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The Religious Infrastructure of Electoral Victory

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The Religious Infrastructure of Electoral Victory The Islamist Advantage: The Religious Infrastructure of Electoral Victory Sharan Grewal∗ March 29, 2021 Abstract Why do Islamists regularly win elections in the Middle East? One common yet rarely tested hypothesis is that Islamists can rely on a vast, country-wide network of religious institutions, particularly mosques, to facilitate voter outreach and mobiliza- tion. Secular parties, meanwhile, have no comparable, preexisting infrastructure. This paper attempts to test this \infrastructure advantage" in two ways. First, it leverages a dataset of Tunisia's 6000 mosques to show that sub-nationally, the number of mosques per capita strongly correlates with Islamist vote share in the 2011, 2014, and 2019 parliamentary elections. Notably, results appear to be driven by mosques facilitating personal, horizontal interactions with Islamists, rather than exposure to Islamist social services, politicized imams, or underlying religiosity. Second, drawing on region-wide survey data from the Arab Barometer, it shows that respondents who attend mosque for Friday prayers are significantly more likely to trust Islamists, and that this is one of the most consistent predictors of Islamism across multiple survey waves. ∗Assistant Professor, William & Mary ([email protected]). I am indebted to the phe- nomenal research assistance of Cassie Heyman-Schrum, Hank Hermens, and Amy Hilla. For helpful comments, I thank Nasir Almasri, Lucia Ardovini, Elizabeth Baisley, Steven Brooke, Melani Cammett, Matthew Cebul, M.Tahir Kilavuz, Alex Kustov, Marc Lynch, Ameni Mehrez, Elizabeth Nugent, Tom Pavone, Scott Williamson, and audiences at POMEPS, Oxford, Tulane, and Central European University. 1 Introduction When Islamists run in competitive elections in the Middle East, they tend to win. Beginning with the Islamic Republican Party's victory in Iran in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, the region has seemingly witnessed a `green wave,' with Islamists racking up electoral victories in Algeria, Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, among others. Even in the past three years, Islamists have placed first in all three of the competitive elections in the region, namely Lebanon (2018), Iraq (2018), and Tunisia (2019). In total, Islamists have won 20 out of the 30 competitive elections (67%) they have contested in the Middle East since the 1970s (see figure1). Naturally, a large literature has emerged attempting to explain this `Islamist advantage' in elections. For some, their victory reflects the region's widespread embrace of Islamist ideologies, especially as a reaction to colonialism and forced secularization (Ayubi, 1991; Esposito, 1997; Nugent, Masoud and Jamal, 2018). For others, the appeal of Islamists is their services, whether the charity and welfare they provide to would-be voters (Wedeen, 2003; Cammett and Issar, 2010), the expectation that they will redistribute wealth once in office (Masoud, 2014), or the divine rewards they promise in the afterlife (Grewal et al., 2019). Finally, others argue that the Islamist advantage lies instead in their reputations for competence, probity, and authenticity (Cammett and Luong, 2014; Brooke, 2019). However, there is also an earlier literature claiming that Islamists are not necessarily more appealing than secular parties, but instead that they are better resourced (Wickham, 2002; Clark, 2004; Wiktorowicz, 2004). Social movement theorists, in particular, have highlighted that Islamists enjoy what we might term an \infrastructure advantage." In this account, Islamists benefit from a nation-wide network of religious institutions, particularly mosques, that facilitate their outreach to new supporters. Secular parties, meanwhile, have no such preexisting infrastructure to aid voter outreach and mobilization. While intuitive, this `infrastructure advantage' has rarely been subject to empirical anal- yses. Masoud(2014) is the lone exception, who finds only mixed evidence that mosques 1 provided Islamists an advantage in elections in Egypt. Outside of the Middle East, Bazzi, Koehler-Derrick and Marx(2020) argue that religious institutions encouraged the rise of Islamists in Indonesia, while Jamal(2005) and Moutselos(2020) find that mosque atten- dance increases civic engagement and voter turnout among Muslims in the US and Europe. However, whether and to what extent mosques help explain the Islamist advantage in the Middle East remains an open question. In this paper, I provide two empirical tests of Islamists' infrastructure advantage in the Middle East. First, I leverage an original dataset of all 6000 mosques in Tunisia to conduct an ecological analysis of mosque density and Islamist vote share. I show that the number of mosques