I am very grateful to my dissertation committee, Faten, Paul, Pat, and Jen for their support and guidance in crafting this project. We have not always seen eye to eye on fundamental pieces of this project, but they gave me the room to be creative while providing insightful critiques and comments throughout the research and writing process. Other faculty members supported me through early stages of this project by putting up with niche papers on Islamist politics in their graduate seminars. Thank you to Jess, Yaseen, Maha, Samara, and Kamran. Before graduate school, Quinn introduced me to many of the puzzles with which I wrestle here and Joyce taught me to write about them; thank you.
I also wish to thank my parents, Jeff and Devon, for their support and encouragement through this long process. They helped us have a lot of fun along the way.
I am overwhelmed in my gratitude for Jess. She put up with long hours and unpredictable frustrations, and she provided solace in the hard times and joy in every time. I can’t say thank you enough.
Finally, this project is dedicated to Maisy and Chip who arrived at its inception and near its completion, respectively. They always gave me something to look forward to at the end of the day—and probably too frequently in the middle of the day. You both are my inspirations.
3 TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables..……………………………………………………………………………….……5
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………….……6
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………7
Chapter 1: Defining Islamism and its Puzzles……………………………………………………9
Chapter 2: Patterns of Islamist Electoral Participation: A Set-Theoretic Approach…………….28
Chapter 3: Patterns of Islamist Violent Mobilization: When Can Parties Help?...... 99
Chapter 4: Intersectional Patterns of Islamist Electoral Participation………………………….129 and Violence: The Case of Democratization in Indonesia
Chapter 5: Conclusions on the Patterns of Islamist Mobilization………………………………187
References………………………………………………………………………………………193
4 LIST OF TABLES
A sample of Islamist groups by ideology, organization, and behavior………………………….1.1
Summary of causal conditions…………………………………………………………………..2.1
Results from set theoretic analysis of each causal condition……………………………………2.2
Observations that changed in the contextualized reanalysis of the outcome set………………..2.3
Results from the set theoretic analysis of each causal condition (contextualized)……………..2.4
All observations for set theoretic analysis……………………………………………………...2.A
Regional distribution of country-cases………………………………………………………….3.1
Summary statistics of variables…………………………………………………………………3.2
Summary of major Indonesian Islamist parties…………………………………………………4.1
Multinomial logistic regression results for gubernatorial election decisions by Islamist parties (2014-2019)……………………………………………………………………………..4.2
OLS results for provincial vote share changes in national elections between 2014 and 2019….4.3
Distribution of gubernatorial decisions by party (2014-2019)………………………………….4.4
Summary of theoretical expectations in the prolonged process of democratization among the state and Islamist organizations and Indonesian empirics…………………………..4.5
5 LIST OF FIGURES
Distribution of the proportion of constituencies in which Islamist parties compete………….2.1
Effect of free association rights by V-Dem regional govt. index……………………………..3.1
Effect of free association rights by V-Dem local govt. index…………………………………3.2
Evolution of Islamist and secular groups in the course of democratization……………………4.1
6 ABSTRACT
This dissertation addresses two interrelated questions about mobilization and electoral politics among Islamists in the Muslim-majority world. A fundamental question in the study of Islamist political parties regards the conditions under which they will fully participate in electoral politics and integrate into electoral regimes. Because many—perhaps even most— Islamist parties emerged out of a broader social and religious movement in non-democratic political environments; there was little incentive to publicly declare allegiance to democratic norms and institutions when ruling elites made political democracy an impossibility. When opportunities for electoral participation emerged in the global shift toward more electoral regimes—if not democracies—Islamist groups had to make decisions about forming parties and how intensely to participate in elections. Chapter 2 reviews several expectations about party- level and regime-level inputs that may have caused Islamist parties to limit their participation in elections. I then rely on a set theoretic approach to test the relevance of each of the causal pathways. I find strong support for the hypothesis that the combination of parties that grew directly out of social and religious movements rather than merely adopting an association with these movements after their formation in combination with uncompetitive electoral institutions are nearly sufficient for parties to avoid fully participating in national elections. These results point to the relevance of this—their antecedent organization structure—highly salient and frequently overlooked dimension of variance among Islamist political parties. Over the last three decades both Islamist political parties and Islamist terrorist organizations have proliferated across the Muslim-majority world. Non-democratic regimes often argue that restrictions on Islamist political parties are necessary to curtail levels of Islamist violence, while these parties argue that without opportunities to participate, Islamist supporters may be more likely to turn to violent forms of mobilization. Scholars generally agree that the freedoms of association granted under political democracy will facilitate the organization of violent groups. In chapter 3, I present a theoretical discussion, based on the demands and preferences of Islamists themselves, that argues that opportunities for governance at the subnational level will condition this effect on levels of Islamist violence. Drawing on data from states where Islamist parties are organized and utilizing disaggregated measures of democracy, this hypothesis is tested quantitatively. I find support for the notion that only when there are not opportunities for subnational governance are increasing levels of free association rights are associated with increasing levels of violence. When there are opportunities for subnational governance, there is no relationship between free association rights and levels of violence. These findings highlight the demands of Islamist parties and the potential of subnational governance as a means of disincentivizing Islamist violence. The relationship between democratization and Islamism has traditionally been analyzed through an examination of either Islamist civil society or violent Islamist groups; the former, the argument goes, needs to “moderate” and the latter needs to “deradicalize”. However, Islamist civil society and Islamist violent groups compete over control over the same legitimizing symbols in Islam as well as over support from individuals sympathetic to Islamist ideas in both the populace and the state. Chapter 4 is an extended case study of the process of democratization in Indonesia and the varying relationships that Islamist civil society and violent groups had with each other and the state through this process. I divide the process of democratization into three pieces: the pre-transition phase, the initial transition phase, and the consolidation phase. I then
7 trace the evolution of Islamist civil society into normalized political parties and the rise and demise of violent Islamist groups through these three phases.
8 CHAPTER 1
Defining Islamism and its Puzzles
This dissertation project tackles two of the most salient questions in the study of Islamist political parties: 1) when do Islamist parties fully embrace democratic electoral participation, and
2) how might Islamist parties mitigate the prevalence of Islamist violence in the Muslim- majority world? There has long been a fierce debate about the relationship between political
Islam, violence, and democratic political culture. It is difficult to escape polemical arguments that Islam. On the one hand, some argue that Islam is invariably linked with violence and that
Islamist movements are antithetical to democratic governance on one side (for example: Bale
2013; Mozaffari 2007; Huntington 1996; Fish 2002). On the other hand, others argue that Islam is an inherently peaceful religion and that its legal history demonstrate its unequivocal compatibility with democratic norms and institutions, on the other side (for example: Esposito and Voll 1996; Esposito, Sonn, and Voll 2016). In the present project, I avoid these textually grounded polemical debates about the intrinsic nature of the religion of Islam or the Islamist movement in its broadest sense. Instead, I focus on empirical questions that embrace both the notion that Islamist groups behave strategically and that they are motivated a ideologies that, in some circumstances, may reject democratic norms or justify violent mobilization. In doing so, I take seriously the religious and social underpinnings of these groups while also recognizing the strategic incentives that political institutions can create.
I begin this short introduction to the project by carefully conceptualizing what I mean by
Islamism and identifying variance across Islamism as a political ideology and across Islamist groups. Following this discussion, I move to discuss the contexts of Islamist mobilization, which motivates this project. On the one hand, I consider the emergence of electoral politics in much of
9 the Muslim-majority world beginning in the late 1980s and expanding rapidly in the post-Arab
Spring political environment. On the other hand, I recognize the role of international conflicts and the proliferation of violent forms of Islamist mobilization over the same time periods. This context then forms the foundation for the subsequent empirical chapters that seek to explain patterns in electoral and violent forms of mobilization.
Historical Origins of Islamism
The term “Muslim politics” refers to discourses of political action among Muslims around the world (Eikelman and Piscatori 2004). From the origins of Islam and the Muslim community, there has been considerable debate about the relationship between religious authority and the authority of secular governing officials. The Prophet Muhammad clearly exercised both religious and secular authority in the Muslim community until his death (632
AD). Muhammad was the final messenger (rasūl) of God on the earth and was thusly endowed with divine authority to reveal God’s law, but he also organized a political community that included both Muslims and non-Muslims and he led political conquests across much of the
Arabian Peninsula. However, upon the Prophet’s death the community fell into its first schism largely based on the question of who would continue to hold this dual title of both religious and political leader of the rapidly expanding Islamic empire. The forerunners of the contemporary
Shi‘a community favored Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, as the successor, while the forerunners of the contemporary Sunni sect favored the succession of a close companion of the prophet named Abu Bakr.1 The first two Caliphs, Abu Bakr and ‘Umar, were able to maintain a dual religious and temporal legitimacy and hold the Muslim community together. However,
1 The history of political and religious authority across the expanding and fragmented Islamic world is outside the scope of tis project and has been covered extensively by other scholars. For a highly readable account see Ayoub (2004).
10 rapid expansion2 coupled with increasing nepotism and tribal rivalry during the reigns of the third and fourth Caliphs—‘Uthman and ‘Ali—led to outright conflict within the Muslim community.
Further division in the Muslim community emerged over the next couple of hundred years as competing dynasties emerged in Baghdad, Cairo, and Iberia, and the role of the
Caliph—especially in the core Caliphates of the Muslim world centered in present-day Iraq,
Syria, and Turkey—diminished to one of being simply an advisor who was tasked with legitimating corrupt, secular rulers. Thus, Islam became less a framework for governance, but a set of symbols that were wielded to provide a justification for the self-interested policies of extraction and conflict that typified medieval governance. This new advisory role for the religious establishment bred a new generation of disillusioned Islamic scholars who sought to reform Islamic religious practice, especially its relationship to structures of governance, to bring it more in harmony with the example of Muslim life under the leadership of the prophet
Muhammad (Malkawi and Sonn 2011).
The most significant Islamic reformer in the pre-modern period was Ibn Taymiyah (d.
1328) who fought against Shi‘i doctrines and Sufi3 practices, and, above all, advocated for a renewal of the interpretive practice of ijtihād. Ijtihād refers to the exercise of independent reasoning by Islamic legal authorities. The practice of ijtihād had been fundamental to Islamic legal practice until the codification of schools of Islamic law (madhāhib,sing. madhhab) in about the tenth century, which rendered ijtihād largely unnecessary. Ibn Taymiyah argued that by
2 During Umar’s reign—less than two decades after Muhammad’s death—the Islamic empire spread to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia. 3 Sufism is the branch of Islam concerned with mysticism and connections between Muslims and God. Among puritanical Muslims, many Sufi practices such as the veneration of saints are seen as heretical. Sufi movements have a long history among both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims.
11 adhering to a madhhab and its accompanying precedents in legal rulings, Islamic jurists were stifling the role of the Shari‘a in the life of the Muslim community. Ibn Taymiya’s ideas were taken up in the eighteenth century by Muhammad ibn ‘abd al-Wahhab from central Arabia. ‘Abd al-Wahhab founded the Wahhabi movement, a puritanical Islamic reformist movement that, after his alliance with the tribal leader Muhammad al-Saud, became the legitimating foundation of an anti-colonial political movement that would eventually found the modern state of Saudi Arabia in the wake of the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Theologically, the Wahhabis argued that nothing should stand between an individual Muslim and God, including clerics (‘ulema). For the purposes of this project, what mattered most for this movement was not its approach (manhaj) to
Islamic theology (‘aqīdah) and law (fiqh), but the political implications of this approach.
In the eighteenth century, the Wahhabi movement used violence to spread their puritanical ideas through the Arab world, and their alliance with the al-Saud tribal leaders was founded on the principle that good governance was any governance that allowed them to practice what they saw as the only true interpretation of Islam. Indeed, among the Wahhabi’s strongest criticisms against the established Islamic legal scholars was that they use their uninspired and authoritarian approach to legal interpretation to legitimate secular rulers rather than teach
Muslims God’s path (shari‘a). Today, Wahhabi clerics and jurists—who nearly exclusively reside in Saudi Arabia and continue to support the Saudi monarchy—sponsor similarly puritanical movements throughout the world referred to as either “Salafi4” or “ahl-e hadith.”
These reformist movements vary in their approach to politics, but broadly, they tend to be suspicious of political democracy. Most Salafi groups prefer to remain indifferent about the policy programs of the states in which they operate, arguing that the supremacy of the Shari‘a
4 For an excellent survey of Salafism as a global movement with many layers, see Meijer (2009).
12 can only be achieved when Muslims are sufficiently educated. Thus, their goals cannot be met through political participation. However, since the 1970s, some Salafi groups have begun to develop more sophisticated political programs as they embrace other, non-Salafi, reformist ideas about the corrupting nature of expanding Western powers, the globalized economy, and the dictatorial political regimes that have become entrenched by these two forces.
Modern Islamic reform movements emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Western powers to control much of the Muslim- majority world—notably the Indian sub-continent and Egypt. The first wave of these reformers included Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) and Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) who argued, based on evidence from the medieval period, that “when Europe was most Christian it was most backward, while the Muslim community was most advanced when it was most Muslim” (Ayoub
2004, p. 203). Thus, the advances that Europe had made—especially their imperial control of lands predominately populated by Muslims—were at least partly the result of a decline in
Muslim piety—a decline for which al-Afghani faulted the Muslim rulers of the Islamic community. In addition to advocating for a renewal of Islamic study and Muslim piety, al-
Afghani advocated for revolution among Muslims and the creation of a unified Islamic state that stretched from Southeast Asia to Morocco. Importantly, among the European advances during this period were also market economies and political democracy, which al-Afghani and ‘Abduh both found compatible with this new Islamic state.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was the ideal moment for these modernist Islamic theories to be put to the test, but Western powers and secular-nationalist indigenous leaders made this impossible. The next phase of Islamic reform was even more overtly political and statist, and it became more hostile to the West. This wave of Islamic political thinkers and movements has
13 been broadly identified as Islamic fundamentalism or Islamism5 (Moaddel and Talattof 2002).
While the modernist goal of a united Muslim community (ummah) remained important, the hegemonic status of nation-states as the primary units of political power moved transnational aspirations to abstractions and these movements began to emphasize the importance of implementing the Shari’a through the institutional structures and within the borders of modern states. This new statist orientation is at the heart of two of the most significant Islamist organizations to emerge after World War I: The Society of Muslim Brothers (al-jam‘iyyat al- ikhwān al-muslimīn, often referred to as the Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt (est. 1929), and
Jama’at-e Islami in India (est. 1943).
Both the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama‘at-e Islami were initially established to provide social and religious services for their respective populations to increase piety, Islamicize society, and—ultimately—create an Islamic state governed by Islamic law. The Muslim Brotherhood remained committed to bottom-up strategies of Islamicization, while Jama‘at-e Islami transitioned to preferring to attempt to Islamicize the upper-levels of post-partition Pakistani political society as a means of creating an Islamic state. After the death of the founder of the
Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, some factions of the group emerged that favored a more confrontational approach to reaching their goals of Islamicization and regime change. The most significant ideologue from this more hardline faction was Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966). Qutb argued that Muslims were obligated to violently topple political regimes that he identified as un-Islamic
5 The meaning of the neologism “Islamism” has been the topic of some debate among scholars. Some have argued that Islamism ought to exclusively pertain to the ideological goals of groups with holistic and totalitarian goals (Mozaffari 2007; Bale 2013). Others argue that Islamism is a broader term that specifically relates to the ideology of groups that seek to, to varying degrees, make claims on the powers of the state with reference to Islamic symbols (Mecham 2017). Even in the broadest view, Islamism is distinct from concepts like “political Islam” (Ayoob 2008; Roy 1990) and “Muslim politics” (Eikelman and Piscatori 1996; Hefner 2005), which refer to a broader set of actions and ideas and focus on the variety of modes of activism in which Muslims participate rather than a particular family of politico-religous ideologies.
14 and replace them with regimes that would implement the dictates of the Shari‘a. This ideological innovation would spread rapidly through Islamist militants from around the world who were recruited to fight against the Soviet armies in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, under the patronage Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988.
General Zia is “the person most responsible for turning Pakistan into a global center for political Islam” (Haqqani 2005, p. 131). Coming to power in a coup d’état that unseated the secular leftist government of Zulfikar Bhutto, Zia was supported by a broad Islamic coalition that demanded the implementation of Islamic rule—they used the phrase nizam-e mustafa, meaning the political system of the prophet Muhammad—a system that Jama‘at-e Islami played a crucial role in crafting. This Islamicizing project was buttressed by financial support from the United
States, who used Zia and the Pakistani military to recruit and train foreign fighters to support
Afghan paramilitaries who were attempting to push back the Soviet Union’s invasion of
Afghanistan. This militant activity brought Muslims from North Africa, the Middle East, and
South and Southeast Asia to Afghanistan, through Pakistan where they were indoctrinated not only in opposition to the Soviet Union, but in the Islamist ideologies of their patrons who favored the implementation of the Shari‘a by the state. Some of these fighters combined this ideological indoctrination with the paramilitary training they received in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan then became the hub of an international network of Islamists called al-Qaeda. Al
Qaeda’s network serves as the principle case for arguments that Islamism aspires to totalitarian domination of the world (cf. Mozaffari 2007), and its members aspire to radically transform the states from they originate. One of the most well-connected of these fighters who came to see the monarchical regime of his native Saudi Arabia as un-Islamic was Osama bin Laden, who founded a network of veterans of the Afghan conflict to destabilize the Saudi state and the
15 Western powers that had contributed to its corruption. Al-Qaeda, thus, became the glue that connected violent and extremist Islamist organizations around the world, and despite its transnational network, its affiliates remained statist in their ambitions.
While General Zia and the militants in Afghanistan were spreading violent, statist approaches to Islamist mobilization among their recruits, Shi‘i Muslims in Iran were living under the world’s first Islamist political regime. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary opposition to the dynastic Pahlavi monarchy demonstrated to the world that not only could Islam provide a framework for mass mobilization but that a statist interpretation of the Shari‘a could be codified into a system of governance for a modern state. Because of the anti-Shi‘a dynamics of many prominent Islamist thinkers and movements, the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was met with some ambivalence among Islamists around the world. On the one hand, the Islamic revolution demonstrated the potential for an Islamist ideology to mobilize a mass revolution against a pro-Western secular authoritarian monarchy. Until the Islamic revolution, despite their vast organizational structures in some countries, Islamist groups had played relatively minor roles in formal state institutions. On the other hand, Khomeini’s approach to Islamic governance was styled in the tradition of Shi‘i religious authority which tends to be much more hierarchical than in Sunni Islam. He also sought to export the revolution to Muslims around the world, but his
Shi‘i orientation and anti-monarchical stance alienated many of the most significant voices in political Islam—especially on the Arabian Peninsula. However, in either case, the Iranian revolution renewed the influence of Islamism in much of the Muslim-majority world. In particular, the statist orientation of Islamism became hegemonic as Islamists around the world either attempted to emulate or challenge the Iranian “Islamic Republic.”
16 The final force that has contributed to the development of contemporary Islamism is democratization. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a global wave of democratization—that had actually begun more than a decade earlier in Southern Europe—swept the Earth. Entrenched authoritarians fell, and even where they did not, the institutions of democracy—elections, political parties, legislatures, etc.—became nearly ubiquitous. Political parties that advocated for an increased role for the Shari‘a in their state’s policy programs had existed in Indonesia and
Malaysia since the 1950s, and Pakistan since the 1970s, and some were ultimately interested in transforming their state into one exclusively governed by the Shari‘a. The democratic wave of the 1990s saw similar parties emerge across the Middle East and even Central Asia, where electoral politics was being practiced for the first time. No matter how devoted any individual party was to the implementation of the Shari‘a, all of these parties took an explicitly statist approach to their political ambitions. Islamist parties emerged as significant political actors across the Muslim-majority world, and they have won national elections in Morocco, Tunisia,
Egypt, Sudan, and Iraq.
Interestingly, this evolution toward a statist orientation in contemporary Islamism— specifically the interest in creating an “Islamic state”—may be a self-contradictory ambition.
Wael Hallaq (2012) argues that the respective foundations of Islamic law and the role of law in a modern state are irreconcilably different from one another. While the Shari‘a is meant to define an ideal human existence, the legal structures of modern states are meant to govern societies in realistic—not idealistic or utopian—terms. Thus, the foundational aspiration of the Shari‘a cannot be accomplished through the institutions of a modern state. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template for governance among Islamists around the world. In this project, this statist orientation is definitive of Islamism.
17 Conceptualizing Islamism
Fundamentally, Islamism is a political ideology. It varies widely, as do the groups that espouse this ideology. This section reviews ways that scholars have identified to conceptualize variance in Islamism and Islamist groups and discusses the sources of variance that I will rely upon in the remaining chapters.
Ideological variance in Islamism has rarely been conceptualized systematically.6 Rather, scholars have tended to identify Islamist ideologies in ad hoc case studies. Taking these studies together, three broad categories of Islamist ideologies emerge. Bokhari and Senzai (2013) explicitly identify these three ideological camps with labels that relate to the relationship each ideology has with political democracy: rejectors, conditionalists, and participators. As the name suggests, the rejector ideology sees no compatibility between Islamism and political democracy.
A rejector ideology, similar to all contemporary Islamist ideologies, is fundamentally statist.
However, it does not seek to gain or influence state powers through democratic processes.
Instead, rejectors tend to remain aloof of formal politics, preferring instead to engage in a long- run process of Islamicization of the state through increasing study of the sources of Islamic law and general piety among the population. However, some groups that espouse rejector ideologies developed a more aggressive stance toward the non-Islamist regimes in which they found themselves. In particular, rejectors have embraced the idea that democracy takes an attribute of
God—sovereignty (hakimiyyah)—and gives it to humans.7 At the other end of Bokhari and
Senzai’s ideological spectrum are acceptors which fully embrace the institutional constraints of political democracy. Participator ideologies are embraced by groups that participate in
6 An exception to this pattern is an ongoing working paper by Ghosn, Bond, and Curtis (n.d.) 7 This interpretation of hakimiyya comes from the political philosophy of Sayyid Abul A‘la Maududi in Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb in Egypt. While Maududi eventually came to accept some elements of democratic participation and governance in Pakistan, Qutb remains the principle ideologue of violent Islamist groups around the world.
18 competitive elections as well as groups interested in liberalizing the political regimes of their home countries. These ideologies can be traced back to the liberal reformers of the nineteenth century, but they have fully embraced statist styles of governance in the contemporary political world. And somewhere between rejector and participator ideologies are conditionalist Islamist ideologies that embrace democratic institutions as vehicles for influencing the state, but do not argue that democracy and Islam are necessarily harmonious. Often these conditionalists come from groups with rejector ideologies under political regimes that liberalize. While groups with conditionalist ideologies may remain skeptical of democracy, they are willing to participate in electoral contests in a limited way.
Of course, a group’s willingness to work within democratic constraints is not the only ideological dimension of Islamism. Perhaps the most significant source of ideological variance among Islamists is the variance in their interpretive approach to the sources of Islamic law. The most significant legal interpretive division in the Islamist movement is between the Salafis and other Islamists. Definitive of the Salafi movement is an originalist approach to the interpretation of the sources of Islamic law. As noted above, the Salafi intellectual movement focuses on a return to ijtihād by elaborating the Shari‘a from the Qur’an and the hadīth8 rather than by emulating the legal decisions of past jurists (taqlīd). Practically, this emphasis on scholarship and originalism has created an insulated and exclusivist community of Muslims who are dedicated to living the life that was emulated by the first generation of Muslims. As a political ideology,
Salafism is a distinct form of Islamism that tends to embrace a holistic and unified vision of the relationship between Islam and the state, modeled after the form of governance under the
8 Hadīth is one of several collections of stories about and sayings by the Prophet Muhammad and his closest companions. The life-example (sunnah) of the prophet is a principle source of Islamic law, and this life-example is contained in these hadīth collections.
19 Prophet Muhammad and his successors. Non-Salafi Islamist ideologies tend to lack the sophisticated legal methodologies from which Salafism emerged, and this lack of jurisprudential oversight has made these ideologies more amenable to the idea of a shared public space between
Islam and the state (Gerges 2013). However, the relationship between ideology and political behavior is conditional on structural and institutional conditions within a state (Schwedler 2011).
Variance across Islamist groups has also been conceptualized across a number of dimensions of organizational structure. Islamist groups vary in who and how they recruit members to their organization, in the services they provide, and their relationship to political parties and electoral contests. Sinno and Khanani (2009, pp. 38-39) identify four ideal types of organizations in Islamist groups: centralized, patronage-based, vanguard, and networked.
Centralized groups have several specialized branches that provide various services and goods to their communities. These services are generally public goods that are not provided exclusively to group members, and these activities tend to help groups build a reputation of trust and competence in their communities (cf. Cammett and Luong 2014). The Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood is the quintessential centralized Islamist group. Like centralized groups, patronage- based groups provide goods and services to their supporters and potential supporters, but unlike centralized groups, support for patronage-based groups tends to be a direct effect of the goods provided by the group. Afghan and Iraqi Islamist political parties are examples of Islamist patronage-based groups. Vanguard Islamist parties are highly centralized, but they do not focus on the provision of public goods. These parties tend to have a lengthy and onerous initiation process, and they focus their efforts on influencing elite behavior rather than mass organization.
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and the Pakistani Jama‘at-e Islami are examples of vanguard parties. Finally, networked Islamist groups are highly decentralized, do not provide public goods,
20 and rely on members and affiliates to recruit ideologically like-minded members to participate in, typically, grass-roots activities. Networked groups are typified by terrorist organizations, especially al-Qaeda; networked organizations would struggle to organize electoral campaigns because of the relative autonomy of their lower ranks.
Finally, Islamist groups vary on their behaviors. This is perhaps the simplest way to identify variance among Islamist groups. In particular, the difference between Islamist groups that participate in violent campaigns and those that do not is highly relevant among political theoreticians and policy-makers. However, behaviorally, there is considerable variance among
Islamist groups that mobilize violently. Some of these groups are decentralized terrorist networks with little in the way of practical political ambitions other than creating chaos and stoking fears
(al-Qaeda), and others are highly centralized networks of fighters with clear—though radical and lofty—political ambitions (Palestinian Islamic Jihad). Some combine violent mobilization with electoral participation and social service provision (e.g., Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese
Hizbullah), while others focus exclusively on armed rebellion against the state and occupying forces (e.g., Afghan Mujahideen groups and Algerian Armed Islamic Group). Additionally, violent Islamist groups differ in the contexts in which they engage in violence. Islamists violently mobilized in contexts of brutal civil conflict in Algeria and Syria and against occupying forces in the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They also violently mobilized in communal conflicts in Indonesia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and led violent secessionist movements in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Russia. Most significantly to the global great powers, Islamists have perpetrated massive terrorist attacks specifically targeting Westerners in—among other places—India, Western Europe, Tunisia, Egypt, and the United States.
21 All of these sources of variance matter for demonstrating that Islamism is not a monolith.
Additionally, these sources of variance are intersectional. In other words, ideological differences may not correlate with organizational, or behavioral differences. Table 1 displays a small sample of Islamist groups at the intersection of ideological, organizational, and behavioral variance. This table is not meant to provide an exhaustive typological arrangement of Islamist organizations.
Instead, it demonstrates, using relatively influential and recognizable cases, the wide variation in
Islamist organizations and the intersectional nature of their ideological, organizational, and behavioral tendencies. The distribution of these cases offers several lessons about the nature of
Islamist groups. Among violent groups, the political parties Hamas, Hizbullah, and FIS stand out because they all have both histories of political participation and violent mobilization. However, their violence needs to be placed in the national context in which these groups operate. Hamas’s violent campaigns have largely focused against Israelis who they see as occupiers. Hamas did also wage a violent campaign against the leading secular party in the Palestinian Authority,
Fatah, in 2007. Hizbullah emerged as a paramilitary organization during the Lebanese civil war to defend Shi‘i Muslims in Southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation. In the aftermath of the civil war, Hizbullah has remained militarized and operates alongside the Lebanese armed forces as well as in conjunction with regional allies in armed conflicts, especially in Syria. The Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS) was a broad coalition of Islamist groups in Algeria that violently mobilized against the state after the military canceled elections that the FIS were projected to win in 1991.
More extremist elements of the FIS went on to form Islamist rebel groups that waged a brutal civil war against the Algerian state for nearly the next decade. These three parties share two important conditions. First, each party violently mobilized in response to external forces. Second, each of them participated in electoral competitions when they were given the opportunity.
22 Another lesson that can be gleaned from the distribution of organizations in the table is the ideological nature of most groups with rejector ideologies. Rejectors tend to come from the
Salafi trend in Islamist thought, but these Salafi groups include both violent and non-violent groups, and groups with both national and transnational goals. ISIL, al-Qaeda, and Hizb ut-
Tahrir all have the broad goal of reestablishing a transnational Islamic Caliphate. The Egyptian
Salafi Call, which rejected electoral politics until after the Egyptian Revolution when it formed the Nour political party, and the Palestinian Salafi movement have not made claims about the formation of a transnational state, and the rejector Afghani mujahideen groups were explicitly interested in Afghani national interests. Last but not least, among rejectors, the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad does not belong to the Salafi trend, demonstrating that a Salafist legal approach is neither necessary nor sufficient for groups to be rejectors.
Finally, the table demonstrates the inadequacies of networked Islamist groups.
Networked groups, because they lack a central command and leadership structure, tend to also lack a coherent ideology, or a sufficient amount of organization to overcome collective action problems. The United Tajik Opposition (UTO) continually struggled to identify a coherent goal in the conflict with the Tajiki state throughout the 1990s—indeed many fighters did not have
Islamist ambitions at all. Similarly, al-Qaeda’s various branches seem much more focused on fomenting instability than actually reaching any ideological goal. The only non-violent networked group in the table is the Palestinian Salafi movement, which is a broad collection of scholars and students in the West Bank who explicitly reject political engagement—including, indeed especially, the Palestinian national movement.
The concept of “Muslim politics” offers researchers an important insight that the religion of Islam can be—and frequently is—used for political purposes by a wide variety of actors.
23 States across the Muslim-majority world rely on various forms of legitimation through Islam.
Various features of the religion become politicized as states seek to extract resources, networks, and endorsements from Islamic institutions. These forms of legitimation take many forms including monarchs citing their familial relationship to the Prophet Muhammad, governments seeking the input of Islamic centers of learning in drafting policy and legislation, providing patronage to Islamic organizations that seek to spread the message of Islam, and states subsidizing clerical education costs.
