Does prohibition of polygamy always correlate well with democracy?

score:2

Accepted answer

Evolutionary Psychology perspective

Polygamy is beneficial to

  • the "desirable" men (i.e., men with power/status/wealth who can attract multiple mates) and
  • "generic" women (i.e., women who cannot hope to monopolize a "desirable" man, but who can benefit from "upgrading" from being the one and only wife of a good-for-nothing bum to being the 7th wife of a rich man; this is an "upgrade" because a small share of a big fortune can be more than almost nothing).

At the very least the option (for men: taking an additional wife; for women: "upgrading") improves their negotiating power in marriage.

Note that polygamy leaves many "generic" men without a mate (and without even a hope of getting one) which puts them in a desperate position (leading to very risky behavior).

Historical perspective

A promise of enforcing monogamy gives hope to the mass of "generic" males and thus is an extremely profitable move for any revolutionary in a polygamous society.

Observe that both Jesus and Muhammad used this move: Christianity outlawed polygamy completely, while Islam limited the number of wives to 4 and gave the promise of conquered women to the mujaheddin (jihad participants).

Current situation

What really matters is not the legality of polygamy, but its availability. If a "desirable" man can have an "official" mistress and no one bats an eye, then the society can be considered to be de facto polygamous.

I would expect more correlation between the spread of polygamy (measured by, e.g., Gini index of number of women / men or the entropy of the distribution) and the violent crime rate (which is mostly perpetrated by males), because, as I already mentioned, men without a hope for a mate tend to engage in extremely risky behavior in the off-chance of radically changing their status.

The crime rate, however, can be moderated by an oppressive government or given an outlet in military adventures, so the formula would be something like

glm(crime ~ polygamy + oppression + aggression)

Here glm stands for, as DVK guessed, generalized linear model. In other words, if we build a regression model

crime ~ A + B * polygamy + C * oppression + D * aggression

and I conjecture

A > 0
B > 0
C < 0
D < 0

This, of course, should not imply that that there are no other possible predictors, e.g., the economic inequality as expressed as, e.g., Gini index, is probably positively correlated with crime, while general wealth negatively.

Upvote:8

prohibition of polygamy most certainly doesn't correlate with democracy.

  • Polygamy was prohibited in the entire Christendom throughout Dark Ages and absolute monarchies - not exactly the best circumstances for Democracy. Same with USSR and Nazi Germany.

  • On the other side of the matter, modern western democracies and USA are fairly obviously evolving into societies where polygamy will soon be legal (never mind practiced - what with French and their fabled stables of mistresses :))). I don't mean to sound like a h*m*phobic zealot, but looking at things from legal standpoint, if you legalize marriage between ANY non-monogamic heterosexual couple (like, say, legalizing gay marriage), there is very little legal ground not to legalize any other marital arrangements.

    As a matter of fact, BDSMish subcultures practice poly* arrangements nearly openly these days.

As to whether prohibition of polygamy is necessary for democracy, that is less clear. I'm not aware of any research supporting or refuting this, but a fairly plausible argument can be made that any culture which has polygamy (and not polyamory) might be LESS likely to be democratic in historic context, since in a true democracy, with average male/female distribution, the non-mated males would at some point organize and vote in the prohibition (unless they are explicitly excluded from franchise).

Also, as a side note, please don't confuse democracy with things that kinda look like democracy (hint: Egypt may have had elections, doesn't necessarily make it a democracy, 95% of the power is split between the military and Muslim Brotherood. Oh, and USSR used to have those nice democratic elections all the time).

Also, don't confuse "democracy for some" with what you may think of as democracy. While franchise restriction always exists and will exist (e.g., any society would likely stop convicted killers from voting), you can for example have extremely-limited-franchise democracy like city states of Ancient Greece (VERY VERY few people were entitled to a vote, none of them women, and few of them with no access to mates).

More post

Search Posts

Related post