The Social Science of Ramadan
Big commitments, big effects on politics, economics, and happiness
Eid Mubarak! That’s right—it’s the end (well, yesterday) of Ramadan in Qatar. Ramadan—the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar—is the month when, in Islamic belief, the Prophet Muhammad received the Koran. The fasting during Ramadan—abstaining from food, drink, sexual relations, and any sinful behavior during daylight hours.
Ramadan reshapes society. Working hours are limited, and many businesses open in the morning and then close until the late evening. Families and friends gather late in the evening for iftar, the breaking of the fast; mosques and other institutions can host large iftars as well. As you might guess, it’s a big deal.
Ah, yes, and they close the store that sells alcohol and pork.
Although this isn’t my first time living in Qatar, this was my first time living here during Ramadan. As you might have noticed, Ramadan is a lunar calendar month, which means that it changes relative to the Gregorian by about 11 days every year. The last time I lived here, Ramadan fell over the summer—when many folks leave in the first place, particularly academics and others tied to the academic calendar, and especially so when Ramadan restrictions are in effect. But this year, the holy month fell right in the middle of the academic calendar, and I got to experience something that’s really different—and deeply significant and consequential for the community that’s hosting me.
As a social scientist, my mind turned toward exactly what sorts of effects this could have, and how we could measure them. And it turns out social scientists have learned a lot about that. In fact, we’re in something of a golden age for the social science of Ramadan.
Religion can be a difficult subject to talk about. There can be a division between how believers and practitioners experience religion and how social scientists examine the world. But if religion forms a central part of how a great many people see and act in the world, then ignoring that would put too much of human life off limits. Imagine landing in the United States in December and trying to understand social relations, movements, and the existence of the Hallmark movie without being able to access religion. And Ramadan is a much bigger reorganization of society than Christmas: a full month of reorganizing social life around a cultural practice that has something like 90-plus percent observance.
Something this big has got to have an effect on how society functions. But how can you measure its effects on, say, economics or politics? After all, it’s a central Muslim practice, which means that it’s hard to tease apart the effects of Ramadan from the effects of being Muslim?
About fifteen years ago, social scientists started using different strategies to explore this question. One strand used the variation in the timing of Ramadan to arrive at an answer. Because Ramadan comes at a different time of the year every year, it therefore interacts with society in different ways over the course of its transit through the solar calendar. In particular, the length of time spent fasting varies over the course of the year because days are longer in July than in December. And because Muslim societies are located in different parts of the world, there’s even more variation—the days are even longer in July in more northerly latitudes than nearer the equator.
The first, or at least one of the first, research teams to recognize the significance of this was Filipe Campante and David Yanagizawa-Drott.1 Campante and Drott used the variations in day length (and thus of fasting length) to isolate the effect of Ramadan and fasting on Islamic societies. Specifically, they found evidence consistent with a theory that fasting and other practices serve as commitment mechanisms screening out less committed members of a society from the collective goods that religious practices provide.
They also found that those devices are costly—not just on a personal level (going hungry for a long time), but on a societal level. Specifically, they find “longer prescribed Ramadan fasting has a robust negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries”—no matter how you measure it. It’s a large effect: going from the longest to the shortest Ramadan fasting periods (1.4 hours per day) leads to a difference in growth rates on the order of one percentage point of growth. But they also find that subjective well-being increases substantially because of Ramadan fasting. Bluntly, a society that prays together sacrifices some growth for more happiness.
A similar study by sociologists Ozan Aksoy and Diego Gambetta examined how this variation in fasting length affected politics.2 Specifically, by examining the variation in the length of fasting in different latitudes of Turkey (Türkiye), Aksoy and Gambetta find a substantial causal effect of fasting length on votes for Islamist political parties—an extra half-hour of fasting time per day leading to an increase of 11 percent in vote share in Turkish parliamentary elections. That quantum of fasting also produces large increases in the number of Turks who signed up for courses in the study of the Quran (Koran). Like Campante and Yanagizawa-Drott, Aksoy and Gambetta conclude that this furnishes evidence for religious practices as a screening devices—but also that their evidence demonstrates how religious practices can produce greater religious affinity. The more expensive adherence is, the more attractive (to some) that adherence will become.
A fascinating study by economists Ernan Haruvy, Christos Ioannou, and Farnoush Golshirazi3 explores variations within the daily experience of Ramadan. In an experimental study of male factory workers in a Muslim country, they found that workers observing the fast who were asked to play a dictator game. This is a standard experiment in which respondents are asked to divide a sum between themselves and someone else—in this case, a prominent charity—with the understanding that what they keep in the game they keep in real life (and what they give to the charity goes to charity). One of the emphases of Ramadan is on giving, in keeping with the social-scientific understanding of practices like fasting (or, say, attending church) as an outwardly observable and costly signal of belonging. In keeping with this, Haruvy, Ioannou, and Golshirazi found that workers playing the game during the fast were much more generous than those who had broken their fast in the evening. The experience of hunger—of fasting—made the religious prescriptions more acutely powerful.
I find this sort of work fascinating. There’s lots of ways to approach religion—oh, boy, is there ever—but investigating how religion influences the experiences of the religious on an individual and a societal basis is just really exciting (and a staple of sociology).4 That these studies are based on top-flight ways of identifying the causal relationships between a religious practice and behavioral changes makes them much more credible. And they point to very human manifestations of religious phenomena—while also prompting real questions about what their ultimate meanings are (particularly Campante and Yanagizawa-Drott’s material and subjective findings). Social science—as a disciplined, systematic set of diverse methods for understanding human behavior—matters, and going beyond taking observations for granted offers much of real value to learning why our societies work as they do—and differently to each other.
Campante, Filipe, and David Yanagizawa-Drott. "Does religion affect economic growth and happiness? Evidence from Ramadan." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 130.2 (2015): 615-658.
Aksoy, Ozan, and Diego Gambetta. "Commitment through sacrifice: How Longer Ramadan fasting strengthens religiosity and political Islam." American Sociological Review 87.4 (2022): 555-583.
Haruvy, Ernan E., Christos A. Ioannou, and Farnoush Golshirazi. "The religious observance of ramadan and prosocial behavior." Economic Inquiry 56.1 (2018): 226-237.
Wilcox, Clyde, Kenneth D. Wald, and Ted G. Jelen. "Religious preferences and social science: A second look." The Journal of Politics 70.3 (2008): 874-879.