Not only do states rely on Islamic institutions, but citizens of various Muslim-majority states rely on Islamic groups to organize a seemingly endless array of social and political interactions. Islamist groups provide health care services, sanitation services, and they build infrastructure. Islamist groups organize social and religious gatherings like Qur’an study groups and recruitment events meant to strengthen the bonds between members. Thus, these groups provide a powerful social network through which collective action can be facilitated.
Islamism can also be characterized as a particular form of social movement. Social movements are informal interactions between individuals and/or groups that are engaged in political conflicts. These interactions are structured through shared identities (Diani 1992).
Therefore, fundamental to studying social movements is endeavoring to understand the shared identity within a given social movement. Some social movements are built around socio- economic identities, racial or ethnic identities, or national identities. Islamism, as a social movement, is one branch of Islamic activism (Wiktorowicz 2004). Similar to Muslim politics,
Islamic activism is a consciously broad concept meant to describe all examples of mobilization in support of “Muslim causes” (p. 2) without regard to a particular interpretation of what it means for a cause to be for “Muslims.” Thus, within the population of social movements in the
24 Muslim-majority world, the distinguishing characteristic of “Islamist” movements as opposed to other “Muslim” or “Islamic” movements is that they espouse an exclusive interpretation of what constitutes a “Muslim cause.” Islamist activists work to promote and create policies that will advance their niche interpretation of the relationship between the state and Islam. These policies may include the implementation of specific policies that are inspired by various tenets of Islamic law, or be as broadly ambitious as the creation of an entirely new national or international political system and gives primacy to Islamic law.
The Lingering Questions of Democracy and Violence
The 1990s saw the beginning of a proliferation of both semi-democratic institutions and
Islamist violent across the Muslim-majority world (Bokhari and Senzai 2013). Elections, usually including an array of political parties from across the political spectrum, have become the norm in much of the Muslim-majority world, and Islamists have increasingly formed political parties to compete in these elections. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the conditions under which these Islamist parties will fully participate in national-level electoral contests. Their full participation represents an embrace of democratic norms as well as a confidence in their viability as legitimate electoral contenders. I find that parties that emerged out of broader social and religious organizations and parties that compete in less than competitive systems are least likely to fully participate in electoral politics.
The second chapter examines patterns in violent Islamist mobilization. If Islamist parties are beginning to integrate into democratic and semi-democratic systems, should we expect an increase or a decrease in violent Islamist events? This chapter develops a theoretical logic that attempts to answer this question by considering when Islamist parties might be able to meet the demands of their supporters that include both the creation of favorable policies and the provision
25 of social and religious goods that are best done at the local level and often outside of the domain of formal politics. I find that, where Islamist parties compete in systems that protect free association rights and provide for effective governance at the local level, the number of Islamist violent events tends to decrease.
Taken together these chapters suggest that several patterns of democratization tend to both decrease levels of Islamist violence and promote full electoral participation among Islamist political parties. However, these processes are certainly interconnected. The third chapter takes a process-oriented approach by examining patters of Islamist violence and partisanship through
Indonesia’s democratic transition. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority country and the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. It is also home to the two largest
Islamic organizations, Muhammadiya and Nahdlatul Ulema, with combined memberships of nearly fifty million. At the end of the 1990s, Indonesia’s autocratic president, Suharto, was removed from power after over thirty years. The newly democratic Indonesia saw the eruption of
Islamist violence both in rural regions and the capital as well as a rapid proliferation of Islamist political parties that have continued to be powerful, if relatively small, forces in national politics.
Overtime, Indonesia also became a base of operations for Southeast Asian transnational Islamist terrorist organizations. Thus, this case study enables me to examine temporal patterns of the development of Islamist violent campaigns, electoral strategies, and international terrorism. It also gives me the opportunity to consider the interconnectedness of these various forms of
Islamist mobilization.
26 Tables
Table 1.1 A Sample of Islamist Groups by Ideology, Organization, and Behavior Violent Groups Patronage- Centralized based Vanguard Networked Some Islamic Afghan Jihad Mujahideen (Palestinian Rejector ISIL groups Territories) al-Qaeda
Some Afghan Some Hizbullah Mujahideen factions in Conditionalist (Lebanon) groups - the UTO Hamas Some Some (Palestinian factions of factions of Participator Territories) FIS FIS -
Non-violent Groups Patronage- Centralized based Vanguard Networked Salafi Call (Egypt, pre- Hizb ut- Palestinian Rejector revolution) - Tahrir Salafis
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Jamiat Sudanese (pre- Ulema-e- Muslim Conditionalist revolution) Islam Brotherhood - Egyptian Pakistani Muslim Islah Jama'at-e Participator Brotherhood (Yemen) Islami -
27 CHAPTER 2
Patterns of Islamist Electoral Participation: A Set-Theoretic Approach
The third wave of democratization did hit the Muslim-majority world, but it did so in fits and starts (Hungington 1993, p. 287). While the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to propel much of Eastern Europe toward democratization, this international pressure has had more limited effects on the authoritarian regimes in the Arab and broader Muslim-majority world. At least part of this authoritarian entrenchment has been ascribed to Islam, but the causal connections are far from definitive (Fish 2002; Donno and Russett 2004). While a debate has raged about the— probably unknowable—connection between Islamic cultural, theological, and legal underpinnings of authoritarianism, a more practical fear about the consequences of democratization has emerged: what happens if Islamist parties win elections? The Algerian experiment with democracy at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s serves as a grim omen of how liberalizing regimes may cope with losing power to Islamists and of how Islamist parties—long seen as uncompromisingly radical—may be inclined to turn take authoritarian and violent turns.
In response to mass protests, in 1989 the Algerian government rewrote the constitution to allow for the formation of opposition political parties. The deeply fragmented Islamist movement coalesced into a political party—the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)—which attempted to appeal to broad segments of society and received overwhelming support in the local elections of 1990 in the run-up to the first multi-party national elections (Willis 1997, pp.115-134). In the year between these local elections and the liberalized national elections, the FIS struggled to coordinate the efforts of its party cadres because of how fragmented the party was. In particular, some elements of the party—especially those who had recently returned from the war against the
28 Soviet Union in Afghanistan—advocated for a much more confrontational approach to implementing policy and challenging both the state and other opposition parties. As the national election began, it became clear that the FIS had won an overwhelming plurality of seats in the first round and was poised to take as many as two thirds of the legislative seats after the second round of elections. The prospect of an outright majority of Islamists in the legislature and the constitutional need to rely on them to form a government left many in the Algerian military particularly troubled. The military subsequently initiated a coup, canceled the elections, and dissolved the FIS, and in response several factions within the FIS initiated an armed rebellion that quickly devolved into a particularly gruesome civil war (Willis 1997, chapter 7; Kalyvas
1999). This devastating experience in Algeria suggests both that Islamist parties’ participation poses a threat to democratic institutions—either real or perceived—and that the electoral success of Islamist parties may be particularly challenging for liberalizing regimes.
In the academic literature on Islamist political participation, there are theoretical divisions drawn—both implicitly and explicitly—between Islamist parties that are a threat to democratic institutions and those that are willing to operate within the confines of democracy. However, this review demonstrates that these divisions are rarely so clear in the empirical world. Much of this literature has focused on the difference between moderate and radical Islamist parties, so this chapter begins with an overview of this literature as it specifically relates to Islamist parties. This review suggests the need to move past these labels that tend to conflate ideology and behavior. I then follow the example of other scholars who have emphasized the need to focus on Islamist political behavior and organization rather than ideology. This literature has stagnated because of a lack of conceptualization about Islamist political behavior—a gap in the literature that I attempt to fill in a parsimonious way. This conceptualization leads to testable hypotheses about the
29 conditions under which Islamist parties may not fully participate9 in an electoral regime which I test with data from a sample of elections from across the Muslim-majority world where Islamist parties have competed. I find evidence that parties that compete in uncompetitive elections and that are themselves part of a broader social and religious organization will not fully compete in elections.
How to characterize variance among Islamist political parties
A fundamental question to many scholars of Islamist political behavior is how and why
Islamist parties integrate into an apparatus of democratic or semi-democratic institutions
(Schwedler 1998; Schwedler 2002; Brumberg 2002; Nasr 2005; Case and Liew 2006; Dagi
Bashirov and Lancaster 2018). Part of the logic of this research agenda is the observation that many Islamist parties have not formed ex nihilo when political regimes in the Muslim-majority world began to liberalize. Instead, many of these parties existed as social and religious organizations with varying levels of interest in political participation long before they organized as political parties. Some of these organizations explicitly eschewed democratic institutions in the pre-liberalized period, others expressed a desire to participate but were repressed, and still others simply did not talk about electoral politics because there was no opportunity to participate in them. When the opportunity to organize new political parties emerged in these states, these various pedigrees set the stage for the continuing debate about whether Islamist parties’ participation is these systems could be trusted. In particular, there is a fear that some of these parties are fundamentally illiberal and are only interested using electoral institutions to capture
9 I build and test hypotheses about when Islamist parties do not fully participate in electoral politics rather than when they do fully participate. It is more theoretically and empirically interesting to consider why a party, which is ostensibly highly interested in maximizing its share of state powers, would not do everything it can to do so.
30 the powers of the state and impose a religiously oriented form of authoritarian rule. The long legacy of Islamist groups rejecting an entirely political agenda has had a remarkable impact on the development of many of these parties.10 This chapter aims to exploit this variance in organizational pedigrees to understand if this variance impacts how Islamist parties integrate into electoral institutions.
I begin with a brief review of some of the seminal literature on liberalization and democratization that has provided the bedrock for much of our current understanding of Islamist political engagement. I then move to a review of efforts to understand the variance in the ways in which Islamist political parties behave in electoral regimes. Both the concept of Islamist electoral behavior and the causal arguments to explain its variance are hotly debated. This review points my work to a novel and simple conceptualization of Islamist electoral participation that I rely on to test a variety of causal arguments below.
Much of the academic work on Islamist political parties has focused on conceptual distinctions between moderate and radical parties and the process of transformation from radical to moderate known as moderation (Wickham 2002; Schwedler 2006; Mecham 2004; Cavdar
2006; El-Ghobashy 2005; Buehler 2013; Clark 2006; Karakaya and Yilidrim 2013; Schwedler
2013; Schwedler 2011). Radicalism, as the term emerged in the democratization literature in the
1980s and 1990s, focuses on movements and parties that seek to mobilize the masses in
10 Two of the most influential thinkers in the foundations of the contemporary Islamist movement—Hasan al-Banna (d. 1949) and Abul A’la Maududi (d. 1979)—advocated for participation in electoral politics as one dimension of a much broader program of social and religious reform in Egypt and Pakistan, respectively. In both cases, these founders anticipated participation in political systems that included somewhat competitive elections. However, as the organizations that they founded—the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama’at-e Islami—encountered political environments hostile to competitive electoral participation, they substituted social and religious service provision for electoral mobilization. The Salafi movement has seen similar ambivalence, but it emerged in a fully authoritarian political system—Saudi Arabia—and so its leaders tended to spend little time worrying about electoral participation. Originally conceived as an ascetic movement that eschewed political participation, Salafis have slowly come to embrace electoral participation when institutional conditions—as in Egypt—or structural conditions—as in Bahrain—provided opportunities to influence policy.
31 organized opposition to authoritarianism (Przeworski 1991, p. 68; O’Donnell and Schmitter
2013, p. 11; Karl 1990, p. 8). These mass movements are often leftist movements intent on mobilizing disenfranchised workers (Przeworski 1986); however, their ideology is not definitive of the designation of “radical.” Radical refers to an any political ideology that seeks to mobilize the masses. In analyses of the third wave of democratization, these types of movements are nearly universally seen as anathema to democratic transitions because they can incite ruling elites to double-down on repressive authoritarian rule in the name of preserving order
(Huntington 1991; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992, p. 271). By contrast, moderate groups are conceptualized as elite-based parties that will not mobilize the masses. Moderate groups engage the elites in the ruling coalition and are willing to negotiate the terms of a “pacted transition” in which opposition elites make deals about the form of the new regime with “soft- liners” or “liberalizers” within the ruling coalition (O’Donnell and Schmitter 2013, pp. 42-54). If the terms of these pacts are amenable to the radicals, then they will begin their process of moderation as a function of regime-level changes toward increasingly competitive elections. As elections become more competitive, radical parties are incentivized to embrace democratic institutions and abandon mass mobilization campaigns, and in the new democratic regime they compete as moderate—meaning not engaged in mass mobilization—political parties.11
11 There are reasons to doubt this process in both the broader democratization literature and the specific Islamist literature that is discussed below. Bermeo (1997) argues that while moderates may have been the pact-makers in many of the ideal typical transitions that this literature examines, they relied heavily on mass demonstrations by radicals who were not spoilers in the process of democratization, but rather the only group that could credibly pressure the authoritarian elites to compromise with the moderates. Tezcür (2010) identifies a similar pattern among moderate Islamist groups in Iran and Turkey who, precisely because they relied on institutions rather than mass- demonstrations to achieve their goals, were unable to credibly threaten the incumbent authoritarians and halted—or at least did not strengthen—democratic transitions. While the broader implications on regime-level changes are beyond the scope of this dissertation project, these works do contribute to the argument that the distinction between moderates and radicals may not be analytically helpful and may in fact lead researchers to focus on inconsequential dimensions of opposition groups—Islamist groups, in particular.
32 In the context of Islamist parties, scholars have relied on this framework of a spectrum between moderate and radical forms of political opposition to explain events across the Muslim- majority world in the post-third wave period. Problematically, Islamist parties are nearly universally conceptualized as radical. Much of this work “stretches” the original conceptual limits of the terms by focusing on ideological or behavioral “radicals” and “moderates” despite the original usage of these terms primarily focusing on organizational and demographic dynamics. Theories of ideological moderation among Islamist parties emphasize the process of ideological change toward an embrace of democratic norms as they gain experience with other parties and players within democratic institutions (Schwedler 2006). In this framework, democratic institutions are nearly epiphenomenal to the interactions that moderate radical
Islamist ideologies. Thus, it may be that behavioral moderation—simply a willingness to work within democratic institutions—precedes ideological moderation (Wickham 2004; Clarke 2006).
This suggests that even if the object of a given study is behavioral moderation, ultimately what matters in the broadest possible interpretation of the process of moderation is an ideological shift. However, this shift is not readily observable and can easily be made disingenuously on the part of the party to solicit more popular support (Sinno and Khanani 2009).
Given the complicated nature of these terms, there have been calls for changes in the way scholars talk about the variance of Islamist political parties. I will review a few of these alternative conceptualizations. Each is fundamental to the research design below which explicitly tests several different forms of Islamist variance against one another to determine which most convincingly explains variance in electoral participation. One suggestion is to reframe notions of moderate and radical as issue specific (Clark and Schwedler 2003). While this approach acknowledges significant variation across Islamist parties that can be missed by broad,
33 unidimensional labels of moderate and radical, it essentially creates layers of dimensions along which parties can vary from radical—they use the synonymous concept “hardline”—to moderate. Once again, the concepts of moderate and radical do not represent their initial meaning, but come to represent externally imposed normative preferences for pro-democratic, progressively oriented parties; moderates are democrats, radicals are not.
Other scholars have embraced the labels of radical and moderate to describe variance in the behavior—rather than the ideology—of Islamist groups. Problematically, the assumption in this line of research is that only moderate groups will work within the confines of electoral politics, while radicals will eschew all democratic institutions. In this framework, variance across
Islamist political parties—who, as defined in the literature, all participate in elections—begins with the assumption that they are minimally “moderate.” Embracing the original meaning of the term “radical”—groups that seek to mobilize a vast segment of the population in a campaign that transcend the limits of democratic institutions—some Islamist groups have begun to opt for electoral participation and have done so to some success. These Islamist parties are interested in massive changes to the political regime where they operate, and their definitive appeal to religious symbols and aspirations enables them to mobilize through traditionally apolitical networks in addition to more typical networks of political patronage on which most parties rely.
Through these networks, these parties can mobilize masses to support their political project
These observations make it unlikely that an Islamist party would unambiguously be labeled moderate, so—despite the near ubiquity of the labels of “moderate” and “radical” in the literature on Islamist political parties—it is unclear if these labels offer much conceptual leverage for researchers.
34 An alternative approach to conceptualizing variance across Islamist parties focuses on organizational distinctions among parties. One of the most common approaches to identifying organizational variance among Islamist political parties is to consider the breadth of the membership in the party. For instance, two of Pakistan’s most influential Islamist political parties differ significantly in their membership and recruitment techniques. Jamaat-e Islami (JI) has always been a highly centralized, “vanguard” party with an exclusive membership (Ullah
2013, pp. 59-62; Nasr 1994), and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) has consistently attempted to recruit widely, especially among the working classes in Pakistan (Ullah 2013, pp.68-72). These differences may have implications on the electoral successes of each party and each party’s ability to pressure the state, but this dimension does not seem to affect how vigorously these two parties participate in electoral politics. In 2013, JI ran candidates in just over half of Pakistan’s constituencies, and JUI ran candidates in just under half of them. They appear to have struck approximately the same balance between electoral and other forms of mobilization.
Sinno and Khanani’s (2009) agenda-setting chapter in an early volume on transnational trends in Islamist partisanship explicitly argues for an organizational approach to conceptualizing variance among Islamist parties. They divide the population of Islamist parties into either patronage-based or centralized parties to generate predictions about different parties’ willingness to participate in electoral institutions. However, these labels do not correspond to the legacy of social movements from which many Islamist parties have emerged. Sinno and Khanani argue that, given opportunities to compete in genuinely competitive elections, patronage-based (or service-oriented) parties are more likely to “fully participate” in elections than centralized (or vanguard) parties because they are more likely to win broad support from their patronage networks and influence policy (p. 40). This argument fails to account for the decision-making
35 calculus that these parties have to make as they shift resources away from service provision and toward electoral engagement; fully participating in electoral politics will inevitably mean diverting resources away from providing social and religious services and toward campaigns and elections. For instance, the leaders of religious study groups, schools, or clinics that are sponsored by the Islamist group may be run as candidates or used to mobilize support for candidates which means they will have less time to focus on their work of providing social or religious goods to the group’s supporters. Thus, it may be that parties that grow out of groups with a long pedigree of providing these services will be less likely to fully participate because in doing so they may compromise their reputation of pursuing more social and religious aspirations that transcend politics.
Sinno and Khanani’s categories do not capture the most salient distinctions in organizational differences among Islamist parties. For instance, Sinno and Khanani identify the forerunners to Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party as patronage-based (or service- oriented) parties. However, each of these Turkish parties, unlike parties that are part of broader social and religious organizations, “was foremost a political party” (Mecham 2004, p. 342).
While they were broadly inclusive and able to create and utilize patronage networks to build support at a grass-roots level, their focus was nearly singularly on winning elections and maximizing their influence in the state. This is very different from their other ideal-typical example of a patronage-based party, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. No doubt, the Muslim
Brotherhood faced a more restrictive electoral regime than the regime that the Turkish parties faced, but the Muslim Brotherhood also focused much more of its efforts on activities outside of the realm of electoral politics rather than trying to appease the incumbent rulers and fully entering the political system. In short, the electoral practices of the Turkish Islamist parties and
36 the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood do not really resemble one another at all especially when their electoral participation is considered as a subset of all of the other activities in which they engaged. Turkish parties spent much more of their time on electoral politics than the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood.
Sinno and Khanani’s chapter does offer a simple concept—albeit implicitly—to examine variance in how Islamist parties behave in elections: full participation. They never fully conceptualize the meaning of full participation, and their brief empirical examination includes not only electoral behavior but regime-level preferences as features of “full participation.” For instance, in their examination of their dependent variable—types of electoral participation—they include parties’ calls for democratic reform and more competitive elections as components of full participation. It is unclear why these preferences, more or less ideological in nature, should be thought of as part of a party’s willingness to participate fully in electoral politics. Despite these flaws, the framework of organizational differences affecting Islamist participation in electoral politics is highly valuable and sets the stage for the theory and analysis below.
Of course, Sinno and Khanani are not the only scholars to try to explain Islamist electoral participation. A more recent edited volume (Mecham and Hwang 2014) on Islamist political parties continues to move beyond the language of moderates and radicals and toward carefully conceptualizing organizational and behavioral differences among Islamist parties. As an outcome, these authors look at a process they call normalization: a shift in electoral behavior in which Islamist parties, often in response to institutional incentives, move their focus toward a more complete embrace of electoral politics and away from social and religious aspirations that lie outside of the domain of electoral politics. This volume examines this process of change within several country-cases in the Muslim-majority world, and while the first chapter makes
37 several broad arguments about this process of change, the ultimate destination—a “normalized”
Islamist political party—is never explicitly conceptualized. Additionally, because of the focus on within-case processes rather than cross-case comparisons it is unclear what factors or sets of factors make one party more or less likely to normalize or become normalized over time under an electoral political regime.
This previous scholarship suggests that scholars have begun to see the need to move past the language of the democratization literature when studying Islamist parties. However, there is considerable debate about what a suitable alternative might be. In this chapter I focus on a novel and parsimonious outcome among Islamist political parties as I test various conceptualizations of ideological, behavioral, and organizational variance.
Defining the dependent variable: Electoral participation
Conceptualizing Islamist electoral participation is a challenging task. One of the main challenges is that moderation and normalization—both discussed above—likely look different across regime types and electoral systems. For instance, one indicator of political normalization may be a willingness to enter into coalition governments. However, not all regimes or electoral systems are likely to lead to coalition governments. Additionally, it may be that Islamist parties are unlikely to be asked to join coalition governments even if they would be willing to join them.
Another potential indicator of political normalization is attempting to appeal to the “median voter” in order to maximize their vote share (cf. Downs 1957). This indicator is particularly difficult to identify because it assumes that the preferences of the voting population and the ideological stances of the parties in the system can be conceptualized on a unidimensional space.
This assumption is probably too restricting for many political environments, but it is particularly hard to justify in the context of Islamist politics (Clark and Schwedler 2003).
38 I adopt a rather simple conceptualization of full electoral participation that, similar to capturing the “median voter,” attempts to capture a party’s desire to maximize its vote share. I avoid the conceptual ambiguities of normalization and moderation for the reasons laid out above, but I do rely heavily on the insights from scholars who have used these labels. In my discussion below, Islamist parties fully participate in an election when these parties run a candidate or an electoral list in all available constituencies in a given election.12 I remain agnostic as to whether fully participating in elections is definitive of moderation or normalization and focus exclusively on this dimension of Islamist electoral behavior in my analysis. I then use ideological, organizational, sectarian, or other conceptualizations of variance across Islamist parties to identify causal relationships between these dimensions and electoral behavior. I also look to structural and institutional causes of Islamist electoral behavior among various political regimes in which Islamist parties participate. Finally, I analyze combinations of group-level and regime- level conditions as potential configurations of conditions that are associated with variation in electoral participation among Islamist political parties.
In the theory building and hypothesizing that follows, I specifically derive expectations about when an Islamist party will not fully participate in electoral politics. This is both a theoretical and methodological decision. Theoretically, understanding why, given the opportunity to compete in elections, a party with robust plans for economic, social, and foreign policy would not do everything they can to win seats is a more interesting question than determining why an Islamist party would take advantage of institutions opportunities at their disposal. Methodologically, as I will discuss in more detail below, the set-theoretic methods on which I rely allow me to take an asymmetric approach to testing these theories where I can focus
12 I will provide more details about the operationalization of this concept in the context of the research design below.
39 on identifying patterns of non-participation while remaining agnostic about patterns of participation. These methods follow the theoretical logic that identifying patterns of non- participation is more interesting than patterns of participation, which should simply follow institutional incentives.
Explaining patterns of Islamist electoral participation
There are several potential explanations for patterns in the electoral participation of
Islamist political parties. Islamist political parties vary across a number of dimensions that scholars have argued matter for explaining why some parties fully participate in elections and others do not. This section introduces several, non-exclusive potential explanations for variance in the electoral participation of Islamist political parties that will be tested alongside one another below. I begin with party-level explanations, then proceed to institutional and structural explanations, and I conclude by considering combinations of these explanations.
First, it may be that ideological differences across Islamist groups are associated with shifts in electoral behavior. For instance, groups with ideologies that are more hostile to the status quo may be less inclined to fully participate in electoral contests. This is perhaps the simplest and most easily explicated potential source of variance in electoral participation.
However, the right way to theorize and empirically identify variance in ideology among Islamist political parties is not obvious. Here, I take a particularly broad approach to conceptualizing this variance. The most significant ideological trend in the Islamist movement comes from the
Muslim Brotherhood (al-ikhwan al-muslimeen). The ikhwani ideological trend is the oldest in contemporary Islamism and has been marked by a consistent willingness, even desire, to participate in electoral politics. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna ran for legislative office in Egypt before the Free Officer’s revolution, the Jordanian Muslim
40 Brotherhood has consistently campaigned for greater electoral competition in elections in Jordan, and the Algerian Muslim Brotherhood continued to support electoral politics during the civil war in Algeria when many other Islamist groups joined the rebels and fought against the military’s control of political power. However, electoral politics has never been the sole venue for political engagement for ikhwani groups. Al-Banna’s original conception of the Muslim Brotherhood was as “an orthodox call, a Sunni way, a Sufi order, a political organization, a sports club, a cultural and scientific organization, [a] financial company, and a social philosophy” (Al-Abdin 1989, p.
220). This plurality of ambitions suggests that organizations attached to the ikhwani ideology may be less willing to fully participate in electoral politics. However, I consciously distinguish between Islamist organizations generally, and Islamist political parties. Parties that adhere to the ikhwani ideology are often autonomous from the broader Muslim Brotherhood social organization, and these parties are better able to focus their efforts exclusively on electoral contests without compromising on the allocation of resources for other dimensions of the organization. Thus, I expect that parties that do not adhere to the ikhwani ideology will be members of the set of parties that do not fully participate in elections.
Second, differences in legal interpretations across groups may cause shifts in electoral behavior. Broadly, there are two legal interpretations in the Islamist movement: reformist and
Salafist. Salafist Islamist parties reject legal interpretive innovations and seek to apply a more originalist methodology to the interpretation of the sources of Islamic law (Haykel 2014). By contrast, reformist Islamist parties tend to be less interested in legal interpretive methodologies, generally. Instead, the reformist trend tends to emphasize the role of Islam in providing a moral framework for governance. Reformist Islamists are also more likely to play to a universal
Muslim identity, while Salafists tend to be more exclusionary because they argue that only their
41 interpretive approach is valid. Because there is, obviously, no historical precedent for participating in elections or other forms of modern political mobilization, I expect Salafi parties will not fully participate in elections.
Third, the relationship between the party and an antecedent social or religious organization may affect the electoral decisions that the party makes. Most Islamist parties participate in social and religious activities beyond electoral contests including leading Qur’anic study groups and funding educational and health-care facilities. But some Islamist parties were formed directly by social and religious organizations, while others are merely affiliated with these groups by loose connections between supporters of the party and members of the social and religious organization. Parties that have an antecedent in a broader social and religious organization will face a distinct set of constraints and incentives in their decision-making process as they determine how they will compete in elections. In particular, people support these groups because they value the social and religious services that the groups provide, and when these groups form a political party, they will have to reallocate some of their resources for political mobilization. If they reallocate too many of their resources, they risk alienating their core supporters, so in the interest of balancing these competing interests, I expect that Islamist parties that are formed directly out of broader social and religious organizations will not fully participate in elections. For example, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood recently disavowed partisan politics in favor of reallocating its resources toward charitable and religious work (al-Monitor 2019).
This decision was made in the aftermath of a brutal repression campaign that followed the ouster of Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi as president. The Egyptian Brotherhood is responding to a failure of their over-allocation of resources toward partisan politics. As I mentioned above,
42 many ikhwani parties have antecedent social and religious organizations, but these are not the only parties that grow out of broader social and religious organizations.
I now move to institutional- and structural-level explanations of Islamist electoral participation. First, variance in the relationship between the state and religious institutions may affect the electoral behavior of Islamist parties. Where states accommodate and favor Islamic religious institutions, Islamist parties may be more willing to fully participate in elections because they will be able to maintain and even strengthen relationships with religious institutions while they occupy political offices. One way to conceptualize the relationship between the state and religious institutions is to examine the set of countries where the state provides disproportionate financial assistance to Islamic educational institutions. I expect that where this funding is not provided, Islamist parties will not fully participate in elections because they will sense an incompatibility between their political agenda and the opportunities available to them by the state.
Second, the competitiveness of the electoral institutions in the regime may affect whether and how Islamist parties compete in elections. Competitive elections are elections in which the incumbents are not institutionally advantaged, so there is a level playing field for all parties competing in the election. Obviously, non-electoral regimes will see no Islamist electoral mobilization, but some electoral regimes may systematically disadvantage Islamist parties more than other opposition parties. Thus, rather than thinking about how broadly competitive the regime may be for all parties participating in an election, I consider how competitive the regime allows Islamist parties to be in elections. This approach complements the typical approach (cf.
Przeworski et al. 2000) to identifying the competitiveness of an electoral regime—turnover in the government—with an analysis of restrictions on Islamist political activities. As electoral contests
43 become competitive, the probability of a given party being able to effect changes in policy toward their preferred outcomes increases because electoral contests become meaningful opportunities for parties to gain access to the levers of state power. Therefore, I expect that in electoral regimes where Islamist parties cannot compete competitively, these parties will not fully participate in elections.
Third, sectarian differences across Islamist parties may be associated with different patterns of electoral behavior. I expect that what will matter for Islamist parties’ decision-making is whether or not they align with the sectarian identity of the majority of the population. In particular, I expect that parties that appeal to the interests of Sunnis in Shi’ite-majority countries will not fully participate in elections. Similarly, I expect that parties that appeal to the interests of
Shi’ites in Sunni-majority countries will also not fully participate in elections. These minority sectarian parties will be less likely to find broad support in the entire electorate, so they will not waste their resources in many constituencies where they will not be competitive.
Combinations of these individual causes are particularly important in understanding when
Islamist parties may not fully participate in elections because parties compete within structural and institutional conditions. Therefore, I consider nine additional causal configurations that match each party-level condition with each of the institutional or structural conditions. Below I empirically identify the causal relevance of each of the party-level conditions—socio-religious antecedent group, not ikhwani ideology, and Salafi legal interpretation—and each of the regime- level or structural inputs—uncompetitive elections, no state funding of Islamic education, and minority sect parties—and the combinations of each to explain why Islamist parties do not fully participate in national elections. The following section elaborates on one of the particularly novel
44 and compelling combinations of these causal conditions: the combination of an antecedent social and religious organization and an uncompetitive electoral regime.
