Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iranian Public Opinion

Religion plays an important role in shaping how people see the world around them and has a potentially important effect on political ideologies. Despite the interest in Iran in the past three decades in the study of religion using quantitative methods, there have been hardly any works that take religion as an explanatory variable in explaining political attitudes or political behavior. We propose a construct named political Islam. We show how this construct relates to various dimensions of religiosity, and how it can explain a wide range of political attitudes as an explanatory variable. Not surprisingly, more religious people possess higher levels of political Islam. It is interesting that political Islam has a significant explanatory power in explaining a wide range of political attitudes even when we control for multiple dimensions of religiosity. Similarly, political Islam has a far greater and more significant relationship with political attitudes compared to party identification.