this kind of attitude: hostility towards US and Western cultures (VII), but also religious justifications for opposing a two-State solution concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (VIII).
Our results show that national economic evaluations as well as personal economic situation are not related to support for religious parties. By the same token, a similar pattern can be observed when we are looking at the effect of existential security variables captured at the individual level, in contrast with previous research at the macro level. We found mixed results when we examined both authoritarian attitudes and anti-western sentiment. Support for religiously inspired parties is strongly associated with a higher level of religiosity, positive views on gender equality and a lower level of education, whereas being member of a religious minority strongly decrease the preference for such parties.
Faced with contrasted results in this sample, our study claims for a deeper investigation in each national case, to avoid hasty generalizations. Furthermore, our wish to focus on individual factors fits in an emerging field in the study of Arab societies.