Competing Islamist interests in non-competitive elections
Islamist parties, particularly those that emerge out of broader social and religious organizations, have to deal with competing, sometimes contradictory, interests as they make decisions about how to allocate resources, engage with the state, and expand their support base.
These competing interests can take many forms that I will discuss below, but the primary argument that emerges out of this section is that parties that are associated with these social and religious organizations will not fully participate in electoral politics in anything short of fully competitive elections.
One mechanism that may keep Islamist parties that are associated with broad social and religious organizations from fully participating in elections is that they derive legitimacy for their social and religious activities by remaining apolitical. Supporters of the broad social and religious organization may see directly participating in electoral politics as a corruption of the organization. This perception would be amplified if the election in which the organization fully participated is not competitive because supporters may see it as not only an embrace of power structures outside of the domain of religion but also as a collaboration with an unfavorable, undemocratic regime. Many of the goals of these broad social and religious organizations can be achieved outside of electoral politics; indeed, many of these groups existed long before opportunities for participating in electoral politics became available (Brown 2012). These opportunities to participate in elections created a crisis of legitimacy that many Islamist organizations have had to deal with when they are first given the opportunity to organize political parties and compete in elections. After decades of repression forced Islamist groups in
(Cavatorta and Merone 2013) and elsewhere to remain out of formal politics, new opportunities for political participation opened a deep divide within many Islamist groups that often corresponded with a generational gap. Younger cadres were keen to effect change within the state, but more senior organization members were hesitant about participating in and engaging with the state apparatus. The older generation saw their organization’s principle responsibility as promoting Islamic values and encouraging piety to gradually reform society and the state, while younger members saw opportunities to participate in the elections as opportunities to reform society and the state from the top. However, moving resources to support electoral participation at the expense of grassroots social and religious outreach campaigns may come at a cost, especially if the older generation cannot be convinced to continue to support the evolving organization. Limiting electoral participation, even doing so strategically, may keep the organization united across this generational divide.
A second mechanism that may keep Islamist parties that are associated with broad social and religious organizations from fully participating in elections is that they will have to draw resources away from the social and religious activities of the group to further their political aspirations. As I mentioned above, for these parties, fully participating in elections involves a shift in resources from a social and religious organization to a political party, and in many cases the social and religious organization has a long history of remaining outside of partisan politics.
This shift in resources may fundamentally alter the types of goods and services provided by the organization and may signal a betrayal to loyal supporters of the social and religious organization. If religious meetings turn into political rallies, or social service providers turn into campaign canvassers, then the individuals that valued these services in the first place may feel
46 like the organization is moving away from them. This is essentially the pattern of disillusionment among revolutionary youth in the Islamic Republic of Iran where the constant politicization of
Islam has left these youth questioning their devotion to Khomeini’s Islamist ideology as it has become institutionalized as part of a state that frequently fails to meet their social economic demands (Azimi 2008, pp. 418-419). In the context of participation in uncompetitive elections, this betrayal is compounded by the observation that the organization is participating in a regime where it is highly unlikely that they will meaningfully effect changes to policy. Parties with a pedigree of providing social and religious goods are incentivized to balance their electoral participation with their provision of social and religious goods.
A third mechanism that may keep Islamist parties that are associated with social and religious organizations from fully participating in elections, particularly uncompetitive elections, is that they will want to avoid being co-opted by the regime. Because of the far-reaching aspirations and activities of the organization, they are able to operate largely autonomously from the state’s repressive apparatus when there is no political party. However, when the political space opens and the organization forms a political party, this party may be the target of state repression or attempts at co-optation, especially if the opening is anything short of full democratization. Repression is clearly disadvantageous to a social and religious organization, but co-optation may also severely harm the reputation of the organization. Under regimes with uncompetitive elections, support for an Islamist organization or party is partly based on its autonomy from the state’s repressive apparatus that allows members and supporters to organize religious activities or the provision of social services without fear of state interference.
Participation in an uncompetitive election could bring the party under the watch or influence of the authoritarian elites who may particularly worry about Islamist electoral success, so parties
47 will be interested in maintaining their distance from fully participating in uncompetitive elections. Bangladeshi Islamist political parties, which compete in elections that vary widely in their competitiveness between electoral cycles, may experience this ambivalence about competition. The liberalization of Bangladeshi politics was not initially extended to opportunities for Islamist electoral participation. Because Islamist organizations collaborated with the
Pakistanis during the Bangladeshi war for independence, these parties fear that participating in elections too fully may push the state to clamp down more harshly on their activities. This will be especially true for parties that are directly connected to broader social and religious organizations which are presumably most interested in remaining independent from the state because they are most capable of meeting ambitions outside of the realm of partisan politics.
A final mechanism that may keep Islamist parties that are part of broader social and religious organizations from participating fully in elections is the costs associated with losing those elections. Parties that are not associated with broad social and religious organizations want to win elections, but not winning some elections is part of the process of participating in democratic and semi-democratic institutions. There is little reason for parties not to run a candidate in every constituency because they are primarily interested in maximizing their influence on the state; the more candidates they run, the higher the likelihood that they will win more seats. This is also true in semi-democratic conditions because even with very little chance of winning a majority of seats in the election, these parties are able to maintain their reputation as credible opposition to the incumbents by offering as meaningful of a challenge as they can in each election. However, Islamist parties that are part of broad social and religious organizations face a different set of constraints than other political parties. Because of the costs discussed above that are associated with fully participating in an election, these types of Islamist parties
48 need to demonstrate that they can succeed in electoral politics and that shifting the group’s resources and politicizing the group’s ideology were worth the cost. Because they are highly unlikely to win an election in an uncompetitive environment, Islamist parties that are associated with a broader socio-religious organization are unlikely to fully participate. Instead, they will run candidates in a few constituencies where they are relatively confident that they will be able to win or where they will not need to invest much in case of a loss.
The causal combinations described above offer novel theoretical contributions, but I submit them not as an alternative to ideological, legal interpretive, or structural arguments about
Islamist electoral participation, but rather in addition to them. The research design described below enables me to consider the broad consistency of each of the causal combinations described in the previous section on the choice of Islamist political parties to not fully participate in national elections.
Research Design
Fundamental to testing the arguments laid out above is recognizing that they are asymmetrical (Ragin 2008, pp. 15-17). For instance, I argue that Islamist parties that are part of broad social and religious organizations and that compete in uncompetitive electoral regimes will not run in every constituency. I am not also arguing that parties that are independent of social and religious organizations and/or that compete in competitive regimes will run in every constituency. Indeed, it is possible that other types of Islamist parties in other types of electoral regimes will also not run candidates in every constituency. Some Islamist parties are highly niche, poorly funded, deeply unpopular, and heavily repressed, and all these factors may impact whether or not the party runs in all electoral constituencies. There are many causal paths to not fully participating in an election, and this chapter attempts to theoretically and empirically
49 address the relevance of causal paths that were theorized above. The sample of elections that I will discuss more below comes from electoral regimes in the Muslim-majority world that have a long history of electoral politics, which suggests that these results may be most relevant for parties competing in established—though not necessarily competitive—electoral regimes.
The asymmetrical nature of these arguments means they do not lend themselves to correlational analysis where asymmetry washes out estimates of correlation coefficients and conditional probabilities (Ragin 2008). Instead, I rely on methods based on set-theoretic relationships to determine the sufficiency of each of the causal conditions laid out above. Before
I move to discuss the particulars of my research design, I offer a brief overview of the set- theoretic approach to observational research design.
A set-theoretic approach differs from the more traditional linear regression approach to observational analysis in a number of important ways. First, while the regression approach enables researchers to identify correlations between dependent variables and independent variables, the set-theoretic approach focuses on configurations of causal conditions. In the linear regression framework, researchers focus on changes in the average quantities of two or more variables to identify correlational relationships. Thus, regression analyses rely on quantifying variables that vary across a sample of observations to identify aggregate patterns. By contrast, a set-theoretic approach relies on conceptualizing sets in which observations have varying degrees of membership. For instance, in a regression framework, a researcher might ask how increasing levels of competitiveness in national elections are associated with changes in the proportion of constituencies in which an Islamist party runs a candidate. However, in a set-theoretic framework, a researcher identifies the set of parties that do not run a candidate in every constituency—parties that do not fully participate in elections—and then identifies the degree of
50 overlap between this set and the set of elections that are not competitive.13 In this framework, the fact that there are cases of uncompetitive elections in which parties fully participate does not affect the degree of overlap between the set of parties and do not fully participate and the set of uncompetitive elections. This puts a greater onus on the researcher to explain the presence of the outcome of interest rather than explain full variation of the outcome across all observations.
The set-theoretic approach is also ideal because of the data limitations that I discuss more below. While regression-based approaches tend to require a “large-n” to identify correlational relationships (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994), a set-theoretic approach is ideally suited for analyses of data in any size (Ragin 1987; Ragin 2013; Fiss, Sharapov, and Cronqvist 2013).
Therefore, the small size of the sample that I use in the analysis below is a better fit for set- theoretic methods, and set-theoretic methods are ideal for both theoretical and empirical reasons.
Outcome set
The outcome set begins with interval-level measures of the proportion of constituencies in which a party fields a candidate in a given election. These data come from the Constituency-
Level Elections Archive (CLEA), and the sample of party-election observations in the data that I analyze is restricted to those which are featured in the CLEA14 (Kollman et al. 2019). The interval-level variable was created by counting the number of constituencies in which an Islamist party ran a candidate or a list and dividing that number by the total number of constituencies in a given election. The distribution of these proportions is given in figure 2.1. There is a clear
13 The conceptualization and operationalization of this set is described in detail below. 14 I use all data from CLEA in which an Islamist party existed in the analysis below. Unfortunately, I had to drop Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran from the sample despite the fact that these three countries do have Islamist political parties that compete in national elections. The data from these three countries do not include information about the behavior of individual parties but of coalitions of parties, and these coalition vary regionally. With these data, it is impossible to identify where Islamist parties are running candidates and lists because they are part of coalitions that shift over both time and space. The appendix lists each of the cases of parties nested in elections that I include in the empirical analysis.
51 bimodal distribution in these data where most parties compete in all constituencies or very few constituencies. Because the expectations that I laid out above relate to causal conditions for
Islamist political parties not fully participating in elections, I use these proportions to construct the set of Islamist parties—by election-years—that do not run in every constituency. Set membership scores for this set are dichotomized so that a party, in a given election-year either does not fully participate in the election (y=1) or it does (y=0). The proportion of constituencies that Islamist parties in the set of parties that do not fully participate in elections ranges from
0.001 to 0.78. This y=1 set constitutes 62 out of the 109 observations in the dataset.
Input sets
The analysis of these causal combinations includes six individual conditions: crisp-sets
(which are coded dichotomously) of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization, parties that are not ikhwani, Salafi parties, parties that appeal to a sect that is not the majority in the state, states that do not fund Islamic educational institutions, and a fuzzy-set (which is coded continuously on the interval between 0 and 1) of states will competitive elections.15
I relied on primary and secondary sources to determine which Islamist political parties are autonomous from broader social and religious organizations and which are integrated into these organizations. Many Islamist parties are affiliated with broader social and religious organizations, but the expectations laid out above are specifically relevant to parties that are directly part of these broader organizations. In the analysis below, I identify six parties that are explicitly part of a broader social and religious organizations: the al-Asalah and al-Menbar
15 Crips sets only take on the value of 0 or 1, meaning that they clearly distinguish between membership in the set and non-membership. By contrast, fuzzy-sets provide nuance in set membership scores. For example, a fuzzy-set membership score of .75 suggest that the observation is more in than out of the given set, .5 suggests that the observation is neither in nor out of the set, and .25 suggests that the observation is more out than in the given set.
52 parties in Bahrain, Jama’at-e Islami in both Bangladesh and Pakistan, Jama’at-e Ahl-e Hadith in
Pakistan, and the PKS in Indonesia.16 Each of these parties was created by an antecedent social and religious organization and is the political wing of that broader organization. There are other parties that draw support from broader organizations and parties that rely on the same social networks as other nonpartisan organizations, but these six parties are directly connected to broader social and religious organizations. By maintaining a strict conceptualization of this set, I focus on what I have argued above to be the single most salient dimension of organizational variance among Islamist political parties.
Parties that are not officially related to the international Muslim Brotherhood are identified as members of the set of not ikhwani parties. The only controversial cases in this coding procedure are the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Jama’at-e Islami parties. While Jama’at-e
Islami is not formally connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, they share many of the same political aspirations and strategies. Indeed, Jama’at-e Islami is often thought of as the South
Asian equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ayoob 2008, pp. 64-89), and this similarity is particularly ideological if not behavioral. Thus, I feel comfortable including these parties in the set of ikhwani parties to test the ideological hypotheses laid out above. I hypothesized that parties that are not ideologically ikhwani will not fully participate in elections.
The set of Salafi parties was simple to identify because these parties self-identify as part of the Salafi movement. The calibration of the set of Salafi parties is used to test hypotheses about the role of variance in legal interpretive traditions among Islamist parties. I hypothesized
16 There are other Islamist parties that are part of broader social and religious organizations—the Egyptian Freedom and Justice Party’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, for instance—but these six are the only parties that are part of broader organizations for which there is data from CLEA.
53 that Salafi parties will not fully participate in elections. These three crisp-sets serve as the party- level inputs in the analysis below.
In addition to these party-level inputs, I consider the impact of three regime- and structural-level inputs. First, the crisp set of parties that do not identify with the same sect as the majority of the population is calibrated by comparing the demographics of the country in which the party competes and the sect to which the party attempts to appeal. So, party-election year observations are members of this crisp set if they appeal to Shi’ites in a majority-Sunni country or if they appeal to Sunnis in a majority-Shi’ite country. I hypothesized that parties that are members of this set will not fully participate in elections.
Second, I identify countries in which the government provides funding to Islamic educational institutions by relying on data from the Pew Research Center (Pew 2017). I hypothesized that parties that are not in these countries will not fully participate in elections, so I used the information from Pew to calibrate a set of countries that do not provide funding to
Islamic educational institutions.
The set of competitive elections is calibrated as a fuzzy set. To focus on the single dimension of democratic governance that is relevant to the theory above, I created my own set- theoretic calibration of membership in the set of elections that are competitive. I then relied on the negation of that set to analyze the relationship between uncompetitive elections and not full participation in elections. My calibrated fuzzy set takes on five values (0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 1), and is built from three observable indicators: government turnover, the presence of a tutelary leading figure, institutional constraints on Islamist political actors. Government turnover is identified if the party who controls executive powers changed in the election. The presence of a tutelary figure is identified by a figure that exercises executive power and is unelected.
54 Institutional constraints on Islamists were identified by asking two questions. First, if an Islamist party was declared to be illegal during the election year or in the previous five year, the country was identified as institutionally constraining on Islamists. Second, I specifically identified all
Turkish cases as institutionally constraining on Islamists.17 What is particularly useful about this calibration is that it focuses specifically on the competitiveness of Islamist parties in elections.
Given that Islamist parties may be targeted by unfair election practices in ways that differ from other opposition groups, focusing specifically on constraints on Islamist parties may be more valuable in this analysis than looking at the competitiveness of the regime broadly.
This fuzzy set is calibrated in the following way. When there is government turnover, then the election is deemed fully in the set of competitive elections and given a set membership score of 1 (negated to 0). When there is not turnover, but there is also neither a tutelary figure nor institutional constraints on Islamists the membership score is .75 (negated to .25). When there is not turnover, no tutelary figure, but there are institutional constraints on Islamists, the fuzzy set membership score is .5 (negated to .5). This corresponds to a conceptual space directly in between competitive and uncompetitive elections. When there is no turnover, no institutional constraints on Islamists, but a tutelary figure in the regime, the fuzzy set score is .25 (negated to
.75). The logic behind the distinction between set membership scores of .5 and .25 is that the presence of a tutelary figure makes access to power less meaningful for potential opposition groups who gain power. This is more serious to the competitiveness of the elections than restrictions on Islamists given that the set of cases included in the analysis all are open enough to
17 This may seem to be an outlandish decision, but Turkey stands out in the cases that I analyze in a number of important ways. Three Islamist political parties have been outlawed since the inception of the Turkish Republic, and the national narrative that has motivated these moves is highly hostile to Islamism and any public manifestations of Islam. This narrative has deeply impacted the Islamist movement in Turkey (cf. Mecham 2004), and even though the current ruling party is built on the pedigree of these old banned Islamist parties, the AKP’s policy positions and preferences still have to be weighed against the threat from the protectors of Turkey’s secular statehood, the military.
55 allow for Islamist parties to compete. Finally, when there is no turnover, and there is a tutelary figure and institutional restrictions on Islamists the membership score is 0 (negated to 1).
Therefore, I derive a fuzzy-set of uncompetitive elections in which a set membership score of 1 indicates fully within the set, .75 indicates more in the set than out of it, .5 indicates equally in and out of the set, .25 indicates more out than in the set, and 0 indicates fully out of the set of uncompetitive elections.
Table 2.1 summarizes the six individual causal conditions described above.
I test both the set theoretic relationship between each input condition as well as the intersection between each party-level condition and each regime- and structural-level condition.
The intersection of sets is derived by taking the taking the minimum membership score in either of the two conditions for each observation (Ragin 2000, p. 322; Ragin 2008, pp. 114-115).
Formally, the intersection of conditions can be represented as:
푿ퟏ ∩ 푿ퟐ = min(푿ퟏ, 푿ퟐ)
Where 푿ퟏ is the first condition and 푿ퟐ is the second condition. The intersection of sets corresponds to the logical AND operator. Because of my focus in this project on the sufficiency of each of these conditions, these causal configurations treat the individual conditions as INUS conditions (Mackie 1965).18
Analysis and Discussion
In analyzing the set theoretic relationships, I rely on a measure of set-theoretic consistency. Consistency is a measure of how frequently cases that share a given causal
18 Mackie defined an INUS condition as “an insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result” (p. 245, emphasis in original). Thus, in the configurative causal conditions, the individual conditions are treated as necessary but insufficient for the configuration, and the configuration is treated as an unnecessary of sufficient condition.
56 condition or intersection of conditions also share the outcome—how often do causal conditions correspond with the outcome of interest. As an indicator of the sufficiency of a causal condition, consistency is a measure of how frequently cases in which the input(s) are a subset of the set of cases in which the Islamist party did not compete in all electoral constituencies. The sufficiency of each of the crisp sets—including the intersection of two crisp sets—is assessed by identifying the proportion of observations in which both the causal condition and the outcome conditions are both present. Importantly, the presence of the outcome without the causal condition(s) does not contradict the set relationship, but the presence of the causal condition without the outcome does lower the consistency score. The consistency of a fuzzy set is calculated by weighting the proportion of observations in which both the causal and outcome conditions are present by the fuzzy set scores of the causal condition according to the following formula:
퐶표푛푠푖푠푡푒푛푐푦(푿풊 ≤ 풀풊) = Σ[min(푿풊, 풀풊)]/Σ(푿풊)
The statistical significance of a consistency score can be calculated as a p-value that tests the statistical significance of a difference between the consistency score against a given benchmark. In the results reported below, I use a consistency score of 0.65 as a benchmark. This has been used in other set-theoretic analyses (Katz, Hau, and Mahoney 2005).19 The standard deviation and number of observations used in this test is based on the distribution of observations in which the set membership score for the causal condition is greater than zero, since these are the observations that are being used in the calculation for the consistency score.
Finally, I include an analysis of the set theoretic coverage of each of the causal conditions. While set theoretic consistency is a measure of the overlap between the causal
19 The choice of a benchmark for sufficiency is always going to be arbitrary. Given the relatively low number of y=1 cases in my data, 0.65 seems like an appropriate choice. This is not to say that any configuration with a score above 0.65 can be interpreted as a sufficient condition, but rather that any score below 0.65 fails to be an even somewhat sufficient condition for the outcome.
57 condition and the outcome, coverage is a measure of the proportion of occurrences of the outcome that can be attributed to the causal condition, and it can be thought of as a means of identifying how empirically relevant to multiple cases, a given causal condition is.
Table 2.2 displays each of the causal conditions in the analysis along with the number of observations with each causal condition (n(x>0)), the number of observations with both the causal condition and the outcome condition (n*), the consistency scores, the standard deviation, the p-values, the number of observations in the outcome set (n(y=1)), and the coverage scores for each causal condition. The full set of observations and their set membership scores are listed in the appendix to this chapter.
First, there are 62 y=1 observations out of the total 109 observations in the data set. This means that are 62 observations in which the Islamist party does not fully participate in the election. Among the three party-level causal conditions, the set theoretic relationship between
Salafi parties and parties that do not compete in every constituency is perfectly consistent. The consistency score for parties formed out of an antecedent social and religious organization, is
0.75, but this score is not statistically different from the benchmark score of 0.65. The consistency score for non-ikhwani parties is well below the benchmark suggesting that neither the set of non-ikhwani parties nor the set of parties with antecedent social and religious organizations are sufficient conditions for not fully participating in a national election. Among the three regime-level and structural causal conditions, only the set of parties that appeal to a minority sectarian identity is sufficient for not fully participating; neither a lack of state-funded
Islamic education nor a lack of competitive elections are sufficient conditions.
58 I also analyze the intersection between each of the party-level sets with each of the regime-level and structural sets. The only intersection with the set of not ikhwani parties that is a sufficient condition is the intersection with the set of minority sectarian parties, but this is just an artifact of the individual sufficiency of minority sectarian parties. The intersection of the set of minority sectarian parties with both the set of Salafi parties and the set of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization are also sufficient conditions for not full participation for similar reasons. This is also true of the high levels of set theoretic consistency for the intersection of the set of Salafi parties and the set of non-competitive elections. The intersection of the set of Salafi parties and the set of states that do not fund Islamic education is an empty set.
The two most interesting configurations of causal conditions are the intersection of the set of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization and the set of states with no
Islamic educational funding—which has a consistency score of 1—and the intersection of the set of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization and the set of non-competitive elections—which has a consistency score of 0.93. In the former intersection, the set of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization and the set of states with no funding for
Islamic education are insufficient and nonredundant parts of an unnecessary but sufficient condition for an outcome, or INUS conditions. Similarly, in the latter intersection, the set of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization and the set of competitive elections are INUS conditions. The consistency score for the intersection of the set of parties with an antecedent social and religious organization and the set of competitive elections is associated with a relatively small p-value (0.2), but this is an artifact of the number of observations in this intersection (n=5). Only one observation does not support the set theoretic relationship, and it is
59 a very near miss. In 2009, the Indonesian national election was less than perfectly competitive, so the set theoretic hypothesis would be that the PKS, the only Indonesian party with an antecedent social and religious organization should not fully participate in this election. Because it did fully participate, the relationship is not perfectly consistent.
In terms of the expectations laid out above, I expected that parties that did not belong to the ikhwani ideological trend would not fully participate in electoral politics. However, this was only true when the party appealed to a minority sect in the population. My expectations about the legal interpretive frameworks of parties and their sectarian appeal were strongly supported in the analysis. All Salafi parties and all parties appealing to minority sects did not fully participate in electoral politics.
I expected that parties that grew out of antecedent social and religious organizations would not fully participate. This condition is nearly individually sufficient for parties to not fully participate, and it is an INUS condition when in a causal configuration with each of the institutional and structural conditions. This lends strong support to the novel theoretical contribution of this chapter that Islamist parties that face competing sets of ambitions—in particular, those that emerged directly out of social and religious organizations—will not fully participate in electoral politics. These parties never, or nearly never, fully participate in elections when they are appealing to a minority sect in the population, when the state does not fund
Islamic educational institutions, and when elections are uncompetitive.
Electoral Systems and the Limits of Outcome Set
The causal force of the electoral institutions under which the Islamist parties discussed above participate has, thus far, been a neglected feature of this analysis. However, the two country-cases in which Islamist political parties nearly always fully participate in elections—
60 Turkey and Indonesia—both have proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. In the sample above, the only other state that relied on PR electoral institutions was Libya in the 2012 election. However, in this election only half of the seats were elected via a PR system, party lists were open, and all forms of political organizations had a history of repression under Qaddafi’s rule. For each of these reasons, the Libyan case is a poor representation of the relationship between electoral systems and full electoral participation. However, the Indonesian and Turkish cases suggest a highly consistent relationship between PR electoral systems and full electoral participation.
While the set-theoretic approach and limited sample size of the analysis above mean that the presence of a causal connection between electoral systems and patterns of participation is not mutually exclusive of the causal conditions discussed above, the fact that electoral systems have such a strong relationship between Islamist partisan participation suggests a limit to the empirical utility of the set theoretic operationalization of “full electoral participation” used above. Scholars have identified the relationship between party nationalization and PR electoral systems in both advanced democracies (Cox 1997; Morgenstern, Swindle, and Castagnola 2009) and developing democracies (Bochsler 2010). While full electoral participation, as I operationalized it above, is not an identical concept to party nationalization, a party cannot nationalize without fully participating.20
A PR electoral system provides institutional incentives for parties to run in as many constituencies as possible, while single member district systems (SMD) may not. First PR systems are associated with fewer electoral constituencies than SMD systems because the districts send more than one representative to the legislature. Thus, it is less costly to “fully
20 Party nationalization refers to a homogenous electoral performance of a political party across electoral districts. Thus, parties need to compete in every electoral district to have a homogenous performance in each district.
61 participate” in PR systems than in SMD systems. Furthermore, in a SMD system, there is little utility for a party to run a candidate in a district in which it is unlikely to win because only the winner of the election gets a seat in the legislature. Therefore, if a party thinks it will lose in a landslide it may choose to focus its resources on races that have a higher expected probability of yielding a seat in the legislature. However, in a PR system, parties that do not win a plurality of the votes in a district still have an opportunity to be allocated seats in the legislature, so parties will vie for votes in districts where they know they may not win in a hopes of still gaining seats in the legislature.
This section takes a critical look at the operationalization of “full electoral participation” used above based on the possibility that full electoral participation in a SMD system does not necessarily mean running in every electoral constituency. Here I offer a brief qualitative sketch of the Islamist parties from above that competed in SMD systems to consider if a contextual approach to the concept of full electoral participation meaningfully effects the results from above. These sketches are organized by country.
Bahrain
Three Islamist political parties have competed in Bahraini elections, and the sample used in the analysis above included two Bahraini elections, 2010 and 2014. In Bahrain, the three
Islamist parties, al-Menbar, al-Asalah, and al-Wefaq, are the only parties to win any seats in the legislature. Al-Menbar is the partisan wing of the Bahraini Muslim Brotherhood. In 2010, al-
Menbar ran in 25% of the Bahraini constituencies, and in 2014, they ran in about 14%. Al-
Asalah is the partisan wing of the largest Salafi network in Bahrain. In 2010, they ran in 15% of constituencies, and in 2014 that number increased to about 16%. Al-Wefaq is a Shi‘i party and, until the cancelation of its registration in 2016, it was the largest party and most significant
62 opposition to the Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain. In 2010, al-Wefaq competed in about 43% of constituencies, but they boycotted the 2014 election.
The concept of “full electoral participation” implies that a party is attempting to win enough seats to control the legislature. With the high number of independent, pro-monarchy candidates running in Bahraini elections and the monarchy’s control of the district lines to keep any party from controlling the legislature, it is hard to know how to conceptualize full electoral participation in this context. Given the discrepancy between the number of constituencies in which al-Wefaq competes and the number in which the other two parties compete, it seems reasonable that only al-Wefaq’s participation in 2010 can be conceptualized as “full” in Bahrain.
Unlike al-Menbar and al-Asalah, al-Wefaq is solely a political party with aims to empower the
Shi‘i majority in Bahrain against the rule of the Sunni monarchy. If al-Wefaq’s participation in
2010 can be conceptualized as full participation in the Bahraini context, then its lack of connection to a broader social and religious organization supports the arguments made above.
Furthermore, there is no doubt that Bahrain’s elections are the least competitive in this sample, which may further explain al-Wefaq’s unwillingness to compete in more constituencies.
Bangladesh
Two Islamist parties compete in Bangladeshi elections. The Jama‘at-e Islami (JI-B) traces its roots to Abul A‘la Maududi’s highly influential group formed in British India in 1941. The other is Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ), a coalition of small Islamist groups that have competed jointly since 1990. All religious based parties were illegal from 1971 to 1979, but the powers of the parliament were severely weakened during the period of presidential rule in Bangladesh between
1975 and 1991 (Riaz 2014 p. 157). The first competitive election in which the Islamist parties
63 competed was in 1991 when parliamentarism was restored and the military began to lose its influence in state institutions.
In the 1991 election, JI-B ran a candidate in 74% of the country’s single member districts. This suggests an aspiration to meaningfully compete with the two largest Bangladeshi parties—the center-left Awami League and the center-right Bangladesh National Party (BNP)— and can probably rightly be termed full electoral participation in the Bangladeshi electoral system. By contrast, the IOJ only ran a candidate in 18% of Bangladesh’s constituencies. In
February of 1996, the incumbent ruling BNP oversaw elections that were boycotted by all of the opposition parties, so this election is omitted from the analysis above. In June, fresh elections were held in which JI competed in each of Bangladesh’s 300 electoral districts—the only case of full electoral participation, as defined above, for an Islamist party in a SMD system. In a similar increase in participation, IOJ competed in 55% of constituencies. Relative to JI-B’s full participation in this election, IOJ cannot be termed as fully participating in this election, but its participation was certainly significant. However, by 2001, both JI-B and IOJ had settled into their status as parties that cannot meaningfully compete with the Awami League and the BNP, but who can play the role of kingmakers in coalition governments with either of the dominant parties. Furthermore, they were able to do so largely without shifting their ideologies (Riaz
2014). Thus, JI-B’s participation in 1991 is the only observation from Bangladesh that needs to be changed based on contextual factors in the analysis.