per capita at the delegation level strongly correlates with the Islamist party Ennahda's vote share in the 2011, 2014, and 2019 parliamentary elections. Moreover, mosque density also correlates with the 2019 vote share of a new Islamist party, the Karama Coalition, as well as the total vote share of all Islamist parties combined. However, one possible confounder to this relationship is religiosity, which might be pro- ducing both a demand for mosques and for Islamists. I accordingly control for religiosity in two ways. First, I combine six nationally-representative surveys (four waves of the Arab Barometers and two of my own), to generate a sufficient level of respondents (N=8,203) to make meaningful claims about piety at the delegation level. Second, I follow Ciftci, Robbins and Zaytseva(2020) and collect satellite imagery of night-time lights during Ramadan as a proxy for sub-national religiosity. The link between mosque density and Islamist vote share remains significant in the presence of either of these proxies, helping to rule out religiosity as a confounder. The results are also robust to a variety of demographic and political covariates, including population density, youth, unemployment, education, urban/rural, and proxies for the former dictatorship's human rights violations, corruption, and regional discrimination. I then explore the mechanisms in Tunisia by conducting three large-scale surveys (total N=13,000) around the 2019 elections. I find no evidence that the effect of mosque density on Islamist vote share in 2019 was driven by politicized imams exhorting their followers to vote 2 for Islamists, by Islamists campaigning near mosques, or by social service provision. Instead, I privilege a more subtle explanation, that mosques provide Islamists the infrastructure to informally meet new supporters and build connections through horizontal, face-to-face interactions. Finally, to show that this relationship might generalize beyond Tunisia, I explore region- wide survey data from the Arab Barometer. I find that respondents who self-report attending mosque for Friday prayers are significantly more likely to trust Islamists, even when control- ling for religiosity and other explanations of Islamist support. Moreover, mosque attendance is one of the most consistent predictors of Islamism across multiple survey waves. In sum, this paper provides some of the first systematic evidence of the infrastructure advantage: the idea that Islamists win elections in the Middle East because they can rely on a vast network of religious institutions, particularly mosques, to aid voter outreach and mobilization. While recent literature seems to privilege the Islamist appeal in elections, suggesting that their services, reputations, or ideologies attract voters, our results instead suggest that more attention should be paid to the differential resources that Islamist parties enjoy in creating ties with potential voters. 2 The Islamist Advantage Elections in the Middle East are not often free and fair, but when they are, they tend to be won by Islamists. Figure1 plots the 30 competitive 1 parliamentary elections that Islamist parties have contested in the region, from the National Salvation Party's lackluster performance in the 1973 Turkish election, to Ennahda's victory in Tunisia in 2019. The y- 1Competitive coded by National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) project (https://nelda.co/) as 1) opposition were allowed to run, 2) more than one party was legal, 3) there was a choice of candidates on the ballot, 4) the incumbent did not enjoy media bias, and 5) there were no allegations by Western observers of significant vote fraud. 3 axis presents the total vote share obtained by all Islamist parties contesting those elections, while the color scheme records whether the winning party was Islamist (blue) or not (red). Figure 1: The Islamist Advantage, 1970-2020 The data show that Islamists won 20 of these 30 parliamentary elections, or 67%. In other words, when Islamists run in competitive elections in the Middle East, they are more likely to win than lose. Moreover, across these 30 elections, Islamists garnered an average of 32% of the vote, ranging from the Welfare Party's 7% in Turkey in 1987 to the 74% blowout by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi Nour party in Egypt's 2012 Shura Council elections. Given the extent of Islamist domination, scholars have focused extensively on explaining the Islamist advantage in elections, putting forth four primary sets of explanations. First, some explain the victory of Islamist parties as reflecting the widespread embrace of Islamist ideologies. In this account, voters in the Middle East turned to Islamism as a reaction to colonialism, forced secularization, and Western influence (Ayubi, 1991; Esposito, 1997; Kepel, 2002; Wolf, 2017; Nugent, Masoud and
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