Malaysia
The Islamist party that has participated in electoral politics for longer than any other party in the world comes from Malaysia. The Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) formed after splitting from the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) in 1951 and, until the 2016 formation of
64 the Malaysian United Indigenous Party (PPBM), was the most significant Malay-oriented opposition party in Malaysia. Malaysian political parties are largely built around ethno-religious identities that permeate Malaysian political life. Until the elections in 2018, UMNO had governed as the largest party in the National Front, a bloc that included the largest Indian and
Chinese parties. In 2018, UMNO was ousted from the governing coalition by the PPBM’s coalition—the Alliance of Hope—that included multi-ethnic reform-minded parties. Importantly,
PPBM refused to invite PAS to join their coalition.
In the 1950s and 1960s, PAS competed heavily with UMNO for political control of the
Malay community, and it always competed in more than half of Malaysia’s electoral constituencies—obviously focusing its efforts on Malay dominated regions of the country. After electoral advances among the ethnic Chinese in the 1969 election, PAS briefly rejoined UMNO’s electoral coalition. Following another division between these two Malay-oriented parties, PAS increased the number of constituencies in which it competed in 1978 to 77% and 74% in 1982.
However, after the elections in 1982, the party was taken over by clerics who pushed back against the Malay-nationalist orientation of the party and insisted on embracing a more hardline approach to the implementation of Islamic law in Malaysia (Liow and Chan 2014, p. 101). This
Islamicization of the party coincided with a shift to limited electoral participation until 2018. It also coincided with an autocratization of UMNO’s approach to governance under Mahathir
Mohammad. PAS’s renewed focus on da‘wa and the encroaching authoritarian nature of electoral politics during the 1980s and 1990s supports the analysis above; though PAS never ran a candidate in every electoral district, their focus on electoral politics seems to have shifted sharply in the face of UMNO’s illiberal governance and their own internal focus on religious issues.
A tiny archipelago in the West Indian Ocean, the Republic of Maldives is home to one of the least well-known Islamist political parties. The Adhaalath (Justice) Party competed in two elections in the data above. In 2009, they ran a candidate in just 5% of the constituencies, and in
2014 they competed in about 15%. In 2014, the Adhaalath Party was given the opportunity to participate in an electoral coalition with the government but chose to run alone (Minivan News
2014). This proved an unproductive strategy as they won a single seat in the opposition bloc of the new government. Even with the leniency of context, neither of these can be conceptualized as full electoral participation.
Pakistan
Other than Malaysia, Pakistan has the longest history of Islamist partisan participation in the world. However, in the data used above, an Islamist party only competed in more than 20% of Pakistan’s districts four times. In 2002, the Muttahida Majles-e Amal (MMA) competed in
64% of Pakistan’s electoral constituencies. MMA is a confederation of five of the largest
Islamist parties in Pakistan that was created entirely to win elections and pressure the government to stand up to the United States as it relied on Pakistani intelligence to mount its invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. The parties included in the MMA were the Jama‘at-e Islami
Ulema-ye Islami (JUI), and Jamiat-e Ahl-e Hadith (JAH, a Salafi party). The MMA struggled to maintain their alliance as these parties had been fierce rivals for decades, especially the two largest parties in the coalition JI and JUI. However, in 2008, they managed to run a joint campaign for 40% of the seats in Pakistan’s SMD system. The fact that, until a coalition that was singularly focused on winning elections was formed, Islamist parties did not come close to fully
66 participating in elections strongly supports the theory laid out above. After the MMA collapsed, in the 2013 elections—perhaps the most competitive in Pakistani history (PRI 2013)—JI ran candidates for 61% of the seats in the Pakistani legislature, and JUI ran candidates in 48%. This suggests a strong association, theorized above, between competitive elections and full electoral participation among Islamist parties.
Reexamination of the set relationships
This brief qualitative examination has revealed a potential weakness in the calibration of the outcome set used in the main analysis above. I identified sixteen party-election year observations in SMD systems where contextual factors suggest that, while the party did not compete in every electoral district, they may have still “fully participated” in the election. These observations are listed in table 2.3. In each of these observations, I changed the set membership score for ~full participation from 1 to 0 and then redid the set-theoretic analysis. The results are displayed in table 2.4. The only meaningful difference between these results and the ones reported above is the p-value associated with the consistency score for the intersection of the antecedent social and religious organization and ~competitive elections. This relationship becomes more statistically significant with the contextual calibration procedure. This lends further support to the importance of this causal condition that I have theorized about extensively above.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to explain one dimension of the electoral behavior of Islamist political parties, namely why, given the opportunity, they may not fully participate in electoral
67 politics. Because Islamist parties’ democratic credentials are often doubted, full electoral participation suggests an embrace of democratic norms and institutions. I offered a simple conceptualization of full participation in electoral politics, and then elaborated a theory about why an Islamist party would not run a candidate or a list in every electoral constituency in a national election. This theory clarifies a dimension of organizational variance of Islamist political parties that has been overlooked by previous scholarship. Some Islamist political parties emerge directly out of broader social and religious organizations and the relationship between the party and these organizations, combined with the competitiveness of the elections in which the party will compete, matter for how the party chooses to participate. The ambitions of a political party may work directly contrary to the ambitions of an Islamist social and religious organization, and these conflicting ambitions create a set of incentives for Islamist political parties that keeps them from fully participating less than fully competitive elections.
One significant limitation to this analysis is the simple conceptualization of broad social and religious organizations from which Islamist parties may emerge. Here, I dichotomize the set of Islamist political parties that emerge out of broader social and religious organizations, making the assumption that these parties are either part of one of these organization or not. However, many of these parties are affiliated, to varying degrees, with social and religious organizations, but are not formally a wing of that organization. These affiliations are often idiosyncratic and highly variable over time, so within-case analyses may be necessary to tease out the implications of these various relationships. However, I argue that, in this cross-case analysis, I have identified the broadest and most salient source of variance among these parties.
Another limitation is in the number of cases available for analysis. The cases are limited by the data drawn from the Constituency Level Election Archive (CLEA) database. While these
68 data do include some of the most significant cases of Islamist parties participating in elections
(For instance: Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh), they are missing several of the more contemporary cases that have inspired much of the current work on Islamist political parties (For instance: Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria). I, therefore, am hesitant to make broader claims about the trends identified in my analysis to cases that are outside of my sample. However, much of the literature reviewed above and used to craft the theory was built around these “missing” cases, which does suggest that these trends may be robust to other cases not included in the analysis here.
Future work on the electoral behavior of Islamist political parties should work to parse out the nuances in the many forms that Islamist political parties might be affiliated with broader social and religious organizations.
69 Tables and Figures
Figure 2.1
70 Table 2.1 Summary of Causal Conditions1
Operationalization Party, Regime, or Crisp or Dimension of the set Structural Level? Fuzzy Set?
Did the party emerge as a wing of a broader social and religious Organizational organization? Party Crisp
Is the party not affiliated with Muslim Ideological Brotherhood? Party Crisp Does the party esopuse a Salafi Legal approach to legal Interpretive interpretation? Party Crisp
Was the election Competitive not competitive Elections for the party? Regime Fuzzy Does the state not provide funds for Islamic State-Islam educational integration institutions? Regime Crisp Does the party appeal to a sect that is a minority Sectarian in the country? Structural Crisp
1The analyses below include the intersection of party sets with regime and structural sets in addition to each individual set.
71 Table 2.2 Results from set theoretic analysis for each causal condition. (~full participation is the outcome set)
Antecedent Social and Antecedent Antecedent Religious Social and ~ikhwani * Social and Organization Religious Salafi * ~State Religious * ~State Organization ~State Funded ~ikhwani * Organization Funded * Salafi * Funded Salafi * Islamic ~Competitive * Minority Islamic ~Competitive Minority Islamic ~Competitive Education Election Sect Education Election Sect Education Election n(x>0) 9 31 4 3 5 2 [empty] 2 n* 4 5 4 3 3.5 2 1.75 Consistency (n*/n(x=1)) 0.444 0.408 1 1 0.933 1 1 SD (x>0) 0.527 0.255 0 0 0.411 0 0 p-value 0.27 0^ 0 0 0.2 0 1 n (y=0) 62 62 62 62 62 62 62 62 Coverage (n*/n(y=1)) 0.065 0.081 0.065 0.048 0.056 0.032 0.028 N 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 Note: * represents the logical AND operator; ~ represents the negation of a set; n* indicates the number observations with the given causal condition and the outcome condition; n(x>0) indicates the number of observations with the given causal condition; n(y=1) indicates the number of observations with the outcome condition; N indicates the total number of observations; reported standard deviations are calculated with the x>0 set of observations; p-values listed are the results of tests against a null-hypothesis of a consistency score of .65 (two-tailed).
72 Table 2.3
Observations that changed in the contextualized reanalysis of the outcome set Country Party Year Bahrain Al-Wefaq 2010 Bangladesh JI-B 1991 Bangladesh OIJ 1996 Malaysia PAS 1959 Malaysia PAS 1964 Malaysia PAS 1969 Malaysia PAS 1978 Malaysia PAS 1982 PAS (in Malaysia coalition) 2004 PAS (in Malaysia coalition) 2008 PAS (in Malaysia coalition) 2013 PAS (in Malaysia coalition) 2018 Pakistan MMA 2002 Pakistan MMA 2008 Pakistan JUI-F 2013 Pakistan JI 2013
73 Table 2.4 Results from set theoretic analysis for each causal condition. (~full participation [contextualized] is the outcome set)
Antecedent Social and Antecedent Antecedent Religious Social and ~ikhwani * Social and Organization Religious Salafi * ~State Religious * ~State Organization ~State Funded ~ikhwani * Organization Funded * Salafi * Funded Salafi * Islamic ~Competitive * Minority Islamic ~Competitive Minority Islamic ~Competitive Education Election Sect Education Election Sect Education Election n (x>0) 9 31 4 3 5 2 [empty] 2 n* 3 3.5 4 2 3.5 2 1.75 Consistency (n*/n(x=1)) 0.333 0.296 1 0.667 0.933 1 1 SD (x>0) 0.5 0.461 0 0.577 0.447 0 0 p-value 0 0.482 0.115 0 0 n (y=0) NA NA 47 47 47 47 47 47 Coverage (n*/n(y=1)) 0.064 0.074 0.085 0.043 0.074 0.043 0.037 N 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 109
Note: n* indicates the number observations with the given causal condition and the outcome condition; n(x>0) indicates the number of observations with the given causal condition; n(y=1) indicates the number of observations with the outcome condition; N indicates the total number of observations; reported standard deviations are calculated with the x>0 set of observations; p-values listed are the results of tests against a null-hypothesis of a consistency score of .65 (two-tailed).
74 Appendix
Table 2.A
Antecedent Social and Election ~Full Religious Party Country Year Participation ~ikhwani Organization Salafi Al Asalah Bahrain 2010 1 1* 1* 1* Al Menbar Bahrain 2010 1 0 1* 0 Al Wefaq Bahrain 2010 1 1* 0 0 Al Asalah Bahrain 2014 1 1* 1* 1* Al Menbar Bahrain 2014 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 1991 1 1* 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1991 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 1996 1 1* 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1996 0 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2001 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2001 1 1* 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2008 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2008 1 1* 0 0 KAMI Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 New Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PAN Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PBB Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PK Indonesia 1999 0 0 1^ 0 PKB Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PNU Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PPP Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PUI Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PUMI Indonesia 1999 0 1^ 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2004 0 1^ 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2004 0 1^ 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2004 0 1^ 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2004 0 0 1^ 0 PKB Indonesia 2004 0 1^ 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2004 0 1^ 0 0
75 PAN Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2009 0 0 1^ 0 PKB Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PKNU Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PPNU Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2009 0 1^ 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2014 0 1^ 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2014 0 1^ 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2014 0 0 1^ 0 PKB Indonesia 2014 0 1^ 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2014 0 1^ 0 0 Justice Reform and Developent Assembly Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Justice and Construction Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
National Convocation and Development Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Shari'a Movement Libya 2012 1 1* 0 1* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1959 1 0 0 0 Pan-Malaya Islamic Party Malaysia 1964 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1969 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1978 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1982 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1990 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1995 1 0 0 0
76 Alternative Front(People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 1999 1 1* 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2004 1 1* 0 0 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2008 1 1* 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2013 1 1* 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2018 1 1* 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2009 1 1* 0 0 Islamic Democratic Party Maldives 2009 1 1* 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2014 1 1* 0 0 Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Hadith Pakistan 1988 1 1* 1* 1* Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Sunnat Pakistan 1988 1 1* 1* 1* Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Darkhasti Group) Pakistan 1988 1 1* 0 0
Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Fazal- Pakistan 1988 1 1* 0 0
79 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1991 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 1996 1 0 1* 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1996 0 0 1^ 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2001 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2001 1 0 1* 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2008 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2008 1 0 1* 0 KAMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 New Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PK Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PNU Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PBR Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PBB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PKS Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PKB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PKNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PPNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PPP Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PAN Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0
80 PPP Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 Justice Reform and Developent Assembly Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Justice and Construction Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
National Convocation and Development Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Shari'a Movement Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1959 1 0 0 0.25* Pan-Malaya Islamic Party Malaysia 1964 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1969 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1978 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1982 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1990 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1995 1 0 0 0.25*
Alternative Front(People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0.25* Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0.25* Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2004 1 0 0 0.25*
81 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2008 1 0 0 0.25* Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0.25* Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0 Islamic Democratic Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2014 1 0 0 0.25* Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Hadith Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Sunnat Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Darkhasti Group) Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Fazal- ur-Rehman Group) Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Tehreek-e- Nafaz-e- Fiqah-e-Jafria Pakistan 1988 1 1* 0 0 Jamaat Ahl-e- Sunnat Pakistan 1990 1 0 0 0
84 Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 New Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PK Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PNU Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PBR Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PBB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PKS Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PKNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PPNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PPP Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PAN Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 Justice Reform and Developent Assembly Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
Justice and Construction Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
National Convocation and Development Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
85 Shari'a Movement Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1959 1 0 0 0 Pan-Malaya Islamic Party Malaysia 1964 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1969 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1978 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1982 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1990 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1995 1 0 0 0
Alternative Front(People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0.25* Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2004 1 0 0 0.25* Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2008 1 0 0 0.25* Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0.25* Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0
88 Note: * indicates that the observation supports the set theoretic relationship, ^ indicates that the observation contradicts the set theoretic relationship. Antecedent Social and Antecedent Antecedent Religious Social and Social and Organization Religious Religious * ~State Organization Organization Funded * Election ~Full * Minority Islamic ~Competitive Party Country Year Participation Sect Education Election Al Asalah Bahrain 2010 1 1* 0 0.75* Al Menbar Bahrain 2010 1 1* 0 0.75* Al Wefaq Bahrain 2010 1 0 0 0 Al Asalah Bahrain 2014 1 1* 0 1* Al Menbar Bahrain 2014 1 1* 0 1* IOJ Bangladesh 1991 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1991 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 1996 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1996 0 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2001 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2001 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2008 1 0 1* 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2008 1 0 0 0 KAMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 New Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PK Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PNU Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0
89 PKB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0.25^ PKB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PKNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PPNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 Justice Reform and Developent Assembly Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
Justice and Construction Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
National Convocation and Development Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Shari'a Movement Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1959 1 0 0 0 Pan-Malaya Islamic Party Malaysia 1964 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1969 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1978 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1982 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1990 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1995 1 0 0 0
90 Alternative Front(People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2004 1 0 0 0 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2008 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0 Islamic Democratic Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2014 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Hadith Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Sunnat Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Darkhasti Group) Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0
Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Fazal- Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0
93 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1991 1 0 0 0 IOJ Bangladesh 1996 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 1996 0 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2001 1 0 0 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2001 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-E- Islami Bangladesh 2008 1 0 0 0 IOJ Bangladesh 2008 1 0 0 0 KAMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 New Masyumi Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PK Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PNU Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PUMI Indonesia 1999 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2004 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PBR Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PKNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PPNU Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PPP Indonesia 2009 0 0 0 0 PAN Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PBB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKS Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 PKB Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0
94 PPP Indonesia 2014 0 0 0 0 Justice Reform and Developent Assembly Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Justice and Construction Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0
National Convocation and Development Party Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Shari'a Movement Libya 2012 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1959 1 0 0 0 Pan-Malaya Islamic Party Malaysia 1964 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1969 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1978 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1982 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1990 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 1995 1 0 0 0
Alternative Front(People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 1999 1 0 0 0 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2004 1 0 0 0
95 Alternative Front (People's Alliance-Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) Malaysia 2008 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2013 1 0 0 0 Pan- Malaysian Islamic Front Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Islamic Party of Malaysia Malaysia 2018 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0 Islamic Democratic Party Maldives 2009 1 0 0 0 Adhaalath Party Maldives 2014 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Hadith Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamaat-e-Ahl- e-Sunnat Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Darkhasti Group) Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamiat-e- Ulema-e- Islam (Fazal- ur-Rehman Group) Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Tehreek-e- Nafaz-e- Fiqah-e-Jafria Pakistan 1988 1 0 0 0 Jamaat Ahl-e- Sunnat Pakistan 1990 1 0 0 0
Note: * indicates that the observation supports the set theoretic relationship, ^ indicates that the observation contradicts the set theoretic relationship.
98 CHAPTER 3
Patterns of Islamist Violent Mobilization: When Can Parties Help?
Ennahda, the leading party in Tunisia’s first post-revolutionary elections emerged out of an Islamist pedigree but has worked hard to rebrand itself as a center-right party that is motivated by Islamic values and principles (Ghannouchi 2016). This move has been lauded as a necessary step toward democratization in the Arab world because it is an expression of the preferences of
Tunisian civil society, not an authoritarian imposition (Hamid 2018; Filali-Ansary 2016).
However, during the same post-revolutionary period, Islamist violence has increased and Tunisia became the largest supplier of fighters to the Islamic State group in the Syrian civil war (Wolf
2014; Bremmer 2017). Despite—or perhaps because of—Ennahda’s strategic choice to move to the center of Tunisian partisan politics, some elements of the Islamist movement within Tunisia has failed to move with it. This battle over the control of potential supporters of both Islamist political parties and violent Islamist groups is at the heart of this study.
Political democracy is frequently cited as a force that increases the probability of violent mobilization (Eyerman 1998; Li 2005; Chenoweth 2010), and this process may be more pronounced in transitioning democracies (Gaibullov, Piazza, and Sandler 2017). In particular, scholars argue that the freedoms from state repression that are definitive of political democracy enable potentially violent groups to organize and operate more easily relative to more authoritarian regimes (Eubank and Weinberg 1994). Autocrats, not surprisingly, have been particularly supportive of these findings, and in Muslim-majority countries they frequently argue that political democracy will either facilitate Islamist terrorism or enable an Islamist take-over of the regime which will demolish the democratic process (Lust 2011). Indeed, the Algerian
99 experience of liberalized elections that empowered Islamists followed by a military coup and a brutal civil war is a compelling defense for continued authoritarianism.
This chapter seeks to understand the conditions under which democratic opportunities are associated with changes in levels of Islamist violence, and whether opportunities for mobilization within an Islamist political party can mediate potential increases in violence. While case studies of Islamist movements within states have proliferated—especially Islamist groups in
Egypt and Pakistan— little work has been done to consider the impact of democratic institutions and Islamist political parties on levels of Islamist violence across the Muslim-majority world. To fill that gap in the literature, I take a broad, cross-national, quantitative approach. My theory focuses on the unique set of grievances and priorities—both religious and political—of both
Islamists groups and Islamist supporters. This chapter demonstrates that the conditions associated with lower levels of Islamist violence are much more complicated than previous work has suggested. In particular, while free association rights have tended to be associated with increased levels of violence generally, institutions that empower local representation will moderate this increase in violence among Islamists, especially when Islamists have formed a political party that can institutionally channel Islamist mobilization away from violence and into partisan politics.
The chapter will proceed as follows. The first section reviews the literature on Islamist political mobilization and prior work that has tried to explain the strategic choice that Islamists make as they determine how to engage with the state and recruit supporters. This review demonstrates that Islamist demands are poorly conceptualized despite often being made explicit by the groups themselves. The second section introduces a stylized theory that embraces the notion that Islamist groups are simultaneously interested in both religious and political outcomes.
100 This duality creates tension in Islamist political strategy that may lead to violent mobilization when both ambitions cannot be met through electoral participation. The theory argues that opportunities for subnational electoral participation may align the demands of supporters of
Islamist groups with the dual ambitions of those groups and serve to disincentivize violence precisely when prior theories would predict violence is more likely: when free association rights are expanded. The third section elaborates the quantitative research design that I employ to test these hypotheses through a zero-inflated negative binomial regression. The fourth section presents the results of my empirical tests that largely support my theory and point to the particularly important role of local-level elections. And the fifth section concludes with a discussion of these results, limitations of the study, and avenues for future research.
Understanding Islamist Violence
Scholars remain divided about the relationship between political democracy and levels of violence among all opposition groups, including Islamists (Piazza 2008, Chenoweth 2010, Piazza
2013, Morgan and Rubin 2019, Ashour 2009). Broadly, political democracy may be associated with increases in violence because political democracy provides groups greater autonomy from state repression in the form of civil liberties, particularly free association rights. This autonomy may enable violent groups to organize more easily than in more repressive authoritarian contexts.
On the other hand, political democracy provides institutional forms of redress for opposition groups that are far less costly than violent mobilization. By allowing opposition groups to form political parties and compete in elections, democratic regimes should be able to disincentivize violent mobilization. This section reviews these competing hypotheses in both the broad context of all opposition groups and in the context of Islamist groups. Synthesizing these literatures, I derive the expectation that when Islamists are given the opportunity to form political parties and
101 compete in elections, there should be no effect of increasing free association rights on levels of
Islamist violence. This supports the notion that political regime type, in the aggregate, has no effect on levels of political violence (Piazza 2008). In the next section, I expand on this expectation to suggest that when there are not opportunities for subnational governance, the countervailing force of the presence of an Islamist political party may be unable to limit levels of
Islamist violence.
Free Association Rights and Violence
The relationship between political violence—including Islamist violence—and political democracy is not easily determined because of the multidimensional complexity in the concept of political democracy. Previous theory suggests that increases in civil liberties associated with political democracy may increase levels of political violence in a state. Because democracies protect opportunities for citizens to assemble and associate without state interference, terrorists and other violent actors are more easily able to organize their efforts (Eubank and Weinberg
1994, 2001). Thus, political democracy should be associated with increasing levels of political violence because civil liberties, especially free association rights, are respected by the state.
Other studies have focused on the role of competition in democratic regimes as the causal force behind increasing levels of political violence (Chenoweth 2010). However, this analysis implicitly focuses on opportunities for political organization independent of state interference.
Chenoweth’s measure of political competition is not a measure of the competitiveness of electoral institutions—the typical approach to competitiveness in a democratic regime—but rather the state’s willingness to allow competition between various opposition groups. She finds that increasing levels of tolerable competition is associated with increasing levels of terrorism.
102 The relationship between association rights and political violence is particularly acute in emerging democracies. This observation is relevant to the population of interest in this study because the Muslim-majority world has been particularly slow to democratize. While democratic regimes in all forms are more likely to experience terrorism than nondemocracies, states that have recently transitioned to democracy are far more likely to experience terrorist attacks than both authoritarian regimes and consolidated democracies (Piazza 2013). This finding is robust to all forms of terrorism, both international and domestic (p. 255). Time since democratic transition is typically marked by the year in which institutional changes were made to bring the regime in line with a procedural definition of political democracy, but those changes do not necessarily reflect a shift in political culture. Therefore, these new democracies may face violent mobilization as opposition groups come to embrace democratic norms and accept the outcome and legitimacy of competitive democratic processes (Chenoweth 2010).
More contemporary work has disaggregated measures of political democracy to specifically identify the causal impact of protections for civil liberties on levels of political violence. Data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project were built with the recognition that democracy is a multidimensional concept and that various dimensions of democracy may have conflicting effects on many different outcomes of interest to researchers (Coppedge and
Gerring 2011). It, therefore, includes disaggregated measures and indicators of hundreds of dimensions of political democracy. With regard to civil liberties protections, these data suggest that protections for political liberties tend to increase levels of political violence, but protections for physical integrity liberties tend to moderate levels of violence (Morgan and Rubin 2019). By political liberties these authors are referring to the ability of individual citizens to appeal to the government; this concept includes the ability of civil society organizations to operate
103 independently from the state, and it is this independence that empowers both nonviolent and violent groups to mobilize. While these liberties create an environment for violent mobilization, protections for physical integrity liberties tend to eliminate many of the grievances that motivate violent mobilization.
In the context of Islamist political violence and extremism, years of political repression and the inability to mobilize violently or otherwise does seem to moderate the demands of
Islamist organizations and make them more amenable to peaceful mechanisms of redress (Hamid
2014). Above scholars argued that protecting civil liberties, especially free association rights, will enable violent mobilization. In the context of Islamist violence, consistent violations of civil liberties, especially free association rights, seem to decrease levels of violent mobilization.
Repressive states constrain the sphere in which Islamist activists can petition the government such that any potentially violent groups are summarily blocked from action through state actions such as targeted jailings or extrajudicial killings.
Similar to work on political violence generally, there are others who argue that repression and other violations of civil liberties by the state breed grievances among Islamist groups that increase levels of Islamist violence. Hafez (2003) makes this claim most forcefully, but other studies similarly identify authoritarian political systems, particularly those in the Middle East as particularly conducive to violent Islamist mobilization. However, even in these contexts, de- radicalization is theorized to be the outcome of shifting preferences among the leadership who recognize that states are not going to liberalize in the face of violent opposition and seek to limit the costs of continued association by publicly denouncing violence (Ashour 2009). Because this denunciation of violent tactics does not necessarily suggest an ideological shift toward the acceptance of democratic institutions—which likely are not competitive anyway—this line of
104 research does not contradict the theory that increased levels of free association rights will facilitate violent mobilization. The finding is that in parts of the Middle East where violent
Islamist mobilization is prevalent, free association rights are rarely loosened, and so de- radicalization is sometimes an eventual outcome.
The post-Arab Spring political environment provides some insight into how Islamists in the Middle East react to sudden shifts in the political institutional structure of a regime. Broadly, the two dominant outcomes of the Arab Spring movement are Islamist electoral successes—most notably in Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco—and dissents into civil conflict dominated by Islamist rebel groups—as in Syria, Libya, and Yemen (Mecham 2014b). The cases of civil conflict are emblematic of responses to state failure and collapse rather than opening the political space by providing greater protections to civil liberties. The cases of Islamist electoral success speak to the bifurcated nature of Islamist mobilization where non-violent political parties proliferated in the same institutional contexts as violent Islamist groups. What remains unclear is how those institutional environments affected these groups in these separate directions. I argue that, where
Islamist parties are organized, two dimensions of political democracy offer countervailing influences on Islamist political mobilization. As the literature above suggests, increasing levels of free association rights provided an environment where violent Islamist groups can organize without state interference. Below, I consider the influence of competitive elections on levels of violence, and the broad implication is that this dimension of democracy should lower levels of
Islamist violence.
Political Liberalization and Limiting Violence
Another broad branch of scholarship on Islamist political violence argues that the competitive elections that are definitive of political democracy serve to disincentivize violent
105 mobilization among opposition groups. There is a significant cost associated with violent mobilization against state powers, so if non-violent, institutional mechanisms exist and are competitive enough that incumbents may lose power at the ballot box, we should expect to see lower levels of violent mobilization against the state.
In studies of all forms of political violence and terrorism, competitive elections are theorized to push fringe political groups out of the regime’s institutions, where they have no meaningful chance of holding political power, and toward violent forms of mobilization
(Chenoweth 2010). This analysis, however, fails to account for the influence that niche political parties can exert on the policy programs of mainstream parties even without winning elections
(Meguid 2005). These niche groups—among which many Islamist groups could be counted— may be more likely to turn to violence when democratic transitions are not consolidated.
However, work on violent mobilization of Islamist groups suggests that competitive elections should push potentially violent Islamist groups toward institutionalized forms of mobilization
(Hwang 2009).
Islamist groups have a vested interest in not provoking the state. Because they are frequently seen as principle opponents to regime stability, Islamist groups are often the first to be repressed. Islamists, therefore, tend to be hesitant to participate in collective action against the state—more so than other opposition groups (Mecham 2014b). Of course, Islamists are interested in effecting political change, but their tactics tend to be a response to the political context in which they are operating (Brown 2012, Schwedler 2011, p. 351). For instance, when a state is experiencing a civil conflict, Islamists—similar to other opposition actors—may be more likely to mobilize violently. When a state opens up its electoral institutions to greater competition,
Islamists—similar to others—may be more likely to form political parties. This chapter is
106 particularly interested in Islamist violent mobilization in political contexts that include opportunities for Islamists to participate in partisan elections—a tactic that is opposed to the institutional incentives of the state.
The observation that Islamists are not singularly interested in wielding political power further explains their hesitation to join potentially costly mobilization campaigns against repressive states. Islamist groups can accomplish their goals of spreading the message of Islam, encouraging piety, and providing social services without the holding political power; indeed, these pursuits and the exercise of political power may be counter-productive ambitions. These other pursuits—social and religious—are highly valued by Islamist groups (Brooke 2019), so they are unlikely to provoke the state in ways that might compromise their ability to provide these services. This is the key feature of potentially violent Islamist groups, and why I expect them to uniquely be applicable to the theoretical framework I lay out below. Political regimes that include competitive elections enable Islamist groups to balance these social and religious ambitions with political ambitions, so levels of Islamist violence under competitive electoral regimes should be lower than under uncompetitive electoral regimes even if an Islamist party exists in both contexts.
Islamist groups also have an interest in demonstrating their compatibility with democratic institutions, even if those institutions are less than perfectly competitive. Some fear that if
Islamist parties win elections, they will consolidate power, marginalize non-Islamist groups, institute religiously inspired regulations, and cancel or render meaningless future elections
(Djerejian 2008, p. 22; Blaydes and Lo 2012). This fear makes incumbent elites and fellow opposition parties hesitant to work with Islamist parties, but it also makes Islamist parties particularly keen to demonstrate that they are, indeed, committed to the standards of political
107 democracy. Thus, where an Islamist political party is formed that can compete in competitive elections, Islamist violence should be at a low level.
The previous two sections suggest that, in the aggregate, political democracy should have no impact on levels of Islamist violence. This is due to the countervailing effects of two dimensions of political democracy: free association rights are associated with increased levels of
Islamist violence and competitive elections are associated with lower levels of Islamist violence.
Fundamental to these connections is the presence of an Islamist political party because Islamist political parties compete in these competitive elections and direct Islamist grievances toward institutional mechanisms for redress.
The need for autonomous subnational governance
The previous two sections have argued that, inasmuch as within political democracies protections for civil liberties and the competitiveness of elections are positively correlated with one another, there should be no substantive impact of the presence of an Islamist political party on levels of Islamist violence. However, two observations—one about the form of the political regimes in which Islamist parties tend to compete and one about the origin of support for Islamist parties—complicate this picture and suggest a circumstance in which the presence of an Islamist party may influence levels of Islamist violence.
First, the expectation that, in the aggregate, levels of political democracy should have little impact on levels of Islamist violence rests on the assumption that protections for civil liberties, especially free association rights, are correlated with the competitiveness of elections.
In advanced democracies, this is probably a reasonable assumption. However, no Islamist party competes in an advanced democracy. The population of electoral regimes in which an Islamist party competes includes massive variance across these two dimensions, and that variance is not
108 perfectly correlated. This is helpful in testing the argument that these dimensions of political democracy play a separate and countervailing role in diminishing levels of Islamist violence, but it also suggests that the decision-making calculus for Islamist groups about what form mobilization should take may be much more complicated in these more authoritarian regimes.
Second, the potential appeal of Islamist political parties is largely built on a reputation of local-level social service provision and campaigns against corrupt authoritarian incumbents
(Cammet and Luong 2014). This focus on local-level social, educational, and religious issues can be both politically strategic and ideologically imperative for Islamist political parties. Focusing on these local-level issues connects Islamist parties to their supporters, and having a broad program for activism that transcends typical political boundaries endows them with authenticity.
It is unclear if balancing political ambitions with social and religious obligations is a strategic tactic that Islamist parties have learned from years of repression under authoritarian rule (Brown
2012) or if it is a genuine commitment to apolitical activism that is born out of their piety
(Brooke 2019). But the unique position that Islamist political parties occupy in politics and broader society is integral to their support.
While there is still a lot that is not understood about the relationship between Islamist political ambitions and Islamist charitable activities (Brooke 2014), what this burgeoning literature emphasizes is that Islamist groups have a vested interest in subnational politics as a venue for building reputations and connections to their supporters (Cf. Cammett and Luong
2014) and that these reputations and connections have a value to the groups that is not entirely instrumental to national political aspirations. This is a pattern that differs from the effects of efficacious subnational governance among other political opposition groups who use subnational elections as a springboard to national successes (Harbers 2010). However, scholars of Islamist
109 politics have begun to identify local-level venues as integral to the dual nature of Islamist movements (Clark 2004 p. 181; Buehler 2009, p. 56; Muson 2001, p. 496). In the context of
Islamist politics, efficacious subnational governance that enables Islamist political parties to be genuinely competitive may provide the institutional framework for a balance of political power, social service provision, and religious proselytizing. Under these conditions, Islamist supporters may be most aligned with Islamist political parties, and lower levels of Islamist violence should result.
Islamist parties can balance their political and socio-religious ambitions when they can compete in elections at the subnational level. Subnational elections for offices that can wield genuine political power at the local level can enable Islamist parties to balance the political and religious ambitions for at least two reasons. First, when national elections are the only electoral opportunity for Islamist parties, they face significant costs that may lead to a suboptimal allocation of resources for the group. Resources that could be spent on social and religious activities need to be allocated for political endeavors so that the party is not consigned to political oblivion. This leaves a vacuum at the subnational level of potentially violent groups to move in and recruit supporters who may be alienated by the national political ambitions of the
Islamist political party. However, when Islamists can compete for meaningful power at the subnational level, these contests will require fewer group resources and will enable the party to remain close to their parochial interests and supporters which may keep support for potentially violent Islamist groups at bay.
Additionally, opportunities for subnational governance can keep Islamist parties closely connected to their core constituents. When subnational offices can operate autonomously from central levels, they can institute policy that their constituents prefer but that would not be
110 possible at the central level. Absent subnational opportunities for governance, for Islamist parties to wield any political power, they need to appeal to a broad segment of society, so these parties are likely to either move beyond the pale of Islamist politics in an attempt to capture a broader base of support or slip into oblivion as they lose election after election. Therefore, when subnational elections are competitive and fill offices with meaningful autonomy from the central level (i.e. when subnational governance is efficacious), Islamist parties are able to attract Islamist supporters. Thus, potentially violent Islamist groups will be left without supporters, and levels of violence will be lower than under regimes without efficacious subnational governance.
On the Uniqueness of Islamist Mobilization
As the literature review demonstrated, many of the central arguments of this chapter are built upon literatures about the behavior and interests of a broader segment of violent actors than just Islamists. It certainly may be that opportunities for subnational governance disincentivize violence among many types of violent actors just as there is evidence that increasing free association rights tends to increase violence among all types of violent groups. However, the theoretical framework applies specifically to Islamist groups who balance a variety of social, religious, and political interests. Essentially, the argument here is that, while other forms of opposition may provide social services or other public goods, they do so instrumentally to reach their primary political objectives. Islamists stand out in their earnest interest to pursue social and religious ends often more aggressively than they pursue political ends. Because the Islamist project aims to align Muslims with the path of God (shari’a) and spread the message of Islam, their participation in political processes is only one piece of a multifaceted approach to transforming their societies.
Research Design
111 Below I test the theorized effect of free association rights on levels of Islamist violence conditioned by the integrity of subnational elections. Before I can discuss the results of this study, I will elaborate on the research design. First, I will discuss the scope of countries included in my analyses. Next, I will elaborate on my dependent variable. Then I will move to discuss the independent variables in the model. Finally, I will discuss the econometric model specification.
Importantly, the theory and empirical expectations laid out above are about the average causal effect of these various dimensions of political democracy on levels of Islamist violence.
As the introduction to this chapter suggests, Islamist movements in countries such as Tunisia and
Bangladesh informed the theory building. However, the empirical expectations are unlikely to perfectly conform to any single country’s experience with Islamist political mobilization. Indeed, the methodological focus on small-n comparisons and within-case analyses in the literature on
Islam and politics is likely the product of wide, contextual variance among cases of Islamist mobilization (POMEPS 2016). In this chapter, I rely on a quantitative methodology to identify the average effect of these dimensions of political democracy on levels of Islamist violence under political regimes that include an Islamist party while recognizing that this average causal effect may not be empirically identified in any single case.
While Muslims could ostensibly mobilize within Islamist groups anywhere, I choose to focus on countries in which an Islamist political party exists in the analysis that follows. The theory above points to a key decision that Islamist supporters have to make between supporting
Islamist parties or potentially violent groups, so only cases where Islamist supporters have the capacity to make that choice—meaning cases where Islamist parties exist—are included in the empirical tests. Because of the limits of the dependent variable, the earliest that a state enters the dataset is 1972. A country enters the dataset when an Islamist party forms. These parties are
112 primarily identified with data from Kurzman and Naqvi (2010), though they are expanded to include election years that are missed in these data. This exploration of missing data focused on election-years in Muslim-majority countries. If an election-year included an Islamist party that was not listed in Kurzman and Naqvi’s data, I searched previous election-years to make sure that this was when the party entered the system. The most significant addition to Kurzman and
Naqvi’s data is the inclusion of Iran as a country where Islamist parties compete; just because every party in Iran is Islamist does not mean that the Islamist character of those parties should not matter for violent outcomes. Kurzman and Naqvi also identify several elections in which
Islamists competed as independents that I do not include in my analysis which is focused on the effect of formally organized Islamist parties, not independent Islamist candidates. For instance, this causes me to exclude the Muslim Brotherhood as an Islamist party in Egypt until it formed the Freedom and Justice Party in 2011 because the Muslim Brotherhood was not allowed to form a political party, and its members ran as independents until after the Egyptian Revolution. I also exclude Muslim nationalist and Muslim democratic parties that Kurzman and Naqvi include in their broader analysis of Islamic—as opposed to Islamist—political parties. This process yields
484 country-year observations across 25 countries in an unbalanced cross-section time-series dataset.
To test expectations about levels of Islamist violence, I rely on data from the Global
Terrorism Database (GTD) to identify Islamist attacks. Because the GTD does not explicitly differentiate between Islamist violence and non-Islamist violence, I manually identified this difference. I initially distinguished between Islamist and non-Islamist attacks by relying on the information in the gname variable from the GTD. This variable indicates the group responsible
113 for a given terrorist attack. For most cases, this was sufficient to determine if an attack was perpetrated by Islamists. However, there were two entries in the gname variable that added complication to this coding process. First, there was a high volume of attacks for which sources could not identify a particular group, but for which a “generic identity” of the attacker(s) could be found (Global Terrorism Database 2017, p. 42). If this generic identity explicitly identified the attackers as “Muslims,” these attacks were coded as Islamist. This may seem like a controversial coding decision, but in reality, it probably captures most of the right events in the data. In particular, the GTD’s gname variable includes generic categories for “students,”
“activists,” and “workers” which are all categories that are not mutually exclusive of “Muslims.”
Indeed, in the population of Muslim-majority countries, most, if not all, students, activists, and workers who participated in these protests were Muslims, so the GTD’s identification of
“Muslims” as the generic identity of the perpetrators suggests that their demands were specifically related to Islam. Because the GTD does not have a generic category for “Islamists,” I assume that the generic category of “Muslims” capture Islamist events.
A second complication involves a further layer of ambiguity in the gname coding in the
GTD. Many events were coded as being perpetrated by “Unknown” attackers. These events were not coded as attacks by Islamists. While it is likely that many of these attacks were committed by
Islamists, it is impossible to determine which were and which were committed by other groups of
Muslims. I attempt to minimize the presence of type I error by excluding these events from the count variable. The GTD includes information about collaborators and subgroups for each attack, but I only relied on information about the primary perpetrators for these coding decisions, another decision designed to reduce the presence of type I error in identifying relevant events.
Only terrorist events that were carried out by Islamists are included in the yearly count.
114 Finally, because the GTD does not contain data on individual events of violence in
1993—these data was lost several years ago (Global Terrorism Database 2017, p. 3)—this year is subsequently dropped from the analyses below. As I discuss below the models also include a lagged dependent variable on the right-hand-side of the equation. For observations in 1994, the values for lagged dependent variable come from 1992 which is a 푡 − 2 lag rather than the typical
푡 − 1 lag for all other observations.
The GTD provides event-level data, so to conduct my analyses I created a count variable across all countries with Islamist political parties, that counts the number of Islamist attacks in a given country-year. This is the dependent variable in all of my analyses below.
Independent variables: Varieties of Democracy data
Fundamental to the theory laid out above is the need to disaggregate standard measures of democracy to isolate the effects of free association rights and competitive elections. To test my expectations, I rely on mid-level21 indices from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project.
Data on free association rights come from V-Dem’s “freedom of association thick index” which quantifies the “extent [to which] parties, including opposition parties, [are] allowed to form and to participate in elections, and [the] extent [to which] civil society organizations [are] able to form and operate freely” (Coppedge et al. 2018, 43). Like most V-Dem indexes, the values for this index are the result of a Bayesian factor analysis of several indicator-level variables that is scaled to vary between zero and one.
Data on the efficacy of subnational governance come from two V-Dem indices. The V-
Dem “regional government index” quantifies whether or not there are “elected regional
21 The V-Dem dataset is divided into three levels of variables. There are “indicators” which are the lowest level of disaggregation, and there are macro-level indices that are the highest level of abstraction. In between these two variable types are mid-level indices. These indices are aggregations of indicator variables, that capture dynamics below the level of the entire political regime.
115 governments, and—if so—[the] extent [to which] they [can] operate without interference from unelected bodies at the regional level” (p. 49). The V-Dem “local government index” quantifies whether or not there are “elected local governments, and—if so—[the] extent [to which] they
[can] operate without interference from unelected bodies at the local level” (p. 57). While I remain agnostic in the theory above about the relative effect of electoral institutions at the regional and local level, the relative effects of both of these types of electoral institutions is an open empirical question. The V-Dem indices make comparing the effect of elections at both levels relatively easy,22 and I compare the results of these two indices in the results below. These are not measures of subnational electoral competitiveness; rather, they are measures of the ability of elected subnational units to operate without interference from the central level.
To test the effect of free association rights on levels of Islamist violence conditional on the efficacy of subnational governance, I include a multiplicative interaction term in the regression model between these two indicators.
Electoral competitiveness is also measured with data from the V-Dem data project. Data on the competitiveness of elections come from the V-Dem “clean election index,” which quantifies the “extent [to which] elections [are] free and fair” (p. 44). By disaggregating the competitiveness of elections and the levels of free association rights, I am able to consider the relative average effect of each of these dimensions of political democracy on levels of Islamist violence.
Control variables: Conflict and development
There are important confounding variables that need to be controlled in the empirical model as well. First, I control for the effect of ongoing conflict on the level of Islamist violence
22 Data from the local government index were missing for Iran before 1999; these values have been imputed to zero because local governments were not elected in Iran until 1999.
116 by including indicators for both an ongoing civil conflict in a given country and ongoing civil conflict in a neighboring country. Both of these indicators come from the UCDP/PRIO Armed
Conflict Dataset (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Eck and Pettersson 2018). Second, I include a variable that indicates the logged value of a country’s per capita gross domestic product as a control for the effect of levels of development on the level of Islamist violence.
Additionally, in all of the empirical models below I include a one-year lag of the dependent variable among the right-hand-side regressors. Because the level of Islamist violence in the previous year (푡 − 1) is likely a strong predictor of violence in the present year (푡), this variable avoids the bias of model misspecification (Keele and Kelly 2006). While Achen’s
(2000) contention that lagged dependent variables reduce the explanatory power of other independent variables of interest, the bias that the omission of the lag may introduce makes me unwilling to attempt to maximize model efficiency. Attempting to find results with the lag also raises the bar for identifying statistical significance in the models below.
Finally, I include a series of regional control variables that highlight the heterogeneity of cases across my sample. While the conflict, development, and electoral competitiveness variables capture some important confounding variation, there remains a great deal of unexplained variance. These regional controls are attempting to account for this variance.
Substantively, these include macro-level concepts that political history and how ingrained Islam is within a society. For instance, experiences with communism in the Eurasian region, and the relatively late emergence of Islam as a political ideology in parts of Asia and Africa impact the likelihood of Islamist mobilization and support for Islamist groups. Table 3.1 shows the
117 distribution of countries across the five regions that I identify for the analysis: North Africa,
Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Asia.
Table 3.2 displays summary statistics of these variables in the two samples that are used in the models below.
Model specification: Zero-inflated negative binomial regression
To test the hypotheses, I rely on a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model specification. The negative binomial specification deals with the over-dispersed count nature of the dependent variable, while the zero-inflated specification accounts for the possibility that there are two types of zero counts present in the data. On the one hand, an observation may experience no Islamist violence because of the combination of the variables laid out above. On the other hand, some observations may experience a count of zero Islamist attacks for more idiosyncratic cultural reasons that are not directly tested in the model. The zero-inflated negative binomial specification models both the probability that an observation is under no risk of experiencing a positive value in the count—as a logistical regression—and, with zero counts weighted with this probability, how many counts are likely to be experienced in a given observation—as a negative binomial regression.
All of the covariates that I laid out above are included in the negative binomial specification in the models below, but only the conflict and development controls and the lagged dependent variable are included in the logistic, “zero-inflated” piece of the model specification.
Results
Because the models that I estimate include interaction effects of continuous variables, I follow the advice from Brambor, Clark, Golder (2006) by 1) including constitutive terms of the
118 interactions, 2) not interpreting the coefficients of constitutive terms as independent marginal effects, 3) plotting marginal effects across a range of the interacted variables, and 4) providing a measure of uncertainty. Table 2.3 shows the results of the two empirical models. In model 1, the efficacy of subnational governance is measured with the regional government index from the V-
Dem dataset, and in model 2 the efficacy of subnational governance is measured with the local government index from V-Dem. Interpreting the variables of interest from these tables will not be particularly helpful because of the interaction terms, but I will briefly discuss the control variables in each of these models. In both models, the coefficient on V-Dem’s clean election index is not statistically significant. This may be because its effect is subsumed by the regional controls. The omitted category in the regional control variables is the Asia region, so these coefficients can be interpreted relative to this region. In both models the Eurasian and African regions experience fewer events of Islamist violence at conventional levels of statistical significance. In both models North Africa and the Middle East are associated with increased levels of Islamist violence, but these differences from levels of Islamist violence in Asia are statistically insignificant at most conventional levels.
The conflict and development variables are included in both the binary and count components of the zero-inflated model. In the “inflate” stage, the model is predicting the likelihood that a given observation has a count of zero. Therefore, positive coefficients are associated with a decreasing likelihood that any violent events occurred and negative coefficients are associated with an increasing likelihood that at least one event occurred. In both models only the indicator for an ongoing civil war is statistically significant at conventional levels; it is associated with increased levels of Islamist violence. The civil war indicator is only significant in
119 the “count” stage of the models, not the “inflate” stage, which suggests that the presence of civil conflict increased the number of violent Islamist events, but it does not affect the likelihood that a country will or will not experience any events of Islamist violence. In both models the lagged dependent variable is statistically significantly associated with levels of Islamist violence in the positive direction, but its substantive significance is extremely small; and an increase of one
Islamist attack in the previous year is associated with about an increase in one Islamist attack in the next year. The coefficient on the lagged dependent variable is not statistically significant at conventional levels in the “inflate” stage of the model.
Turning to the independent variables of interest, figures 3.1 and 3.2 show the predicted number of events of Islamist violence from models 1 and 2, respectively. In these figures the predictions come from a country in the Middle East region that is not engaged in a civil war and that does not border a country engaged in a civil war. In the predictions, the V-Dem clean election index, logged GDP per capita, and lagged dependent variables are all set to their means—0.399, 7.64, and 30.5, respectively. The V-Dem free association index varies between 0 and 0.6 at intervals of 0.1, and the V-Dem regional and local government indexes equal 0 in the first pane of each figure and 0.6 in the second pane of each figure—about one standard deviation below and above the mean. These figures allow me to determine the effect of free association rights at both low and high levels of autonomy in subnational governance. I have hypothesized that free association rights will increase levels of violence when subnational governance is not efficacious. Therefore, in the first pane of each figure I expect to see an upward sloping curve where levels of violence at high levels of free association rights are statistically higher than levels of violence at low levels of free association rights. In the second pane, I expect to see
120 something other than an upward sloping line. The competing, unconditional hypothesis predicts an upward sloping curve in all panes.
The solid line in the figures shows the point estimates from the models, and the dashed line shows the 95% confidence interval around the point estimates. In figure 1, the point estimates lend support to the hypotheses; in the left pane—where the regional government index is set to 0—as free association rights increase, the level of Islamist violence increases, and in the right pane—where the regional government index is set to 0.6—as free association rights increase the level of Islamist violence decreases. However, neither change is statistically significant over the interval of the free association index. In figure 2, the point estimates also lend support to the hypotheses; from model 2, when the local government index is set to 0, increasing levels of free association rights are associated with increasing levels of Islamist violence, and when the local government index is set to 0.6, increasing levels of free association rights are associated with decreasing levels of Islamist violence. Additionally, the predictions in the left pane demonstrate a statistically significant (alpha=0.05) increase in Islamist violence from the lowest levels of free association rights to the highest. This effect is demonstrated in the figure with a reference line at the upper bound of the confidence interval when the free association index equals 0; when the free association index equals 0.5, the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses the reference line, suggesting a statistically significant increasing relationship.
These statistical tests offer some assurance that free association rights are not unambiguously associated with increasing levels of Islamist violence. Indeed, perhaps as important as the finding that increasing levels of free association rights are only associated with
121 increasing levels of violence when there are no opportunities for autonomous subnational governance, is the finding the free association rights have no effect on levels of Islamist violence when subnational governance is efficacious.
Conclusion
This chapter has offered a novel theory about the moderating role that opportunities for subnational governance play in the relationship between the free association rights associated with political democracy and levels of Islamist violence. By embracing the claims of Islamist groups themselves, I argued that subnational governance may provide incentives for Islamist supporters to throw their support to Islamist parties rather than to potentially violent groups. I then tested this theory in the context of the well-established prediction that increasing free association rights are associated with increasing levels of violence, and I found that this is only the case when there are no opportunities for autonomous local-level governance. Contrary to my hypothesis, and that of prior studies, when there are opportunities for autonomous subnational governance, there is no relationship between free association rights and levels of violence.
It is possible that these findings, similar to many in the study of institutions (Przeworski
2004), suffer from an endogeneity problem. It may be that regimes are reacting to the behaviors of potentially violent Islamist groups by de-liberalizing. If regimes face the problem of Islamist violence, they are likely to violate some of the standards of democratic governance in their attempts to root out violent activities. This practice if probably even more common in semi- authoritarian environments where democratic institutions are tenuous. However, the interactive effects in the above models do not support these reverse causal stories. While competitive elections always make violence less likely, higher levels of free association rights are only associated with higher levels of violence when subnational governance is not efficacious.
122 Increased levels of Islamist violence are not unambiguously associated with violations of civil liberties. In fact, the counter-intuitive reversal-causal story is more strongly supported: increasing levels of Islamist violence are associated with increasing levels of civil society autonomy when subnational governance is being constrained. While the econometric methods utilized above cannot definitively support the causal arrow that the theory suggests, they do lend more support to this causal direction than the reverse.
Additionally, the measures that I used to operationalize the efficacy of subnational governance assumed that these levels are constant across a polity. This is probably an unreasonable assumption (Gibson 2012). Future work should focus on clarifying these subnational opportunities for political power. It is not hard to imagine that incumbents at the central level of political power would be likely to devolve more or less power to subnational units where Islamists are strong. This would likely depend on the incumbents’ perception of the threat of Islamists. However, these findings suggest that central governments probably have less to fear from Islamists at the subnational level than other forms of political opposition because
Islamists may be satisfied with subnational political control as means to achieving both their political and religious aspirations.
These findings support a more nuanced conceptualization of the process of Islamist participation, mobilization, and de-radicalization. While scholarship has emphasized the autonomy of civil society groups in disincentivizing Islamist violence, I have demonstrated that the effect of free association rights is conditional. Civil society autonomy needs to be accompanied by efficacious elections not only at the national level, but also at the subnational level, where Islamists will be able to balance their religious, social, and political ambitions. This effect is most pronounced at local levels of governance. While recognition of Islamist groups as
123 an important constituency that ought to be able to organize and participate in elections is, no doubt, a fundamental step in democratization in the Muslim world, these findings suggest that simply opening space for Islamist organization is insufficient to eliminate the plague of violence in these countries.
124
Tables and Figures
Table 3.1 Regional Distribution of Country-Cases North Africa Africa Middle East Eurasia Asia Algeria (1991- Comoros (1996- Bahrain (2006- Azerbaijan (1991- Afghanistan (2005- 2016) 2016) 2016) 1994) 2016) Mauritania (2013- Tajikistan (2000- Bangladesh (1986- Libya (2012-2016) 2016 Iraq (2005-2016) 2014) 2016) Turkey (1972- 1980, 1983-1987, Morocco (2002- Sudan (1986- 1997-2000, 2002- Indonesia (1999- 2016) 2016) Iran (1979-2016) 2016) 2016) Tunisia (2011- Jordan (1994- Malaysia (1972- 2016) 2016) 2016) Egypt (2011- Kuwait (1992- Maldives (2005- 2016) 2016) 2016) Lebanon (1992- Pakistan (1972- 2016) 2016) West Bank and Gaza Strip (2006- 2016) Yemen (1993- 2016)
125 Table 3.2 Summary Statistics of Variables Variable N Mean S.D. Min Max Islamist attacks 484 37.35 146.9 0 1316 V-Dem Free Association Index 484 0.523 0.229 0.056 0.873
V-Dem Regional Government Index 484 0.318 0.356 0.03 0.969 V-Dem Local Government Index 484 0.329 0.282 0 0.938 V-Dem Clean Election Index 484 0.399 0.236 0 0.93 Ongoing Civil Conflict 484 0.399 0.49 0 1
Neighboring Civil Conflict 484 0.694 0.461 0 1 GDP/capita (logged) 484 7.64 1.21 4.93 10.93 North Africa 484 0.167 0.374 0 1 Africa 484 0.052 0.223 0 1 Middle East 484 0.419 0.494 0 1 Eurasia 484 0.035 0.184 0 1 Asia* 484 0.328 0.47 0 1 Note: *Omitted category in the regression models
126 Table 3.3 Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression Results Model 1 Model 2 DV: Count of Islamist Violence DV: Count of Islamist Violence Count Inflate Count Inflate V-Dem Regional Govt. Index 3.12 V-Dem Local Govt. Index 5.62*** (3.49) (1.78) V-Dem Free Association V-Dem Free Association Index 2.61* Index 3.24*** (1.40) (1.06) V-Dem Regional Govt. V-Dem Local Govt. Index*V-Dem Free Index*V-Dem Free Association Index -5.14 Association Index -6.64*** (5.04) (2.45) V-Dem Clean Election V-Dem Clean Election Index -0.792 Index -1.22 (0.987) (0.867) Ongoing Civil War 1.56*** -0.119 Ongoing Civil War 1.48*** -0.114 (0.535) (0.489) (0.494) (0.644) Neighboring Civil War 0.008 -0.022 Neighboring Civil War -0.144 -0.2 (0.396) (0.538) (0.37) (0.585) GDP/Capita (log) 0.236 0.292 GDP/Capita (log) 0.033 0.28 (0.264) (0.228) (0.145) (0.21) North Africa 0.317 North Africa 0.594 (0.586) (0.467) Africa -3.9*** Africa -3.25*** (0.757) (0.88) Middle East 0.165 Middle East 0.776* (0.64) (0.447) Eurasia -1.72** Eurasia -1.26** (0.825) (0.557) Lagged DV 0.0095* -1.5* Lagged DV 0.01** -1.52 (0.0055) (0.788) (0.0051) (0.948) Intercept -1.43 -2.06 Intercept -0.899 -1.99 (2.26) (2.12) (0.967) (2.02)
N 484 N 484 Non-Zero Observations 258 Non-Zero Observations 258 Note: The regional control variables are relative to the Asian region. Robust standard errors clustered by country are in parentheses. *p<.1; **p<.05; ***p<.01
127 Figure 3.1
Figure 3.2
128 CHAPTER 4
Intersectional Patterns of Islamist Electoral Participation and Violence: The Case of Democratization in Indonesia
The previous two chapters have focused on cross-national associations in trying to understand both how Islamist political parties may affect levels of Islamist violence and the conditions under which Islamist political parties fully participate in electoral politics. This chapter attempts to trace the process that connects these two relationships. Fundamental to both of the previous chapters is the initiation of democratic—or at least semi-democratic—institutions that create a space for Islamist political parties to operate. However, neither of the previous chapters have been able to capitalize on the temporal dynamics of democratization that Muslim- majority states have experienced since the 1990s. This chapter focuses on within-case temporal dynamics and considers the process of evolution among Islamist political parties (and civil society organizations), violent groups, and the state itself. I divide the process of democratic transition into three stages (the final days of the authoritarian regime, the initial transition phase, and the consolidation phase). Dividing democratic transition in this way is a parsimonious approach, but there is certainly temporal overlap between these three stages. However, this framework creates expectations about the shifting relationships between Islamist political parties, violent Islamist groups, and the state through the long process of a democratic transition.
Political regimes in the Arab world, though often most conflated with Islam and
Islamism, do not offer a helpful environment to track the process of democratization and its effects on the state and Islamist groups. First, with very little exception, these regimes suffer from profoundly robust forms of authoritarianism, so the framework of democratization is not
129 particularly helpful in understanding Islamist politics in these regimes.23 Second, as historical abodes of Islamic scholarship, the Islamist movements in these states tend to be less fragmented than in places that are on the periphery of the Islamic world. Indeed, Islamist organizations in the heart of the Islamic world tend to formalize their ideologies with appeals to Islamist legal traditions in ways that Islamists in the Islamic periphery often do not. Third, the historical development of Islam and Islamism in the Arab world and elsewhere in the Islamic center is intimately connected to the development of many undemocratic regimes in the region. Thus,
Islamist organizations in the Arab world are likely to be endogenous to regime changes in ways they may not be in the periphery.
Therefore, I rely on evidence from Indonesia to uncover the process of evolution of
Islamist parties, violent Islamist groups, and the states in which they operate during the extended process of democratization. Indonesia makes an ideal context to empirically examine these processes. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority country, and it is the country where more Muslims live than anywhere else in the world. Indonesia’s population is about 240,000,000 and about 87% of Indonesians are Muslims. Islam arrived to what is now Indonesia near the end of the 13th century (CE), which is almost six and half centuries after Islam emerged as a religious and political movement in central Arabia. This is essentially the last place the religion of Islam reached that has become a Muslim-majority country.
Before I introduce the theoretical expectations and the extended case study, I review some of the seminal literature on democratization as it relates to the evolution of Islamist organizations. Here I also justify Indonesia as an ideal case to examine the processes that these
23 The Arab uprisings in 2010 and 2011 provide some insight into the relationship between Islamism and democratization in the Arab world. However, most of these movements did not ultimately lead to regime change. The Tunisian revolution may offer some insight into these ideas, but the transition is still relatively new.
130 theories elaborate. I then build on this literature and the findings from the previous two chapters to present expectations about the relationship between Islamist political parties, Islamist violence, and democratization in Indonesia. Finally, I move to an extended case study of the evolution of Islamist mobilization in Indonesia from the early 1990s to the 2019 national elections.
Democratization and Islamist Political Mobilization: Indonesian Puzzles
In the previous two chapters of this dissertation, Indonesia has presented a puzzling case for the cross-national analysis. In the chapter on electoral participation, all Indonesian parties fully participated in every democratic election. One interpretation of this finding may be linked to the high levels of democracy in Indonesia. It may be that at a certain level of democratic competitiveness, all Islamist parties are likely to participate across all constituencies; at this highest level of competitiveness the parsimonious operationalization on full electoral participation may not be analytically helpful to distinguish Islamist parties. Thus, one of the principle puzzles that this chapter examines is how Indonesian Islamist parties vary.
While the typical language about ideological and behavioral variance among parties is a spectrum that runs from moderate to radical (eg. O’Donnell and Schmitter 2013; Przeworski
1991), in discussions of variance among Islamist parties these labels tend to be replaced with a spectrum that runs from sharia to secular. The assumption is that the fundamental ideological dimension along which Islamist parties vary is a party’s desire to create a state that is bound only to the tenets of Islamic law (Ullah 2013; Bokhari and Senzai 2013; Badeswan 2004; Mecham and Hwang 2014). This approach neglects the strong argument that can be made both conceptually and empirically that the sharia—the body of Islamic law—is ill-equipped to meet the legal demands of a modern state (Hallaq 2013; Ayoob 2008, chap. 3). Islamists know these
131 limitations, and even if they are prone to grandstand with statements such as “Islam is the answer” (Ehteshami 2005, p. 32), the mere fact that they are participating in elections means that they are willing to accept legal innovations beyond the sharia. The sharia-secular spectrum is a simplistic device for identifying ideological variance that is actually not identifying the dimensions it claims to be. This is only exacerbated by the observation that the “secular” end of the spectrum is not actually avoiding religious appeals. Indeed, one of the secular parties in the
Indonesian case that I explore below, Golkar, regularly appeals to Islamic symbols and identities in efforts to mobilize support (Baswedan 2004, p. 675).
Under the dictatorial regime of Suharto, the United Development Party (PPP) was the only legal Islamically oriented party. The PPP was constructed by the Suharto regime as one of two façade opposition parties to show the world its dedication to “democratic” governance
(Diederich 2009, p. 85). It was designed as an umbrella party for the leading Islamic political organizations, and it was meant to foment infighting among Islamist opponents of Suharto’s regime to cripple their ability to organize (Hwang 2014, p. 63). Not only did this strategy—along with a repressive state apparatus—severely limit PPP’s popularity, but it also drove potential supporters of Islamist parties into the arms of ostensibly apolitical Islamic organizations that founded parties in the democratizing period after the fall of Suharto’s regime.
The two main organizations that attracted potential supporters of the PPP were Nahdlatul
Ulama—with a membership of 50 million—and Muhammadiya—with a membership of 30 million (Hwang 2014). Both of these organizations date back to the early twentieth century and represent the two “mainstream” strains of Islamic revivalism in Indonesia: traditionalist and reformist, respectively. Muhammadiya was founded in 1912 as an organization to promote reformist Islam based on the writings of thinkers such as Mohammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din
132 al-Afghani (Hefner 2000, p. 40). Foremost among their goals was increasing religious education among Muslims, and they aimed to build their educational model on that of Western education systems. After Suharto was ousted in 1998, the then-leader of Muhammadiya—Amien Rais— formed the National Mandate Party (PAN) as a political party to complement Muhammadiya’s broad social and religious efforts. Muhammadiya has never formally endorsed a political party, and its members are free to support any party they choose (Jung 2014). Therefore, while PAN’s political activities seem to jibe with Muhammadiya’s inclusive and reformist agenda and many
Muhammadiya members throw their support behind PAN candidates, there is not a formal relationship between the two groups.
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) represents the “traditionalist” strain of Islam in Indonesia, which embraces Javanese traditions as a part of a broader Indonesian Islamic identity. It was formed, largely as a reaction to the increasing influence of reformist movements such as Muhammadiya, in 1926, which is more interested in purifying Indonesian Islam of parochial traditions (Pringle
2010, p. 116). While reformist Islam pushed against the traditional clerical establishment’s hold on religious power, NU was formed to empower mainly rural clerics across Indonesia. After the fall of Suharto, NU’s leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, formed the National Awakening Party (PKB) as a pro-democratic and inclusive party that, similar to PAN’s relationship with Muhammadiya, could capitalize on its affiliation with NU without formally aligning with NU, though PKB party cadres seem to be more devoted to supporting traditionalist Islam than PAN cadres are to supporting reformist Islam (Baswedan 2004, p. 680). PAN and PKB are considered categorically less Islamist than PPP, and the other two Islamist parties in contemporary Indonesian politics: the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), and the Crescent Star Party (PBB) (p. 679).
133 After Suharto’s fall, another party emerged from a more contemporary reformist movement that particularly challenges PAN’s more tolerant political positions: the Prosperous
Justice Party (PKS). The PKS is rooted in student activism under Suharto’s New Order regime that flourished under the Jemaah Tarbiyah (JT). Similar to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood— which served as a model for its ideology and organization—JT is known for a more exclusionary tone in public discourse and a more political agenda than Muhammadiya and PAN (Machmudi
2008, p. 63). Indeed, under the New Order regime, JT members only interacted with one another; however, with the fall of Suharto, JT leaders saw an opportunity to influence Indonesian politics in ways that were unthinkable previously, and they formed the Justice Party (PK) which has been described as the best organized Islamist party to compete in the 1999 elections (Hwang 2014, p.
61). Despite their organization, PK failed to win any seats, perhaps because of the relative obscurity of the JT. In 2004, the leaders formed a new party—the Prosperous Justice Party—and focused their campaign on fighting corruption. Since then the PKS has gradually become more inclusive (Tomsa 2012), though it remains the political wing of a broad social movement with many goals outside the realm of party politics (Hwang 2014, p. 62). While PAN and PKB rely on
Islamic mass-movements to deliver support at elections but otherwise operate autonomously from Muhammadiya and NU, PKS’s electoral campaigns are one piece of a much broader social and religious movement that seeks primarily to increase Islamic piety.
PKS’s devotion to the broad social and religious goals of the JT sets it apart from the other Islamist parties in contemporary in Indonesia. PPP still attempts to operate as a “big tent” party for Indonesian Muslims, but without the support of a mass movement, PPP lacks ideological vision and is thought to be slowly decaying in Indonesian politics (Hwang 2014, p.
65). The Crescent Star Party (PBB) also lacks an attachment to a broad social movement. PBB
134 was founded by Yusril Ihza Mahendra in the wake of Suharto’s fall. Mahendra was a strong proponent of the adoption of the Jakarta Charter into the new constitution which would have bound all Indonesian Muslims to Sharia law. The PBB was one of many parties that claimed a connection to the first Islamist party in Indonesia, Masyumi, which was declared illegal by
Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno, but it is the only one that remains (Hwang 2014, p. 70).
PPP and PBB are the only two parties to explicitly endorse incorporating the Sharia into
Indonesia’s constitution (Baswedan 2004, p. 689).
The variance across these main Islamist political parties in Indonesia can be conceptualized in a number of ways. Organizationally, only PKS is directly affiliated with a broader social and religious organization—Jemmah Tarbiya—though the supporters of PAN and
PKB do tend to overlap with members of the two largest Islamic organizations—Muhammadiya and NU, respectively. PPP and PBB are distinct in that they are solely political organizations, though they may have some goals that could be achieved outside of partisan politics. Identifying ideological distinctions is particularly challenging among Islamist parties, but a number of scholars have devised systems to do so in the Indonesian context. Baswedan (2004, p. 681) lays out a continuum of party ideologies that stretches from secularist to Islamist. He identifies PAN as the least Islamist party followed by PKB, PKS, PPP, and then PBB. This identification is based on qualitative assessments of each party’s preferences about the adoption of a constitutions built on Islamic law, Islamic morals and ethics inspiring state policy, and plans to more fully develop a “Muslim society” in Indonesia (p. 679). In a more rigorous analysis, Fossati (2019) relied on individual level responses to a battery of survey questions to identify which parties are supported by the most Islamist-minded voters. While the scores were relatively similar to one another, his analysis suggests that PKB is the Islamist party that is supported by the least Islamist
135 voters, followed by PPP, PAN, and PKS (p. 143). Unfortunately, support for PBB is not included in his results.
Fossati also identifies a final source of variance among Islamist parties, which is based on the party system from the first age of Indonesian democracy in the 1950s that divided Indonesian political thought into three families: secularist, traditional Islamic, and modernist Islamic. This dimension may be capturing something akin to variance in interpretive approaches to Islam across the parties (cf. Clark and Schwedler 2003). PKB and PPP both emerge as part of a traditionalist approach to Islam. PKB draws considerable support from the NU movement which was established to promote traditional forms of Islamic religious authority in Indonesia, and the
PPP attempts to draw on their long pedigree of representing Islamist interests during the Suharto- era. By contrast, PKS, PAN, and PBB each have emerged in the context of more modernist interpretations of Islam. The dimension is not coterminous with the ideological variation described by Baswedan; a traditionalist party may favor a greater alignment between Islamic and national law than a modernist party, and vice versa. Instead, the difference between a traditionalist and a modernist party is a difference of religious (not political) preferences about leadership and interpretive abilities among Islamic clerics. Traditionalists tend to focus on maintaining and strengthening a rigid clerical structure and empowering Muslim clerics, and modernists are more apt to reject traditional clerical structures and aim to empower Muslims to confront legal and theological questions in their own studies.
Indonesia has seen a considerable amount of violent Islamist mobilization since the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998. This violence has occurred in essentially two phases.
The first phase was marked by rural intercommunal conflict between Muslims and Christians in regions where there was a history of religious tolerance. The most significant conflicts were in
136 Maluku and Central Sulawesi, but there were also moments of violent mobilization in more urban contexts directed against business that they deemed “un-Islamic” including discotheques and liquor stores. The second phase was predominately internationalized terrorism marked by a small number of high-profile attacks targeting Westerners and only loosely connected to broad ideological ambitions. The most significant events in this phase have been two attacks on tourist locales in Bali in 2002 and 2005. This chapter also tackles both the origins of the inter- communal Islamist violence and the shift in patterns of violence after the first few years of the post-Suharto regime toward internationalized groups.
It also may be that some approaches to Islamic legal interpretation are more accommodating of a moderate political stance than others. A full elaboration of the variance in
Islamic legal traditions is far beyond the scope of this analysis, but there is certainly a tendency to equate traditionalist Islam with moderation and accommodation of democracy and more revivalist approaches with radicalism and a rejection of democracy. In Sunni Islam, traditionalism refers to adherence to one of the four main schools of jurisprudence. Codified centuries ago, adherence to these schools generally involves a limited role for Muslims to oppose political leaders, so they rarely organize politically. However, this lack of opposition makes them frequent targets of cooptive strategies by authoritarian leaders, and their moderation makes them unlikely to provide meaningful support for democratization (Tezur 2010; Bermeo 1997).
Finally, these patterns of electoral and violent mobilization among Islamist political parties and violent groups in Indonesia need to be contextualized in the broader Indonesian experience with democratization. Indonesia is the most democratic regime in the Muslim- majority world and the third largest democracy in the world after India and the United States
(Mujani and Liddle 2015). Pepinsky (2009) focuses on the economic interests of coalition
137 partners in the New Order regime to explain its collapse in the context of the Asian financial crisis. Pepinsky demonstrates that Suharto’s regime was strongly supported both by leaders of the military who had become deeply intertwined in the political-economy of the Indonesian state and a politically influential upper-class of economic elites created by Suharto’s patronage.
During the Asian financial crisis, these two groups favored incompatible policy propositions, and this incompatibility led to the breakup of Suharto’s ruling coalition. Furthermore, balancing the interests of the military and corporate cronies meant placing the brunt of the financial burden on the Indonesian poor. While Pepinsky acknowledges the ideological dimensions of Suharto’s ruling apparatus, he characterizes them as epiphenomenal to its competing economic interests.
However, the final years of the New Order were not only marked by tough financial decisions but also ideological decisions that continued to permeate the regime after Suharto’s fall.
Slater (2010) argues that economic interests are insufficient in explaining the breakdown of authoritarian rule and the initiation of democracy. He argues that, especially in the emergence of democratizing movements, issues of national identity and communal bonds become powerful—though less tangible—motivations for opposing authoritarian regimes and promoting democratization. Thus, the fall of Suharto’s regime was the product of self-interested members of the ruling coalition who attempted to out-maneuver their co-rulers because they lacked a common bond. For nearly a decade before the Asian financial crisis, the New Order regime had focused its resources on distributing wealth to a bloated coalition of increasingly self-interested crony capitalists from both private industry and the military. Thus, when the crisis hit, the members of the ruling coalition were unable or unwilling to work together to preserve the regime. They saw more, potentially, from uniting with local forces that had consistently been in opposition to Suharto’s rule, especially Islamic institutions. These elites then became the
138 harbingers of coming democratization to meet the demands of proto-democratic parties and
Islamic organizations that saw themselves as a more genuine reflection of the demands of
Indonesians.
Violent and Non-violent Islamism in Indonesia’s Democratization
This chapter divides the Indonesian experience with democratization into three stages: pre-transition, transition, and consolidation. In each of these phases, the Indonesian political system saw a different configuration of Islamist parties, violent Islamist groups, and their relationships with the state. Each preceding configuration paved the way for the next. The relationship between Islamist organizations—both violent and non-violent—and the state in the pre-transition phase set the stage for their relationships and activities in the initial transition phase which subsequently set the stage for the configuration of Islamist politics in the consolidation phase. Additionally, these configurations contributed to the regime-level democratization processes of both transition and consolidation.
Figure 4.1 depicts the expected shifts among authoritarian Islamist groups, democratic
Islamist groups, and the secular incumbent parties in the state across the three phases of
Indonesia’s democratization. Each row of the figure depicts the evolution of a different set of political actors in the Indonesian system. The top row shows the evolution of Islamist groups that did not support democratic institutions toward their current state of domestic unpopularity and internationalized support and ambitions. Contemporary violent, anti-democratic Islamist groups—the principle of which is Jemmah Islamiya—are connected to international terrorist organizations, target Westerners in their attacks, and lack coherent domestic political aspirations.
These groups have roots in the paramilitaries that stoked intercommunal conflict that plagued
139 rural Indonesia in the initial transition phase. Those paramilitaries emerged from the violent groups that aligned with Suharto and extremist elements in the military and mobilized against the democratizing movement before Suharto resigned.
The middle row shows the evolution of Islamist groups that accept the legitimacy of democratic institutions toward their current position in which they fully participate in electoral contests, regularly enter into electoral coalitions with one another and secular parties, and adopt comprehensive political platforms beyond simplistic tropes about Islam offering a comprehensive solution to political, economic, and social troubles. These parties emerged in the initial transition phase when political parties were allowed to register. In this proliferation, parties had to distinguish their goals and ambitions from one another as well as from both the violent Islamist groups and the secular democratizers. These new Islamist parties emerged from the Islamist factions of the democratization movement that mobilized against Suharto.
Especially, as referenced above, factions connected to the traditionalist Nahdhatul Ulema organization, the modernist Muhammadiya organization, and the revivalist Jemmah Tarbiya student organization as well as the New Order-era United Development Party (PPP).
Finally, the bottom row shows the evolution of the secular incumbents in the Indonesian system from the Suharto-era to the contemporary consolidation phase in which secular parties have begun to embrace many of the core interests of the Islamist parties. This embrace is rooted in the ideological confusion among the secular parties during the initial transition period.
Specifically, while the New Order regime had historically repressed Islamist political activity,
Suharto’s final years in office were marked by attempts to co-opt Islamist opposition groups in a last-ditch effort to divide his opposition and retain his paramount status in the Indonesian state.
This effort failed, and Suharto resigned from the presidency on May 21, 1998. The post-Suharto
140 regime then had to deal with the relationship between the state and Islamist groups. While the democratizing movement was united in its opposition to the New Order regime, when Suharto fell it began to fracture along partisan lines, and in the initial transition phase secular parties continued to dominate the organs of the state. Among its most significant challenges, the newly democratized regime had to institutionalize its relationship with Islam and Islamic institutions.
The military had aligned with radical and violent elements of the Islamist movement near the end of the Suharto regime and this connection had the potential to catastrophically derail to transition to democracy. This relationship exacerbated intercommunal conflicts in rural Indonesia as elements within the military and Islamist paramilitaries—neither of whom were interested in the initiation of political democracy for strategic and ideological reasons—collaborated to provide arms and fighters to religiously motivated conflicts in Maluku and Central Sulawesi. Some of these paramilitaries also mobilized against centers of urban pop culture in Jakarta.
Linz and Stepan (1993) identified four characteristics of a democratic transition: sufficient agreement about procedures to hold democratic elections, a directly elected government, a government with the ability to create policy, and no power sharing outside of the three branches of government. By the 2004 national elections, the military no longer held unelected seats in the Indonesian legislature, they had largely stopped supporting Islamist paramilitaries, and the president was directly elected, so the criteria for transition seemed to be met by this point (cf. Liddle and Mujani 2013). Linz and Stepan then conceptualized democratic consolidation as a condition where no significant political groups are attempting to overthrow the democratic regime, a “strong majority” of citizens believe that further regime-level changes should take place within the constraints of democratic institutions, and all political actors agree that all conflicts should be resolved within the laws and institutions of the regime. Liddle and
141 Mujani (2013) suggest that Islamist groups remained the most significant obstacle to democratic consolidation, but support for violent groups plummeted after they lost their state patronage, expanded to international targets, and supported transnational networks such as al-Qaeda.
Additionally, the normalization of the behavior of Islamist political parties lends further support to the argument that post 2004, the Indonesian system entered a phase of consolidation, albeit imperfect.
Two challenges remain for the prospects of democratic consolidation in Indonesia, one at the central level and one at the subnational level. First, Slater (2018) argues that power sharing agreements at the central level that emanate from the presidency have blurred the lines of party differences. In a process that Slater calls “promiscuous power-sharing,” Indonesian presidents have preferred to create broad power-sharing coalitions with would-be opposition parties, and those parties have been willing to enter into coalitions with any president. These coalitions shift across election cycles such that institutionalized differences between parties have not emerged, and the lack of clear party differences can result in poor vertical accountability and policy responsiveness. Second, Buehler (2013) has identified a pattern of Islamicization among policy- making at the subnational level of Indonesia despite overwhelming dominance of secular parties.
The emergence of policy preferences that were once the exclusive domain of Islamist parties is a puzzle for the concept of political democracy itself. As scholars have tended to view religious politics antithetical to democracy (eg. Lipset 1959, p. 97), these policy preferences either suggest a failure of democracy or a failure of is conceptualization.
The following extended case study examines these processes both individually and, because they unfolded together, collectively. Thus, I attempt to trace the process of evolution for violent Islamist, non-violent Islamist, and incumbent secular groups across the process of
142 democratization. I also consider how these evolutions contributed to the process itself. In other words, how did these groups evolve across the democratization process, and how this evolution contribute to the outcome of each phase of democratization (authoritarian collapse, transition, and consolidation)?
Empirical Research Design
Before I elaborate on the evolution of the contemporary relationship between Islamist political parties, Islamist violence, and democratization in Indonesia, I will briefly sketch the empirical strategy I use to identify this evolution. In their groundbreaking book on the subject,
Beach and Pederson (2013) identify three distinct forms that the methodology of “process tracing” can take. The unifying feature of these forms is that they use a single case to explore the mechanisms embedded in an evident relationship. Thus, while the two previous chapters have identified relationships—set-theoretic and econometric—across many empirical cases in the
Muslim-majority world, this chapter relies on an exploration of a single case—the development of political democracy, Islamist political parties, and violent Islamist groups in Indonesia—to understand how these phenomena can co-evolve.
The three forms of process tracing that Beach and Pederson identify are theory-testing, theory-building, and explaining-outcome. Recent methodological scholarship focuses on the theory-testing variant (Zaks 2017; Fairfield and Charman 2017), in which theoretical expectations about the mechanisms connecting independent and dependent variables are elaborated explicitly—either formally or informally—and then the absence or presence of these mechanisms identified within a single case in which both the independent and dependent variables are present. The theory being tested is meant to be applicable within more cases than the one being tested, so selected case ought to be representative of the how the process may
143 unfold in the population of cases. Theory-building process tracing is essentially the inverse of the theory-testing variant in which a single case’s causal mechanisms are identified and then used to create a theory that is meant to be applicable across a set of cases beyond the case used in the empirical analysis.
The third variant of process tracing—explaining-outcome process tracing—is case- centric rather than theory-centric. The goal of explaining-outcome process tracing is to trace the evolution of a given case toward an explicit outcome. Though researchers relying on this variant often have theoretical ambitions beyond the single case, “the explanation cannot be detached from a particular case” (Beach and Pederson 2013, p. 19). The analysis below most closely aligns with this variant of process tracing as I strive to create a “minimally sufficient explanation” of the relationship between Islamist violence, Islamist partisan politics, and democratization in Indonesia. The potential of this explanation to be applicable to other cases is explored in detail in the conclusion to this chapter.
Indonesia Before Democratization: Islamist Groups and the Fall of Suharto
From 1967 to 1998, Indonesia was led by the military dictator Suharto. Suharto’s authoritarian regime—dubbed the “New Order”—had a shifting relationship with Islam and
Islamism over his thirty-one years in power. To create the illusion of competition, the New Order regime fabricated two political parties to compete with Suharto’s “Functional Group” (Golongan
Karya or Golkar) in elections. The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) was an amalgamation of several secular civil society organizations, and the United Development Party (PPP) was an amalgamation of several Islamist organizations. These three parties created the illusion of efficacious elections from 1973—when the New Order formally organized the PDI and PPP as amalgams of organizations to oppose Golkar—until 1998.
144 In 1998, the New Order regime faced a number of significant obstacles to continued authoritarian rule. Primary among them were economic hardships associated with the Asian
Financial Crisis of 1997 and 1998. Beginning with the collapse of the Thai economy after that government’s decision to float the value of their currency led to massive capital flight. Because of Suharto’s legacy of controlling economic reforms and weathering storms like these, the IMF was willing to offer loans and assistance to Indonesia on condition of austerity measures including dissolving patronage-based monopolies, ending fuel subsidies, and submitted a budget that projected a surplus. However, none of these conditions were met, and by the end of January
1998, the IMF and the World Bank were projecting Indonesia would default on billions of dollars in loans (Smith 2003, p. 117). To a developing and expanding segment of Indonesian civil society, Suharto’s decades-long failure to provide liberal political reforms and consistent cronyism at the expense of economic liberalization were reaching a critical mass, and they had little faith in the efficacy of pressure from the international community to curb his authoritarian tendencies.
In this political and economic climate, mass protests calling for the end of the New Order regime began to rage in May of 1998. Among the protesters were members and supporters of the
United Development Party (PPP), and the two largest Islamic organizations in the world—the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulema and the reformist Muhammadiyah. However, these allegiances were unimportant in the midst of the movement for democracy where the primary focus was removing Suharto from power and opening the political space to a wide variety of ideological strains to participate in competitive elections.
Notably absent from the street demonstrations were the more hardline Islamists who rejected political democracy and had recently become allies to the New Order incumbents. While
145 the New Order’s ruling coalition had been marked by inter-sectarian cooperation since its inception, the 1990s revealed Suharto’s ideological flexibility was hardly genuine; his prime objective was to surround himself with supporters who would not threaten his and his family’s continued hold on power. The 1990s began with Suharto summarily removing Christians from his governing apparatus after a Catholic military commander criticized the rampant corruption of the First Family (Schwartz 2000, 146). Suharto was also keenly aware of the potentially revolutionary influence that Islam could have on his regime, and he sought opportunities to co- opt these groups to support his continued rule by playing up his own personal piety, promoting military officers with Islamist sympathies, and providing patronage to some of the most extreme
Islamist organizations who had previously been among his most ardent opponents (Bruinessen
2002). Indeed, the political turbulence in Iran, Algeria, and Egypt that was rooted in Islamist demands may have motivated this shift in alliances in the New Order to avoid similar turbulence in Indonesia (Hefner 2005, p. 277). Most importantly, Suharto began to rely on these extreme groups and the hardline Islamists in the military to protect his rule from democratizers among modernist and traditionalist Islamists and reform-minded members of the military. These groups perpetuated conspiracy theories about the potential for infiltration of the Indonesian state by the
United States and Israel if it were to undergo democratization. In the midst of the Asian financial crisis, these conspiracy theories escalated and ethnic Chinese Indonesians became the target of violence that was certainly condoned if not outright planned by Suharto’s new Islamist hardliners in the military and the highest ranks of Golkar (p. 278). This undercurrent of sectarian violence became the most significant legacy of Suharto’s rule in the period immediately following the introduction of democratic institutions when economically deprived Muslims were primed to
146 focus their energies on sectarian and inter-communal conflicts. Hardline Islamists, now without
Suharto to guide their efforts, would capitalize on this legacy.
Beginning as early as the mid-1980s, but continuing in earnest from the early 1990s,
Suharto began to court Islamic organizations for support. He emphasized his personal piety and his regime created a space for Islamic intellectuals to meet and discuss openly. The Indonesian
Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICIM) attempted to bring together Islamic scholars from across the various schools of thought in Indonesian Islam, and Suharto used the ICIM to identify the organizations and schools of thought that were most amenable to supporting his continued rule (Hefner 2000, chapter 6). Suharto found that only ultraconservatives were willing to continue to support his authoritarian rule (p. 166). Accordingly, he began providing patronage to
Salafi groups that had previously been particularly critical of his rule but who also were not proponents of the democratization movement that many of the other Islamic organizations favored.
The alliance between Suharto’s regime and hardline Islamists that would have the longest legacy was that between Suharto’s ambitious son-in-law Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto and two ultraconservative Islamist organizations: the Indonesian Committee for Solidarity with the Muslim World (KISDI) and the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (DDII) (p. 174).
These groups had been labeled extremists and had been barred from participation in the early days of the New Order regime. However, these groups leapt at the opportunity to be included in the political process to try to work against the democratizing movement, which many Salafis saw as an attempt by non-Muslims to infiltrate Indonesia and systematically disenfranchise Muslims
(Hwang 2009, p. 60). These hardline organizations then went on the attack against any groups that opposed the New Order and its ruling Golkar party. They justified violent attacks against the
147 Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) and labeled any Muslims who did support the PDI as communist sympathizers and anti-Islamic (Hefner 2000, p. 175). They also spread conspiratorial rumors about the Asian financial crisis that included advocating attacks against Indonesian non-
Muslims—especially Catholics and Chinese (pp. 175-178). This hardline stance on ethnic and religious minorities became particularly destructive in the post-New Order era.
Suharto’s newly Islamicized ruling coalition was unacceptable to his traditionally most loyal supporters in Golkar and the military, and their defection spelled the end of his rule. Thus, while there was little explicitly Islamic about the democratization movement in Indonesia—and the Asian financial crisis that spurred it affected all Indonesians irrespective of religion and ethnicity—Suharto’s response to this movement drove a clear divide between hardline Islamists who opposed democratic governance and the broader trends in the Islamist movement who aligned with nationalists who protest Suharto’s rule. On the eve of Suharto’s departure from power, the relatively small networks of hardline Islamists were armed both materially by their allies in the armed forces and ideologically by sectarian conspiracy theories that sought to elevate the stature of Muslims across the archipelago relative to the religious minorities with whom they had largely lived in peace for decades.
The Transition Phase: Islamist Partisanship or Islamist Violence
This section is divided into separate sections that consider the implication of the fall of the New Order regime on Islamist political parties, violent Islamist groups, and the newly democratized regime’s reaction to Islamism.
The (re)emergence of Islamist political parties and civil society
When Suharto stepped down as Indonesia’s president on May 21st, 1998, the new political leadership was left to determine the relationship between the new regime and Islam.
148 Among those that participated in electoral politics, three distinct visions of this relationship emerged, and a fourth perspective was held by the extremist Islamist groups who refused to participate in electoral politics. Broadly, three legislative blocs emerged in the initial post-
Suharto and these blocs were largely identified by their perspective on the ideal relationship between the newly competitive regime and Islam (Webber 2006, p. 399). The secular nationalist bloc consisted of Golkar, the newly invigorated Indonesian Democratic Party—now called the
Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)—and a number of smaller parties. These parties see Islam—and all religion—as a private matter. They argued that while the state can recognize the value of Islam as a cultural identity for most Indonesians, it should not provide exclusive goods to Muslims not should it pursue a policy agenda motivated by Islamic legal or cultural standards. The Muslim Democratic—or some might say “moderate Islamist”—bloc consists of the National Mandate Party (PAN) and the National Awakening Party (PKB). These parties maintained close relationships to the two largest Islamic organizations in the world—
Muhammadiya and Nahdlatul Ulema, respectively. Neither of these parties advocated for the implementation of Islamic legal standards by the Indonesian state, and both have always embraced Pancasila as their official guiding ideology.24 However, both parties are interested in advancing the causes of Indonesian Muslims and enhancing the role of Islamic culture—if not
Islamic law—in public life in Indonesia. Finally, the Islamist parties include the Prosperous
Justice Party (PKS), the United Development Party (PPP), and the Crescent Star Party (PBB). In the period immediately following the transition, these parties explicitly advocated for a Shari’a-
24 Pancasila is the guiding ideology of the independent state of Indonesia. Among its five principles is the belief in God (often interpreted to mean the monotheistic god of Islam). Pancasila was meant to unite the various ethnicities and religions of the archipelago, but this principle does seem to favor Muslims and officially discriminates against people without a religious identity. Pancasila does not include the tenets of the Jakarta Charter which obliges all Muslims to be held to the Shari’a.
149 based ideology rather than one based on Pancasila (Baswedan 2004, p. 685). In the context of this project, as I take a broad approach to Islamist politics, I conceptualize PAN, PKB, PKS,
PPP, and PBB—all introduced above—as the main Islamist parties in the Indonesian system.
These new Islamist parties suggest at least a proliferation on the supply side of opportunities for
Muslims to express varying preferences for Islamist styles of governance in the post-Suharto period. Next, I turn to evaluating the appeal of these parties in the first two national election cycles before I consider the proliferation of violent groups during the same period.
In 1999, Indonesia held its first legislative elections open to these new parties. PKB outperformed all of the other Islamist parties by winning 12.6% of the vote. PPP won 10.7% of the vote, PAN won 7.1%, PBB won 2%, and PK won only 1.3% of the vote (Baswedan 2004, p.
685). The PK’s performance was particularly disappointing given that parties were required to garner at least 2% of the national vote to be authorized to participated in the 2004 elections.
Between the 1999 and 2004 elections the Justice Party (PK) reorganized as the PKS (Prosperous
Justice Party), moved away from their staunchly Islamist political preferences to a platform built on social justice and socioeconomic equality as well as commitments about reduction corruption in government (Hwang 2014, p. 61). Interestingly, the PK probably had the most systematized policy platform of all of the Islamist parties, and they certainly had the most loyal party cadres
(p. 61; Badeswan 2004, p. 685). However, it may be that the PK’s legacy in the JT movement— which was highly exclusive—turned off potential supporters who saw the PK as ineffectual at a national scale. Furthermore, PK’s dual emphasis on electoral politics and social and religious outreach may have initially suppressed their popular support because they were seen as disingenuous political actors. However, between 1999 and 2004, the newly renamed PKS’s social and religious outreach became fundamental to their support, and in 2004 the PKS was the
150 only Islamist party that managed to increase their vote share (Hwang 2014, p. 62; cf. Cammett and Luong 2014). The other two traditionally Islamist parties (cf. Webber 2006, p. 399)—PPP and PBB—essentially saw no change in their vote share between 1999 and 2004. However,
Islamist parties, in the aggregate, increased their share of the vote in this initial period relative to the secular parties. This is true even if the decreases in vote share for the more ideologically flexible PAN and PKB are included in the aggregate. This suggests that there was a meaningful—and potentially growing—demand for Islamist representation at the national level in the period immediately after the fall of the New Order regime.
The fact that only the PKS was able to increase its vote share between the first two national elections in democratic Indonesia offers evidence about the interests and preferences of the voters who supported Islamist parties in this period. PKS was only able to increase its vote share after its leadership deemphasized the role of Islam in state policymaking and instead focused on less tangible issues such as combatting government corruption and providing social justice. This suggests that Islamist supporters may not have been particularly interested in a systematic and sophisticated Islamist ideology. Instead, they were compelled by the use of
Islamic symbols by groups with genuine reputations for providing social and religious public goods to campaign for a cleaner and more democratic political system.
The PAN and PKB are also affiliated with Islamic social movements—indeed the two largest Islamic organizations in the world—but their vote shares decreased between 1999 and
2004. PAN and PKB are ideologically distinct from PKS as they have never called for a role for
Islamic law in the Indonesian state. Additionally, PAN and PKB are exclusively political parties who only reach out to their members and supporters during elections seasons—similar to most
Indonesian parties (Baswedan 2004, p. 685). Many supporters and members of PAN are
151 members of Muhammadiya and many supporters and members of PKB are members of
Nahdlatul Ulema, but these massive Islamic organizations also have members who support virtually every political party in Indonesia, and neither of these organizations officially endorse candidates. By contrast, PKS, as the political wing of the Jemmah Tarbiya movement actively engages in social outreach to potential supporters between election seasons, and its candidates receive the full support of the broader movement. Therefore, PKS can benefit from the social and religious efforts of JT and can maintain a balance between their influence on the state and their character as a grassroots organization able to confront the corruption that is rampant among other parties (Webber 2006, p. 412). PKS’s success in the wake of the initial decline among the other
Islamist parties suggests that supporters of these Islamist parties are looking for a group that can stand up to the inefficiencies of the state and that these supports are able to substitute their allegiance across various Islamist parties.
The proliferation of violent Islamist groups and intercommunal conflict
The substitutability of Islamist parties is a fundamental feature of the Indonesian party system. Because so many ideologically similar parties compete in elections against one another, voters are easily able to switch their allegiances between elections cycles as they perceive one party is more able to provide the goods they are interested in, than another. This substitutability also permeates the broader Islamist movement in Indonesia where “the boundary between the
Salafis and members of other Islamist groups in terms of ideology is, in fact, very narrow”
(Hasan 2009, p. 174). This may be due to the long history of uniform repression of all forms of political Islam under the New Order regime that incentivized cooperation among various strains of Islamist activists who would otherwise have been rivals (p. 179). This lack of distinction among Islamist organizations was particularly important in the initial period after the transition
152 to democracy when the difference between parties was less clear, the state’s willingness to allow overtly religious parties a place in the system was unsure, and the Islamist trend itself was divided as to whether or not democratization was ideal in the first place. In these conditions, many potential supporters of Islamist political parties may have avoided casting a ballot at all and instead supported one of several Salafi organizations in Indonesia which had been prime benefactors of the Islamicization that took place in the final years of Suharto’s rule because of their distrust in democratic institutions (Hefner 2005 p. 277). These Salafi groups—initially apolitical and focused on study and piety, but politicized by Suharto as a last ditch effort to remain in power—became the primary insurgents in a wave of intercommunal violence and terrorism that plagued the early years of Indonesian democracy.
For the purposes of this chapter, three dimensions of violent Islamist mobilization in the aftermath of the New Order regime are particularly important to emphasize. First, the groups involved in the rural communal violence and the urban violent campaigns against what they saw as “vice” were primarily made up of and financed by native Indonesians. While transnational
Islamist terrorist groups emerged during this period as well, they played a very minor role in most of the violence during this period—though that will change in the consolidation phase.
Second, much of this violence was facilitated through collaborations between violent Islamist groups and the military. These networked connections were forged under Suharto and played a primary role in the chaos the followed his demise. Third, while Islamist political parties largely remained out of the violent campaigns themselves, they were less than decisive in their condemnation of these attacks. While it is not necessarily incumbent upon non-violent Islamist groups to condemn the violent acts of other Islamists—indeed doing so tends to only perpetuate the conflation of all Islamists with violence—it is noteworthy that in much of the first national
153 election cycle Islamist parties were largely silent about the violent struggles that had erupted across Indonesia. This would change in the coming period.
Heavily equipped with anti-Chinese and anti-Christian propaganda from their brief period of alignment with Suharto’s waning regime, Indonesian Salafis found a fertile ground for violent conflict in the rural regions of Indonesia where economic hardships had heightened ethno- religious tensions (Pringle 2010, p. 153). Furthermore, in the open political environment of the initial post-transition period, some of the Salafi groups that had avoided close association with
Suharto emerged as equally—if not more so—inclined to take up arms against the perceived enemies of Islam who they accused of economically disenfranchising Muslim communities in rural Indonesia (Hasan 2009, pp. 183-186). The most significant of these organizations emerged from the network of Salafis linked to Ja’far Umar Thalib, a Yemeni-educated Salafi leader who had risen to prominence by denouncing the Salafis who had collaborated with the New Order regime as “haraki” (p. 182). Ja’far Umar Thalib had lost the patronage of the Saudis and Suharto because of his staunch opposition to organized political engagement. When the public space opened up for Islamic activism, Thalib did not want to miss this opportunity to spread his Salafi message and empower Muslims across Indonesia. In mid-1998, just after Suharto had been ousted from power, Thalib formed the Laskar Jihad to do just that (p. 183).
Laskar Jihad was probably the best organized violent group in the initial post-transition period (Hefner 2005, p. 287). Laskar Jihad’s activities focused on the intercommunal conflict in the rural regions of Indonesia, especially Maluku and Central Sulawesi provinces, and Ja’far
Umar Thalib expressed a desire to spread his violent campaigns to Central Kalimantan, Aceh,
Papua, and elsewhere in the archipelago (ibid.). The intercommunal violence in Maluku can be traced back to a single event: a brawl between young men from neighboring Muslim and
154 Christian districts in the capital city of Maluku province, Ambon on January 19, 1999. These street brawls were relatively commonplace in Ambon where rivalries for civil service jobs, and other resources were compounded by Suharto’s policy of transmigration when Muslims from more crowded parts of Indonesia were moved to, among other places, Ambon. Religion had always been a significant cleavage for political activity in Ambon as the city is almost perfectly divided between Muslims and Christians who both have a history of religious political authority in the region under various colonizing powers (Van Klinken 2007, p. 91). However, what made this event so significant was the intensity of the skirmish and how quickly it escalated. In particular, the escalation was not just along confessional lines but involved direct attacks on religious symbols, and the two largest religious institutions in Ambon became makeshift headquarters for the warring factions (p. 99).
The conflict in Ambon quickly overwhelmed the poorly armed and organized security forces in the city. The deficit in security organization was both in terms of manpower and infrastructure. By the end of 1999 there were only about 6000 security personnel in all of
Maluku province which was made up of a population of about two million people on hundreds of islands, and the Ambon police station could only hold twenty prisoners at a time (Hwang 2009, p. 90). This necessitated an influx of national armed forces to try to stop the violence.
Unfortunately, the Indonesian military was nearly as divided as the population of Ambon. When they arrived the units that were predominately Christian often found themselves protecting
Christian communities from Muslim attackers, and predominately Muslim units found themselves fighting Christian militants alongside Muslim militants (p. 91). Thus, Suharto’s campaign of elevating pious military leaders with Islamist sympathies systematically disadvantaged Christians when the national forces arrived. Additionally, from the beginning of
155 the conflict, Muslim sympathizers in the armed forces sought to portray the origins of the conflict in Christian aggression carried out against Muslims during an Islamic sacred holiday25
(Van Klinken 2007, p. 99).
The role of the armed forces in perpetuating the conflict in Maluku and Central Sulawesi
(discussed more below) was most significant in the aid that they provided Islamist paramilitaries, especially Laskar Jihad. In December 1999, Christian militias massacred Muslim civilians in
North Maluku as they worshipped in two mosques, and when the news of these deaths reached
Java, Islamists organizations of all varieties marched on the presidential palace to seek redress
(Van Klinken 2007, p. 103; Davis 2002, p. 17). Among these demonstrators were high ranking officials in the PBB and the PPP whose party chair—Hamzah Haz—was currently serving as the
Vice President, but the most significant group to emerge from this demonstration was Laskar
Jihad whose protestors carried sabers (Davis 2002, p.12). By April 2000, Laskar Jihad had established a militant training camp in West Java and was sending fighters from its headquarters in Yogyakarta and throughout Java to Maluku to, as they saw it, protect Muslims from Christian aggressors seeking to both disenfranchise local Muslims and destabilize the largest Muslim nation in the world. Importantly, these fighters were often trained by Indonesian military officers
(Hefner 2005, p. 289; International Crisis Group 2002). These military escorts would then accompany Laskar Jihad fighters into the conflict zone despite calls from the president, minister of defense, and governor of Maluku had forbidden it (Hefner 2005, p. 289). The military would also arm the fighters personally (Hwang 2009, p. 91).
25 The January 19th riots that began the conflict took place on the last day of the fasting month of Ramadan during the Islamic celebrations of Idul Fitri (‘eid al-fitr). However, there is little evidence that the attacks by Christians were unprovoked.
156 Laskar Jihad’s activities were not isolated to Maluku—though this is the conflict around which the organization coalesced. Religion played a pivotal role in the communal conflict that took place in Central Sulawesi, as well. Similar to the conflict in Maluku, Central Sulawesi had experienced local gang activity between youth in the Christian and Muslim communities that, at the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999 escalated into attacks on villages by paramilitaries from both sides. The most significant immediate cause for both conflicts is the failure of the newly democratized state to maintain its control of these disparate regions, and this state failure made escalation by Laskar Jihad and other armed groups possible (Hwang 2009, pp. 90-96; Van
Klinken 2007). Also similar to the Maluku conflict, Central Sulawesi’s experience with violence was made possible because of transmigration policies of the New Order regime where Javanese
Muslims arrived in large numbers and began competing with indigenous Christians for access to arable land positions in the civil service to direct patronage to their communities (Hwang 2009, p. 94). Unlike Maluku, Poso was historically—at least since Dutch colonization—a Christian region (Van Klinken 2007, p. 73). So, the influx of Javanese Muslims under the New Order may have been even more threatening there than in Ambon. Central Sulawesi generally had been seen by Suharto’s commanders as a particularly conflict-prone province, and so its provincial leadership always came from the higher ranks of the armed forces (Ibid.). When the armed forces became part of Suharto’s Islamicization program in the 1990s, these officials were among the many in the armed forces to sympathize with increasingly hardline Islamists.
Central Sulawesi suffered from even more significant shortages of security personnel and infrastructure than Maluku did, and the small town where the violence was centered—
Poso—was remarkably isolated from the rest of Indonesia which slowed military assistance significantly. In this context, when Laskar Jihad’s leadership heard rumors of Muslims being
157 targeted by Christian militias in July 2001, they moved some of their fighters from Maluku to
Poso to protect Muslim communities. Upon their arrival, Laskar Jihad served to unite the fragmented Muslim community in Poso. While the Christians in Poso were a unified front, they lacked the national network that Laskar Jihad provided the Muslim militias, and from July to
September 2001, the Christian militias were beaten back to small mountain sanctuaries (Van
Klinken 2007, pp. 84-85). However, the tide would turn when international attention turned to violent Islamist groups around the world after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States (p.
85). George W. Bush’s administration explicitly identified Central Sulawesi as the home of violent Islamists intent on slaughtering Christians (p. 72; Elegant 2001). This international pressure ultimately changed the course of the Indonesian military’s response to these communal conflicts, and while Islamist violence in Poso continued for several more years, it was largely carried out by internationalized groups who lacked the unifying, domestic legitimacy that Laskar
Jihad enjoyed during its brief existence (see below).
While Laskar Jihad’s primary goal was to protect Muslims from Christian militias in
Maluku and Central Sulawesi, its members also collaborated with other violent groups in urban centers in Java to attack liquor stores, discotheques, and other purveyors of “vice26” (Hefner
2005, p. 287). In early 2001, Laskar Jihad collaborated with—among others—the youth affiliate of the PPP to attack centers of vice in Yogyakarta. Among their targets were supports of the democratically elected president Abdurrahman Wahid (Hefner 2005, p. 289). Their goal could not have been clearer: disrupt the rapidly evolving democratization process. The fact that an
26 The term “vice” comes from the English translation of the Qur’anic directive to “enjoin virtue and forbid vice” (al-amr bil-ma’ruf wan-nahy ‘an al-munkar) known as hisba, a fundamental Islamic institution that can easily be politicized to discredit activities that an Islamist group sees has corrupting to society.
158 affiliate of a registered political party was willing to collaborate in these attacks demonstrates the tenuous nature Indonesian democracy during this period.
There were two other significant Islamist violent organizations during this period. The
Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) was perhaps the largest of the three main violent groups, though its significance severely waned outside of Jakarta. The FPI was principally focused on violently attacking establishments that it saw as promoting vice in Indonesian society (Hasan 2002, p.
148). They were also known for instigating riots in Jakarta. One particularly significant riot was meant to demand that the Indonesian parliament officially institute the Jakarta Charter that would make adherence to the Shari’a compulsory for all Indonesian Muslims (p. 149).
Similar to, Laskar Jihad, the FPI was closely aligned with high-ranking members of the
Indonesian armed forces, in particular General Wiranto, who recruited several thousand members of the nascent organization to protect Suharto’s Vice President B. J. Habibie, from pro- democracy demonstrators after Suharto was removed from office (Hefner 2005, p. 285). The FPI entered the public’s sight in 1998 when they attacked the National Committee on Human Rights in Jakarta for, as they saw it, treating Muslim military officials being investigated for crimes in
East Timor (including General Wiranto) unfairly (ibid.; Hasan 2002, p. 149). The Jakarta police did not pursue the perpetrators of this attack, lending credence to the accusation that they were sympathetic to the FPI’s objectives.
The membership of the FPI tended to come from lower class neighborhoods in Jakarta who were little more than local gangsters. This combined with the lack of a coherent ideology beyond increasing adherence to the Shari’a among Indonesian Muslims contributed to an overall lack of discipline and organization among FPI groups both in Jakarta and participating in the conflicts in Maluku and Central Sulawesi (Hefner 2005, pp. 285-286). This lack of discipline
159 eventually made the FPI too unpredictable of a tool to be wielded by the anti-democratic ranks of the military and remnants of the old regime. The demise of the FPI was the result of the internationalization of their political activities. In 2000, FPI militants announced their intention to assassinate the visiting Israeli delegation for the conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union held in Jakarta. Less than a year later, the FPI organized street demonstrations against the United
States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (p. 286). Both of these incidents directly contributed to the demise of the organization, especially after the United States expressed a willingness to work with the Indonesian armed forces to weed out international terrorist groups.
The other significant Islamist violent organization during the initial transition phase in
Indonesia was Laskar Mujahidin. Laskar Mujahidin was the smallest of the three groups discussed here and had the most tumultuous relationship with the county’s armed forces. Laskar
Mujahidin traces his organizational roots back to the Darul Islam movement that fought for the establishment of an Islamic state in Indonesia from the 1940s till at least the 1960s. Darul Islam is often characterized as a traitorous organization that abandoned the needs of Indonesians to pursue their own goals during the struggle for independence (Dijk 1981). Similar to Laskar Jihad and FPI, Laskar Mujahidin saw enforcing the adherence to Shari’a by Indonesian Muslims as its primary objective. However, the leaders of Laskar Mujahidin, despite having close ties to DDII and KISDI, never reconciled with Suharto’s regime, so they lacked much of the domestic patronage that Laskar Jihad and FPI enjoyed in the late 1990s (Hefner 2005, p. 292).
Without state patronage, Laskar Mujahidin turned to international networks of Islamist fighters to sponsor their activities in Indonesia. Some members of Laskar Mujahidin argued that the Islamic state that they aimed to create should not be limited by the territory of the Indonesian state, but that it should include Malaysia and southern portions of Thailand and the Philippines
160 (p. 292). This argument aligned Laskar Mujahidin with the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group
Jemmah Islamiya which was participating in conflicts across Southeast Asia, including Maluku and Central Sulawesi (Abuza 2003).
This internationalization coincided with an increase in the lethality and aggression of
Islamist violence across Indonesia. A member of Laskar Mujahidin known only as “Hambali” became a key member in planning thwarted attacks against American embassies in Singapore.
He was also identified by Malaysian authorities as one of the plotters of the 9/11 attack on the
Pentagon and by authorities in the Philippines as plotting to blow up American commercial airliners in the 1990s (Hefner 2005, p. 293). In Indonesia, Hambali was part of the devastating string of attacks on Christian churches on Christmas 2000, all of which took place outside the conflict zones in Maluku and Central Sulawesi (International Crisis Group 2002, p. 12). This escalation shocked the Indonesian armed forces who realized that they could not control the actions of violent Islamist groups and their violence was not going to help the old regime return to power.
The two events that forever changed the nature of Islamist violence in Indonesia were the
9/11 attacks on the United States and the 2002 Bali bombings. After the 9/11 attacks, the United
States’ government ratcheted up its interest in cracking down on violent Islamist groups around the world, including Indonesia. The Indonesian military’s recent history of collaboration with violent Islamist groups made them a potential target of the newly launched Global War on
Terror, so the military—and the state as a whole—began to take seriously its need to define its relationship with Islam and Islamism. The Indonesian population was largely sympathetic to many of the ambitions of Islamist organizations—including the institutionalization of the principles of Shari’a at the state level—so an indiscriminate crackdown on all forms of Islamism
161 was likely to backfire (Webber 2006; cf. Singh 2004). The second event that changed the nature of Indonesian Islamist violence were the bombings in Bali in October 2002. Specifically targeting tourists in a non-Muslim and conflict-free region of Indonesia shocked Indonesian
Muslims, even those who have supported the jihadist ventures in Maluku and Central Sulawesi.
Even groups that were created to perpetuate violence in the conflict areas were quickly disbanded with little prodding by the state in the aftermath of the bombings (Hwang 2009, p. 93).
They also forced the state and non-violent Islamist groups to confront the reality of Islamist violence (Hefner 2005, p. 294). While Islam would remain a fundamental force in Indonesian political life, violent extremism became nearly entirely unacceptable in the wake of this international tragedy.
Democratic consolidation: Normalization, Islamicization, and the Limits of Islamist
Violence
After the first two national elections in post-New Order Indonesia, the relationship between Islamist groups and the Indonesian state entered a phase that I term consolidation. The consolidation phase was marked by the political normalization of Islamist political parties and a simultaneous Islamicization of the Indonesian state. Islamist violence continued to plague
Indonesian during this period, but both the state and the Islamist parties have clearly differentiated themselves from this violence and the attacks have become intolerable to all but the terrorists who perpetrate them.
Islamist political parties in the consolidation of Indonesia’s democracy: The process of normalization
Identifying the normalization of Islamist political parties is an empirical challenge because there is not a universally accepted conceptualization of political normalization. At its
162 heart, this concept is concerned with identifying transitions toward behavior that prioritizes electoral success over other outcomes. In the second chapter of this project, full electoral participation is an approximation of political normalization, and in that chapter the data from
Indonesia suggested that all of the parties are fully normalized. Therefore, I turn to subnational variation to identify patterns of normalization in the consolidation phase.
Indonesia provides a compelling venue to examine the behavior of Islamist parties in both national and subnational elections. After the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime in
1998, a new regime marked by rapid processes of democratization and decentralization emerged.
This new democracy saw the emergence of several new Islamist political parties that all vied for the support of citizens in the largest Muslim-majority democracy in the world. Indonesia is perhaps the best country in which to study the behavior of Islamist parties. Not only is there wide variation in the organization and ideology of Indonesian Islamist parties, but unlike Islamist parties in more illiberal regimes, in elections at all levels of government in Indonesia “the only constraint on Islamist party success is the preference of the Indonesian voter” (Hwang 2014, p.
59).
Local level politics in Indonesia, especially gubernatorial elections provide opportunities for Islamist parties to demonstrate their willingness—or lack thereof—to work with one another and with secular parties. Gubernatorial candidates can either run as an independent—though they have to register well in advance of party-backed candidates—or be nominated by a party or parties. It may be that the coalitions formed around these candidates are largely meaningless because there is nothing to bind a governor to respect the demands of his or her campaign coalition (Buehler 2013, p. 213). However, independent gubernatorial candidates rarely succeed on their own, so candidates and parties need to strategically work together to coordinate and
163 mobilize support. Islamist parties are unlikely to win if they each run their own candidate, they need to either run a candidate that will almost surely lose, avoid any participation in the election, or participate in a coalition with other Islamists, secular parties, or both. This is not an arbitrary choice, but rather a signal to voters about the party’s willingness to work with other parties.
Below I consider both how this choice is made and how this choice affects the parties’ vote shares for the national legislature.
Between the 2014 and 2019 legislative elections, five Islamist political parties participated in gubernatorial elections across Indonesia. In each province, each party had to determine whether they would run their own candidate for governor, support another Islamist candidate, support a non-Islamist candidate, or not endorse any candidate. This decision is a function of each party’s willingness to work with other parties, which is frequently identified as a measure of moderation. In the language of the “sharia-secularism spectrum,” parties that are closer to the secular end of the spectrum should be more inclined to work with larger non-
Islamist parties, and parties that are closer to the sharia end should be more exclusionary and less inclined to work with non-Islamist parties or even other Islamist parties. Indonesia’s gubernatorial elections provide an excellent context to examine how various Islamist parties interact with large secular parties. The following review discusses the variance of Islamist political parties in Indonesia on a number of dimensions that have been hypothesized to matter for explaining electoral behavior. I will discuss ideological variance, organizational variance, variance in terms of approaches to Islamic authority structures, and variance in terms of their attempts to appeal to the broader voting public (niche vs. mainstream).
Table 4.1 lists the five main Islamist parties in Indonesia along with several descriptive features of each of them that are related to expectations about their electoral behavior. The first
164 column lists how connected each party is to a broad social movement; PAN and PKB are loosely connected to Muhammadiya and NU, respectively, PKS is directly connected to Jemmah
Tarbiya, and PPP and PBB are only parties. Relatedly, the second column lists whether or not the party provides social services outside of the state. Again, parties that do not provide social services have been theorized to be less likely to normalize their electoral behavior because they need to balance their political aspirations and social service provisions. Based on these two columns, prior literature would suggest that the PKS should be the least normalized party, perhaps followed by PAN and PKB, and the most normalized parties should be PPP and PBB.
The third column, based on Baswedan’s (2004) analysis of Islamist parties in Indonesia, lists the placement of each party along the sharia-secularism spectrum. Parties that are closer to the sharia side of the continuum should be less likely normalize than parties closer to the secular side, so
PAN and PKB should be likely to normalize, PPP and PBB should not be likely to normalize, and PKS lies somewhere in the middle. Obviously, these prior literatures lead to different expectations about the electoral behavior of Indonesian Islamist political parties.
Competing with these expectations, I argue that the fundamental dimension that will affect the electoral behavior of Islamist parties in Indonesia is the dimension that spans from mainstream to niche. The concept of niche parties—and its opposite, mainstream parties—has received significant attention from scholars of both developed democracies (Meguid 2005;
Adams et al 2006; Abou-Chadi 2016), but an important question about the conceptualization of niche parties versus mainstream parties is left open. Though they disagree on the measurement of the concept of niche parties, Wagner (2011) and Meyer and Miller (2013) both argue that the fundamental distinction between niche and mainstream parties is issue emphasis. Wagner
165 suggests that niche parties campaign on a small slate of noneconomic issues, and Meyer and
Miller suggest that these issues need to be issues neglected by mainstream competitors. In the
Indonesian case, there is only one niche Islamist political party: the PBB.
The PKS and the PPP are more interested than the PAN and PKB in instituting reforms that are in line with conservative interpretations of Islamic law, but they also campaign broadly on economic and social issues that are not overtly Islamic. The PBB, by contrast, is supported nearly entirely by ideological university students who are focused on a small range of issues that are directly related to the implementation of Islamic law (Baswedan 2004). In the 1999 elections, the PKS (then there were known as the PK) and the PBB were seen as broadly similar to one another (Tanuwidjaja 2010, n. 12), but more contemporary work argues that the PKS has evolved to become a more mainstream political party (Tomsa 2012; Tanuwidjaja 2012; Buehler
2013); no similar argument about the PBB exists because they have remained niche and myopically focused on Islamic legal issues. The PPP is similar to the PKS in both its hardline ideology and it embrace of a broad slate of issues on which they campaign. Unlike the PKS, the
PPP entered the post-New Order period ready to compete on this broad slate of issues because of its experience competing with the ruling Golkar party while Suharto was in power. Thus, while the PKS had to learn to broaden the range of issues on which it competed as it became a mainstream party, the PPP began Indonesia’s transition toward democracy as a mainstream party.
Of particular interest in this study is how various types of Islamist parties engage with other political parties in electorally competitive regimes. In a previous chapter, I examined the conditions under which Islamist parties fully participate in national elections. However, in the most competitive regimes (empirically, in Indonesian elections) parties tend to always fully
166 participate, so in this chapter I examine a different dimension of electoral participation among
Islamist political parties: the willingness of Islamist parties to work with other parties. Not only is the Indonesian case ideal because of the competitiveness of elections there, but it also offers a set of institutions where parties frequently collaborate to reach their political goals. Since 2005, candidates for governor have been required to secure the nomination of a political party. To increase the likelihood of securing a governor that is sympathetic to their policy preferences, parties frequently form electoral coalitions around candidates that they see as a compromise.
Participating in these electoral coalitions is commonplace among all Indonesian parties, but it has been used as an indicator of moderation—the willingness to work with other political parties suggests a strategic interest that is not common to radical parties (Buehler 2012). In the analysis below, I test the competing expectations laid out above in the context of these gubernatorial election coalitions.
To test the competing hypotheses laid out above, I rely on election data from 2014 to
2019 at the province level in Indonesia. Data from the 2014 election come from the
Constituency-Level Elections Archive (Kollman et al. 2019). These data contain vote shares for each party for the 2014 legislative elections at the constituency level. I aggregated these constituency-level data to the province level by summing both the valid votes cast and the votes cast for each party within each constituency, by province. I then divided the number of votes for each party by the total number of valid votes within each province to generate each party’s vote share within each party. Electoral data from the 2019 election came from the General Elections
Commission (KPU) in Indonesia, and it provides the vote share for each party in each province.
Gubernatorial electoral data came from a targeted search of local Indonesian media and party websites. In 2015, gubernatorial elections were held in Bengkulu, Central Sulawesi, Jambi,
The special region of Yogyakarta does not hold elections for its governor who is always the
Sultan of Yogyakarta—currently, Hamengkubuwono X. In each of these elections, each Islamist party either ran their own candidate, supported a fellow Islamist party’s nomination, supported a non-Islamist nomination, or did not support any candidates. This decision was coded for each party-province observation.
To test expectations about how parties will behave in gubernatorial elections, I perform a multinomial logistic regression on the decision outcomes in gubernatorial elections. These outcomes are predicted by the party indicators and the proportion of Muslims in the province.
The outcome variable is expanded in this model such that it contains six categories: run their own candidate, support an Islamist, support a Golkar candidate, support a PDI-P candidate, support another non-Islamist candidate, and neither support a candidate nor run their own candidate. This model enables me to test competing expectations about Islamist parties’ willingness to work with both one another and other non-Islamist parties. In the ideological explanations, I would expect PBB, PPP, and PKS to be less likely to enter into electoral coalitions with non-Islamists. In the organizational explanations, I would expect only the PKS— the party that is a part of a broader social and religious organization—to be less likely to enter into coalitions with non-Islamists. In the legal interpretation explanations, I would expect the
168 PKB and the PPP—the traditionalist parties—to behave systematically different from the PKS,
PAN, and PBB—the modernist parties; however, I do not have expectations about the direction of this possible relationship. Finally, my novel niche-mainstream explanations would be supported in on the PBB is unlikely to enter into coalitions with non-Islamist parties.
I also test expectations about how parties’ behavior in gubernatorial elections will affect outcomes in national elections, I perform an ordinary least squares regression on the change in province-level vote shares from 2014 to 2019. These changes are predicted by party indicators, the decisions these parties made in gubernatorial elections, an interaction between these variables, and the proportion of Muslims in each province.
I begin with the results of the multinomial logit that predicts whether the party is likely to run their own candidate, support another Islamist party’s candidate, support a Golkar candidate, support a PDI-P candidate, support another non-Islamist candidate, or stay out of the election.
Table 1 shows the results of the model which predicts each outcome as a function of party and the proportion of Muslims in the province. The base outcome is staying out of the election and the party coefficients are in reference to PAN. The overall message of the table is that PBB acts differently than other Islamist parties.
Table 4.2 displays the results of this analysis. First, the proportion of the province that is
Muslim is a significant predictor for party behavior in gubernatorial elections. At conventional levels of statistical significance—alpha=0.1—the probability of running their own gubernatorial candidate, supporting a fellow Islamist, and supporting Golkar increases. However, the Muslim proportion of the population does not affect the probability of supporting PDI-P or any other party. The PBB and the PPP are statistically significantly less likely than PAN to run their own
169 candidates. The PBB is less likely than PAN to support a Golkar or a PDI-P candidate, and the
PBB and the PPP are both less likely to support a candidate from any other party.
Next I present the results of an OLS linear regression model that predicts the change in the vote share for each Islamist party in each province between the national legislative elections in 2014 and 2019. I predict these vote changes by the decisions each party, in each province, made in the gubernatorial elections held between the national elections. The model includes party-level fixed effects and multiplicative interactions between these fixed effects and the decisions made in gubernatorial elections. Similar to the previous model, I also control for the proportion of each province that is Muslim.
Table 4.3 displays the results of this analysis. Once again, the party dummy variables are in reference to the PAN. The categories for decisions in gubernatorial elections are: run their own candidate, support a fellow Islamist candidate, and support a non-Islamist candidate; the reference category is not supporting any candidate. The proportion of Muslims in a province is a significant predictor of positive changes in electoral support for all Islamist parties.
Independently, PPP and PBB both saw a decrease in their vote share across all provinces relative to PAN, and the decision to support a candidate from any other party is associated with a decrease in a party’s vote share—though substantively supporting a non-Islamist is only marginally significant with a decrease in 0.7% of the vote compared to not supporting any candidate. A party’s decision to run their own candidate is not associated with a significant change in vote share compared to the decision not to participate in gubernatorial elections.
The multinomial logistic model reported in table 4.2 offers preliminary evidence for two potential explanations for Islamist electoral behavior at the local level. If more ideologically
170 hardline parties are less likely to cooperate with other parties, then PBB should be least likely to cooperate, followed by PPP, then PKS. PBB and PPP are both significantly less likely to support a non-Islamist party other than Golkar and PDI-P, and only PBB is less likely than other parties to support a Golkar or PDI-P candidate. If niche parties are less likely to cooperate with other parties than mainstream parties, then only PBB should be less likely to cooperate. This is broadly the case; the PBB is very unlikely to support candidates from a non-Islamist party. Interestingly, all Islamist parties, including the PBB, are likely to support one another’s candidates.
Additionally, while the data seem to tentatively support the ideological and niche explanations of parties’ willingness to collaborate with other parties, the data are less clear about the decision to run a candidate of their own. PBB and PPP are also less likely to run a candidate of their own than the other parties. This suggests that PBB and PPP are simply less likely to participate in gubernatorial elections in any way.
Offering a meaningful interpretation to the results in Table 4.3 also requires knowing which parties are running candidates at all. Table 4.4 shows the distribution of decisions that each party made in gubernatorial elections between 2014 and 2019. What is clear from this table is that the modal decision that all Islamist parties—other than the PBB—make in gubernatorial elections is to support a non-Islamist candidate. PBB prefers to just stay out of gubernatorial elections. These decisions in gubernatorial elections are strong evidence of normalized Islamist partisan behavior.
State Islamicization in Indonesia’s democratic consolidation
The consolidation phase is also marked by an Islamicization of all of the other parties in the Indonesian system and a decline in all but the most extreme internationalized forms of
171 Islamist violence. Much of the work the Islamicization of the Indonesian state comes from
Michael Buehler who once argued that political Islam had become largely insignificant in
Indonesian politics (2009). However, in the context of his analyses of subnational dynamics in the behavior of the PKS (2013, cited above), Buehler identified a pattern of Shari’a-based policy programs that were emanating from secular parties, not Islamist parties (2013b). Examining
Shari’a-inspired legislation at both the municipal and provincial level, Buehler found that in the period between 1999 and 2004, Golkar and PDI-P controlled legislatures passed more Shari’a inspired policies than those controlled by PAN and PPP. Further, in the next electoral period
(2004-2009), only legislatures controlled by Golkar passed policies inspired by the Shari’a, and these policies constituted more than 95% of all of the legislative work in these parliaments at the municipal level (p. 68)!
In subsequent analyses, Pisani and Buehler (2017) found that one of the primary motivations for secular parties to pursue Shari’a-inspired policies was to appeal to their constituents by demonstrating their piety. When secular parties who pursued Shari’a-inspired policies had no opportunity to be re-elected, they were unlikely to pursue these policies.
Additionally, the behavior of these secular parties demonstrates the continued significance of
Islamic civil society networks in promoting these policies even when the provincial leadership does not come from an Islamist party. The passage of policies that provide patronage or other benefits to these interest groups, the most significant of which are NU and Muhammadiya, are nearly uniformly distributed across provincial and municipal legislatures. Cycles when the executive heads are actively seeking reelection saw the greatest proportion of Shari’a-inspired legislation that directly benefits these groups. This suggests that the state is highly amenable to the interests of Islamist groups, even when Islamist parties are not in power.
172 Perhaps the most significant pro-Islamist policy at the national level that serves as evidence of the state’s responsiveness to Islamist issues is the action taken against the
Ahmadiyya27 sect in 2008. A joint decree from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s cabinet restricted Ahmadi religious activities to their own community. President Yukhoyono came from the secular, centrist Partai Demokrat. While this policy fell short of an outright ban on Ahmadi organizations, it prevents them from attempting to spread their religious beliefs and amounts to de facto state-sponsored religious segregation. This action was the result of heavy lobbying tactics by Islamist groups across the ideological spectrum, but it specifically benefits some of the most extreme groups in Indonesia and is strong evidence that these groups wield considerable power over even secular politicians at the national level (International Crisis Group 2008).
Patterns of Islamist Violence in the consolidation phase
Despite these concessions, relative to the initial post-transition period, the organs of the state—especially the military—were much less sympathetic to the interests of violent Islamist groups in the consolidation period. Had Laskar Jihad been the only violent group to emerge in the initial transition period, it is possible that its discipline and its focus on stoking intercommunal conflict that benefited the remnants of the old regime would have enabled them to continue to benefit from military patronage. However, the undisciplined attacks on urban centers in Java and the police by the FPI and Laksar Mujahidin’s actions that empowered the international terrorist organization Jemmah Islamiya both convinced the military establishment that supporting Islamist paramilitaries was too costly.
27 The Ahmadiyya movement originated in 19th century India by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who declared himself the promised Messiah. The Ahmadis adhere to a number of heterodox beliefs that set them apart from mainstream Muslims including the continuance of prophetic revelations after Muhammad, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and the cyclical nature of religious history on earth. This heterodoxy has made Ahmadis the subject of fierce persecution across the Muslim-majority world.
173 Violent Islamist organizations did not cease to exist in Indonesia in the consolidation period, but their patterns of mobilization did shift. The pattern of violence in the consolidation phase is one of individuals with abstract animosity toward the United States, its Southeast Asian allies, and Christians carrying out attacks in plots that are related to a broad, decentralized network of violent actors called Jemmah Islamiya (Singh 2004, pp. 57-58). These new violent
Islamist networks no longer resemble paramilitaries or organizations interested in pressing the state for reforms. Rather, they resemble clandestine criminal organizations in which individuals become willing to make risky decisions because of an allegiance to social bonds in the group rather than a unifying ideology (Hwang and Schultze 2018). This shift is what the leadership of
Jemmah Islamiya—as well as smaller violent networks—is consciously aiming to create in their ranks because this structure poses the least risk to those leaders themselves and offers an increasingly lethal potential (International Crisis Group 2011).
The shifts in violent Islamist strategies are closely tied to the consolidation of democracy in Indonesia. While niche extremist groups remained opposed to political democracy, these groups lost all allies in the state apparatus by the 2004 national elections. The groups that emerged to attempt to destabilize the region in this period were less focused on dismantling the
Indonesian regime as they were on attacking Western tourists or symbols of Western imperialism to avenge the deaths of Muslims in the at the hands of non-Muslims in the Middle East, Europe, the Caucasus, and South Asia (Jones 2013, p. 110). Thus, these groups, unlike the paramilitaries in the initial transition phase, are not a significant threat to the new democratic Indonesian regime. Additionally, these groups’ attempts to destabilize the state only served to professionalize the security forces in Indonesia were have worked closely with Western militaries to root-out the leaders of these terrorist cells (p. 109).
174 Finally, at an individual level, the consolidation period has been marked by patterns of disengagement among Indonesian jihadists. Hwang (2017) defines disengagement as the gradual process by which an individual comes to reject the use of violence as a method to pursue their goals. While much more research needs to be done on the relationship between shifts in institutional conditions toward greater competition and respect for individual rights, Hwang’s analysis demonstrates that common pathways toward disengagement include a disillusionment with violent tactics, the development of new relationships between jihadists and non-violent actors, and rational cost-benefit analyses about the individual use of terror and violence (p. 282).
Becoming disillusioned by violence that targets civilians and foreign tourists may be a natural outcome of the Indonesian state—especially the military—creating an environment where this form of mobilization is universally unacceptable. Similarly, increasing the personal connections between jihadists and non-violent actors corresponds to institutional and political cultural shifts towards tolerance and collaboration, hallmarks of a democratic polity (cf. Eckstein 1966; Putnam
1993). Finally, the rational cost benefit analysis that leads a jihadist to disengagement may be evidence of a political cultural shift toward self-expression values28 that emphasize the integrity and autonomy of individuals that is guaranteed by the state (Inglehart and Wenzel 2005). These new patterns of violence and disengagement in the consolidation phase of Indonesia’s democratic transition support appear to be tied to the consolidation of democratic institutions and norms at the level of the state.
28 Inglehart and Wenzel hypothesize that shifts toward secular-rational values are not necessary for the establishment of a democratic political culture, but that shifts towards self-expression values are. This discussion of the disengagement of jihadists supports this framework in which disengaged jihadists remain committed to traditional values from their religious devotion, but they reject their anti-democratic, violent approach to politics as the polity shifts toward democratic consolidation.
175 Table 4.5 reviews the three phases of democratic transition and the relationship between the state and various Islamist organizations in each. It also includes a brief summary of each phase in the Indonesian case.
Conclusion
This chapter has offered a process-oriented discussion of the evolution of the relationship between Islamist political parties and violent groups through the lens of a democratizing political regime. After reviewing the literature on democratization and political Islam, I offered a novel stylized theory about the evolving relationship between Islamist groups and the state as the state experiences democratization. I then offered an extended case study where I traced this process in
Indonesia from the mid-1990s to the elections in 2019. This case study identified many of the patterns that the theoretical discussion had anticipated. Fundamental to this chapter’s findings is the notion that increasingly democratic political regimes foster processes of normalization and deradicalization among Islamist parties and violent groups, respectively.
The Indonesian case offers a compelling context to examine the relationship between
Islamist political parties, violent Islamist groups, and democratization because democratization proceeded largely unabated after the fall of the Suharto regime. Therefore, Indonesia’s experience with democratization provides a helpful lens into the role of Islamist groups in this process. However, precisely because Indonesia is an ideal case to examine the process, the
Indonesian case casts doubt on the ability of this process to unfold in similar ways in other cases.
The Indonesian case contains at least five characteristics that set it apart from many other systems in the Muslim-majority world, but other political systems could evolve to mimic the patterns of normalization, deradicalization, and democratization that have marked the Indonesian case.
176 First, the democratizing movement in Indonesia consciously and effectively minimized the role of the military as a political institution while giving it opportunities to professionalize and represent the Indonesian nation. This is in sharp contrast to the role of the military in other states that have the potential to democratize in the Muslim-majority world. Pakistan and Egypt are instructive cases in demonstrating the deleterious role that the military can play the process of democratization. In Pakistan, the military has a history of power and influence that is largely autonomous from the civilian political institutions while in Egypt, the military has a history of directly leading the affairs of the state. Both countries also have a long history of Islamist organizations campaigning for influence in the state apparatus, and each provides a useful insight into how powerful and politically motivated militaries might hinder both the process of democratization and the development of a pro-democratic Islamist movement.
In Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq’s military dictatorship that began with his coup in 1978 focused on Islamicizing the Pakistani state and Pakistani society. He created powerful linkages between the military and Islamist organizations that were reinforced by American support as
Pakistani Islamist organizations served as recruiters and trainers in the campaign against the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These links became institutionalized throughout the 1980s. In
Egypt, the Free Officer’s revolution brought the military into a powerful position in the new
Egyptian Republic. Unlike the Pakistani experience, the Egyptian military did not align with
Islamist groups, but they also did not allow them to operate without repression. The repression of the Muslim Brotherhood by Egypt’s military dictatorship may have slowly created a pro- democratic segment of that organization (cf. Hamid 2014) that briefly held power after the
Egyptian revolution. However, their time in power demonstrates that the organization was plagued by internal divisions about its stance on issues such as political pluralism, and the limits
177 of the powers of the executive. After only one year, the Muslim Brotherhood’s time in power came to an abrupt end when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) staged a coup, deposed Egypt’s only democratically elected president, Mohammad Morsi, and declared the
Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization. In the Pakistani case, the military-Islamist alliance has hindered democratization and the formation of a pro-democratic Islamist movement, and in the Egyptian case, the military-Islamist rivalry may have softened some Islamists’ stance on political democracy, but it has heightened the military’s paranoid dominance of state powers and destroyed hopes for a democratic transition.
Second, as mentioned in a previous chapter, the Indonesian system developed electoral institutions that incentivized normalization among Islamist political parties. However, the analysis from that chapter suggests that competitive elections may matter more in the normalization of Islamist parties than electoral rules. Importantly, the level of competitiveness in
Indonesian elections exceeds that of any other Muslim-majority state. However, the Arab uprisings led to an increase in electoral competitiveness in several Arab states, both republics and monarchies, and these shifts may be impacting the strategic behavior of Islamist political parties in the region. For instance, the main Islamist party in Tunisia, al-Nahdha, has rejected the label “Islamism” and is firmly committed to democratic governance (Ghannouchi 2014). The main Islamist party in Morocco, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), has similarly embraced an exclusively electoral approach to their engagement with the state.
Third, the Indonesian case includes highly influential Islamic institutions that were outspoken in their support for political democracy. Leaders of the two largest Islamic organizations in the world, Muhammadiya and Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), became key figures in the democratizing movement and the post-Suharto reformasi period. Muhammadiya’s leader, Amien
178 Rais, and NU’s leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, were able to mobilize larger segments of the population than any other leader in the pro-democracy movement through their organizations, and both went on to become leaders in the post-Suharto period. Rais was the first Speaker of the
People’s Consultative Assembly—the national parliament—and Wahid was the first elected president. Rais and Abdurrahman formed the National Mandate Party (PAN) and the National
Awakening Party (PKB), and while neither is directly linked to the broader Islamic organizations, they have come to represent the pluralist and reformist—as well as politically and socially conservative—tendencies of Muhammadiya and NU.29 This is in sharp contrast to
Islamic organizations in other parts of the world that have tended to remain agnostic in their preference for regime types, knowing that they may face strong repression from authoritarian regimes if they are labeled “pro-democratic.” Additionally, Islamic organizations that typically oppose representative institutions—especially Salafi groups—lack a meaningful base of support in Indonesia. Relative to the massive popularity of the modernist Muhammadiya and the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulema, Salafism is largely seen as a foreign approach to Islam that flies in the face of the nationalist utility of Islam in Indonesia. Both Muhammadiya and NU have a strong and legitimate legacy of nationalist support across Indonesia that the Salafi movement, with its obvious connections to the Saudi attempt to control Islam and Islamic revivalism (Hasan
2007).
Fourth, relatedly, there is virtually no history of authoritarian cooptation of Islamic organizations in Indonesia. Authoritarian rulers have used Islamist organizations in Bahrain,
Morocco, and Pakistan to legitimate their regimes, and virtually all regimes in the Muslim
29 Muhammadiya and NU do not fit the mold of Islamist organizations that I have used in this project because they do not make claims about holding state power, indeed Rais and Aburrahman both withdrew from the posts within these religious organizations before they formed their respective political parties.
179 majority world—with the exception of the former Soviet republics—rely on some Islamic institution to legitimate their rule. However, Suharto’s lack of interest in Islamic scholasticism and personal lack of religious conviction beyond Javanese mysticism for most of his life led him to largely isolate Islamic actors during his rule. He was more interested in supporting a non- religious—perhaps trans-religious—national identity built on Pancasila rather than legitimating his rule by appealing to Islamic interests. While Suharto’s preference for little politicization of religion led, at times, to outright repression of Islamic groups, these groups also found themselves never asked to formally legitimize Suharto’s rule, so they were able to remain separate from his corrupt regime and retain their popular legitimacy among Indonesian Muslims into the democratic transition period.
Fifth and finally, Indonesian political culture largely lacks support for transnational
Islamism. Kathleen Collins’ (2007) work on Islamist political ideas in Central Asia makes it clear that for Islamist organizations to succeed they need to “develop a local Islamist ideology that suits a local social base” rather than relying on a nebulous global Islamist agenda (pp. 65-
66). In the initial transition period, both violent and non-violent Islamist groups seemed equally likely to dominate the Indonesian Islamist movement, but as violent groups began to adopt more transnational goals they were unable to retain their support bases outside of a small, fringe network of internationalized Islamist insurgents. By contrast, the Islamist political parties developed national and local-level platforms that spoke to the interests of a Muslim community far removed from the “Islamic centers” of the world in the Middle East. Thus these parties rarely speak to issues such as anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, or the Sunni-Shi‘i divide—despite the focus on these issues in most popular depictions of global Islamism—because there is little popular interest in these issues among Indonesian Muslims. The ability of non-violent Islamist
180 groups to capture nearly all Islamist popular support in Indonesia is a testament to these groups’ ability to engage in the normal political processes, but it also speaks to the undercurrent of
Islamist supporters. That international Islamist ambitions are salient among Islamists in the
Middle East and South Asia may speak to varied support that Islamist in these regions give to democratic movements compared to those in Indonesia, Malaysia, or Central Asia.
Each of these previous paragraphs deserves its own comparative research project looking at cases across the Muslim-majority world, but in this context they demonstrate that while
Indonesia’s experience with Islamism, democratization, and political violence may be unique, it is systematically so, and other states similarly experiencing authoritarian rule, the proliferation of
Islamist groups and ideas, and the weight of violent mobilization may be able to follow
Indonesia’s path.
181 Figures and Tables
Figure 4.1 Evolution of Islamist and Secular Groups in the Course of Democratization
Table 4.1 Summary of Major Indonesian Islamist Parties Connection to broad social movement with mobilization Social Service Sharia or Islamic Legal networks Provider Secular Tradition PAN Weak No Secular Reformist PKB Weak No Secular Traditionalist PKS Strong Yes in-between Revivalist Mix of Traditionalist PPP None No Sharia and Reformist PBB None No Sharia Reformist
182 Table 4.2 Multinomial Logisitic Regression Results for Gubernatorial Election Decisions by Islamist Parties (2014- 2019) Outcome: Run their own candidate Outcome: Support an Islamist Outcome: Support Golkar candidate Coef SE p-value Coef SE p-value Coef SE p-value PBB -3.57 2.56 0.024 -0.851 1.43 0.55 -2.98 1.39 0 PKS -0.441 1.11 0.69 1.68 1.47 0.255 0.325 1.26 0.796 PKB -0.788 1.09 0.471 1.11 1.35 0.413 0.228 0.957 0.812 PPP -1.83 1.11 0.1 0.475 1.4 0.734 -0.884 1.1 0.421 Muslim Proportion 5.76 2.56 0.024 4.99 2.96 0.092 1.85 1.07 0.084 Constant -4.13 2.28 0.07 -5.06 3.02 0.094 -1.32 0.986 0.181 Outcome: Support other non-Islamist Outcome: Support PDI-P candidate candidate Coef SE p-value Coef SE p-value PBB -16.5 0.817 0 -2.39 0.773 0.002 PKS -0.693 0.987 0.483 -0.033 0.94 0.972 PKB -0.288 0.829 0.729 -0.552 0.789 0.484 PPP -0.625 0.905 0.49 -1.22 0.742 0.099 Muslim Proportion 0.017 1.19 0.989 1.32 0.966 0.171 Constant 0.277 1.16 0.811 0.82 1.022 0.423
N 165 Note: Base outcome is not supporting any candidate; party coefficeints are in reference to PAN, the omitted party; robust standard errors are clustered by province.
183 Table 4.3 OLS Results for Provincial Vote Share Changes in National Elections Between 2014 and 2019 Coefficient SE P-value Parties PBB -0.062 0.0178 0.002 PKS -0.012 0.0234 0.614 PKB -0.019 0.028 0.508 PPP -0.045 0.0181 0.018 Gubernatorial election decision Run own candidate 0.017 0.0251 0.512 Support Islamist -0.053 0.018 0.005
Support non- Islamist -0.007 0.019 0.07 PBB Interaction Run own candidate 0.023 0.025 0.366 Support Islamist 0.049 0.019 0.015
Support non- Islamist 0.0082 0.02 0.682 PKS Interaction Run own candidate 0.031 0.029 0.298 Support Islamist 0.055 0.0302 0.078
Support non- Islamist 0.014 0.0275 0.609 PKB Interaction Run own candidate 0.035 0.0401 0.392 Support Islamist 0.057 0.0298 0.064
Support non- Islamist 0.016 0.0285 0.577 PPP Interaction Run own candidate -0.003 0.025 0.899 Support Islamist 0.068 0.018 0.001
Support non- Islamist 0.02 0.0211 0.348 Control Muslim Proportion 0.026 0.0125 0.047 Constant 0.05 0.0193 0.014
N 165 Note: Reference category for "parties" is PAN, and reference category for "gubernatorial election decision" is support no one; robust standard errors are clustered by province.
184 Table 4.4 Distribution of Gubernatorial Decisions by Party (2014-2019) Support Run own another Support Support Support Not candidate Islamist Golkar PDI-P other participate PKS 9.1% 15.2% 12.1% 6.1% 48.5% 9.1% PPP 6.1% 12.1% 9.1% 15.2% 36.4% 21.2% PAN 15.2% 3% 9.1% 12.1% 51.5% 9.1% PBB 3% 9.1% 3% 0% 30.3% 54.5% PKB 9.1% 12.1% 15.2% 12.1% 39.4% 12.1%
185 Table 4.5 Summary of theoretical expectations in the prolonged process of democratization among the state and Islmist organizations and Indonesian empirics The state's approach Islamist civil society Violent Islamist Summary of Phase to Islamism and political parties groups Indonesian experience
Islamic civil society groups align with the democratizing The state attempts to co- movement even after opt Islamist groups but Suharto tries to offer finds that only the most concessions to their Support extreme groups are goals and plays up his Final days of democratization effort Align with the willing to abandon the peity. Suharto then the even in the face of authoritarians and democratization efforts. courts violent, anti- authoritarian offers to join the their patrons in the These groups receive democratic Salfis to regime authoritarian regime's military patronage and are used divide the patronage networks to attack the democratizing democratizing movement and spread movement. rumors about foreign meddling in the democratizing movement.
Islamist political parties and violent organizations proliferate. Sectarian The state is divided conflicts erupt and the Fragment into various Rely on their patrons between old-regime "old guard" military parties and other in the military to wage loyalists (especially in tries to capitalize on organizations across sectarian conflicts in the military) who still them by continuing to the ideological economically align with extreme provide patronage to Intial spectrum. Some are struggling regions. Islamist groups and the violent Islamist Transition willing to work with Also fragment as new democratizing groups. These groups violent groups to political space widens regime who is prove to be difficult to empower Muslims in and some turn to ambivalent about the manage and Islamic communal sectarian international patrons role Islamists will play civil society supports conflicts. of terrorism in the new regime. the state's efforts to curtail the violence, earning them an indispensible place in the democratic regime.
Islmist violence is limited to international terrorist networks that The state unites against Patronage networks are universally rejected violent Islamist groups, from the military are Normalize relationships by state actors. Islamist accepts normalized destroyed and so all with secular parties at parties consistently political parties, and violent mobilization is Consolidation local and national levels work with secular Islamicizes to attract through international through coalition partners to reach policy the median Muslim terrorist networks and building and lobbying solutions, and the voter. Military clandestine criminal secular parties become professionalizes. organizations. much more amenable to Shari'a inspired policies.
186 CHAPTER 5
Conclusions on the Patterns of Islamist Political Mobilization
This dissertation has attempted to analyze the patterns of both electoral and violent mobilization among Islamist groups in the Muslim-majority world. Here I review the major theoretical and empirical contributions of this project, discuss some limitations, and plant seeds for future work in this important strain of scholarship.
Broadly, this project has recognized the religious and social antecedents of many Islamist organizations and tried to embrace both the ideological and strategic logics at work in their behavioral decision making. While Islamism is a fundamentally modern political phenomenon, it derives much of its legitimacy from pre-modern philosophies, and this inherently religious dimension—which exists in a domain that is contrary to much of the structures of modern nation-states—is fundamental to the identity of all Islamist organizations, to some extent. This religious dimension pushes these groups to behave in ways that set them apart from more traditional political organizations. Many provide public goods and organize events without the expectation of political support from their beneficiaries. Thus, the first empirical chapter of this project examined the conditions under which Islamist parties will fully participate in electoral politics. While Islamist parties were less inclined to participate in electoral contests that were not competitive, competitiveness was insufficient to explain a lack of full participation. However, when uncompetitive elections were coupled with a party that grew out of an antecedent apolitical social or religious organization, these parties tended to not fully participate in elections. This lack of participation lends strong support to the notion that the social and religious obligations and activities of Islamist organizations are fundamental to their activity and identity. Islamist parties that grew out of antecedent social and religious organizations and compete in uncompetitive
187 elections will forego opportunities to engage with the state to influence policy and to continue to have the resources to engage in social and religious outreach.
The next chapter retained an emphasis on Islamist political parties but moved the focus away from patterns of electoral participation and toward violent activities. By examining cases in which Islamist parties exist and are capable of absorbing some of the demands of Islamist supporters, this chapter considered the institutional conditions under which Islamist violence might be mitigated by these Islamist parties. Here, I developed a theory in which Islamist parties are able to meet the demands of Islamist supporters—thus cutting off support to violent organizations—when they can effectively govern at the subnational level. This theory was integrated into a broader literature that identifies institutions that protect free association rights as catalysts for increasing levels of violent mobilization—a pattern that exists among both Islamist and non-Islamist violent actors around the world. Because free association rights are also fundamental to effective non-violent political opposition, I argued that when subnational opportunities for autonomous governance were not protected, that the patterns of Islamist violence should look the way the previous literature suggested. However, when subnational forms of governance were made autonomous, then increasing protections for free association rights should not be associated with increasing levels of Islamist violence. While the evidence did not show a decrease in violence when subnational governance was efficacious, the only situation that did support the previous theories was when local governance was inefficacious.
This suggests a particular preference for the relatively less costly and more communally connected forms of local governance of Islamist parties.
In each of these chapters, the case of post-Suharto Indonesia stood out as unique. Its five main Islamist political parties were consistently actively engaged in national-level elections and
188 local level governance. It experienced high levels of Islamist violence immediately after its transition to democracy, and had consistently been plagued by Islamist terrorism, sometimes extremely severely. Thus, the final empirical chapter attempted to trace the origins and evolution of these forms of Islamist mobilization through the highly dynamic period of democratic transition in Indonesia. This case study identified the primary divide within the Islamist movement in the period immediately before the fall of Suharto as the willingness to support
Suharto or not. Islamists and Islamist groups that were willing to support him were willing to do so violently, and that violence morphed into intercommunal conflict in the post-transition phase because of their alignment with the military. By contrast, the Islamists that were not willing to collaborate with Suharto joined the democratizing movement and formed an array of political parties in the new democratic system. The chapter further identified a shift toward nationalization and normalization among Islamist parties and a shift toward Islamicization among the secular parties. Finally, as the military professionalized, its collaboration with violent
Islamist groups dropped off significantly and these groups turned to notorious transnational violent groups. This shift, while making their occasional attacks particularly devastating, has turned nearly all potential supporters away from them because they no longer focus on local- level grievances.
In wrapping up this project, I note that none of the analyses and findings in these chapters are without limitations. The most significant limitation to the findings in the first empirical chapter is the limited sample size that is a function of data availability with the Constituency
Level Election Archive (CLEA). While the countries included in this sample include some with long histories of Islamist participation (for example, Malaysia, and Indonesia) and cases with a variety of electoral systems and levels of democracy, it does lack coverage in North Africa where
189 Algeria and Morocco have histories of Islamist participation and Tunisia has developed one of the most dynamic Islamist parties in the post-Arab Uprisings period. Widening this sample would certainly be valuable in identifying the multiple causal pathways that lead to a lack of full electoral participation among Islamist parties. Additionally, recalibrating the outcome set to include intervals between not fully participating and fully participating would allow for greater nuance in identifying when Islamist parties participate at various levels. This would be particularly helpful among Islamist parties that participate in single member district systems where competing in every available constituency is uncommon.
In the next chapter, the dependent variable in the empirical analysis is drawn from event data on terrorism. I maintain that terrorism data is particularly helpful in analyzing trends in
Islamist violence because of the bias towards ascribing terrorist motives to Islamist actors.
However, as the Indonesian case study demonstrates, there is a wide variety of forms that
Islamist violence can take that may not show up in an event database. However, the solution of merging events from multiple databases may not be a solution either because this could easily lead to duplicated events. A more suitable solution may be to disaggregate forms of violence and consider the impact of subnational opportunities for governance on each form of violence.
Finally, expanding the case study to include controlled comparisons within each domain of the analysis would add to the leverage of the Indonesian case. Thus, in a future iteration of this project, I will include comparisons to other cases throughout the Indonesian narrative. In determining why the Indonesian Islamist movement supported the democratization movement, a comparison to Egypt—where the Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of the revolution came quite late in the progression of the movement—may answer this question. In the context of democratic elections, Indonesian Islamist political parties moved quickly to fully embrace democratic
190 norms. A comparison to Pakistani parties, which have tended to remain deeply skeptical of electoral politics, may help explain why Indonesian parties have embraced democratic politics.
Violent Islamist groups in Indonesia have moved from alignment with the authoritarian regime of Suharto to collaborating with pro-Suharto elements in the military to foment communal conflict to embracing transnational terrorist tactics. Identifying the cause of this progression could be done by building a comparison to the evolution of violent Islamist groups in Algeria where violent groups emerged from an organized political party, fought a civil conflict, and then embraced transnational terrorist tactics. In the Indonesian case, they did so despite opportunities for electoral participation, and in Algeria they did so because these opportunities were pulled away from them. This may suggest a lack of institutional cause in explaining these similar evolutionary paths. Finally, the Indonesian state has embraced a pattern of Islamicization since its transition from authoritarian rule. In controlled comparison to a case such as Tunisia that has similarly experienced transition but has not experienced an Islamicization of the state, the role of
Islamic popular organizations may prove to be key to this process in Indonesia, despite their lack of formal political participation.
Despite these limitations, this project has demonstrated novel patterns in Islamist political mobilization in the context of Islamist partisan organization. Islamist political parties will continue to proliferate as institutional bars to entry in national party systems slowly fade in the
Muslim-majority world. Unfortunately, the process of political liberalization tends to also empower violent actors, especially in the short run. This project suggests that decentralizing political power in this process may be one avenue for mitigating the proliferation of Islamist violence. It also suggests that Islamist parties are best suited to integrate into party systems when
191 they abandon other forms of social and religious engagement or leave these activities to other, broader organizations.
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