Why do some parties commit to democratic principles while others do not? Can democracy socialize political actors? Or is it essentially vulnerable to the attacks of such actors who can come to power through free and fair elections only to destroy democracy? With the recent surge of right-wing populism from the United States and India to Brazil and Hungary, these questions have once again gained urgency. Illustrative of a fundamental paradox, democracies have faced similar threats from political parties before. In fact, socialists, Catholics, and fascists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries instrumentalized democratic routes to power to alter the system in line with their worldview. After these parties joined the democratic game, some accepted it as the “only game in town,” while others undermined it.

In their efforts to discover the conditions under which ideological parties commit to democracy, some scholars highlight structural factors and broader socioeconomic trends such as modernization and economic development. Meanwhile, others underscore institutional constraints on actors’ behavior, attributing democratic commitments to the taming effects of institutions. Inclusion in the system, they suggest, transform actors with authoritarian tendencies, as in the case of socialist or Catholic parties. Yet not all actors embrace democracy despite their political inclusion in the system, as in the case of fascist parties.

Do structural changes, such as modernization, transform authoritarian actors into committed democrats? Or do institutions rein in the authoritarian tendencies of political actors through political socialization and democratic habituation? This chapter critically reviews the scholarly debate surrounding these questions with a particular focus on Islamist parties.

Islamism indeed offers a fertile ground to study the relationship between political parties and democracy. Some observers have singled out Islamism as particularly antidemocratic, a claim that is, as I have already detailed, empirically unsupported.Footnote ¹ Other scholars, in contrast, reject this essentialist approach to argue that Islamists do not carry an unchanging and antidemocratic essence.Footnote ² Instead, they suggest, like the socialist and Catholic parties of Europe, the sociopolitical contexts within which such parties operate shape their political preferences. This line of scholarship is theoretically and empirically more rigorous than essentialist accounts, although they also suffer from some key shortcomings. Here, I discuss three main approaches to Islamist change motivated by structural, institutional, and rational choice theories and their strengths and weaknesses before advancing a complementary framework to unpack the democratic trajectories of Islamist parties.

This chapter surveys existing accounts of Islamists’ democratic commitments starting with macrolevel changes pertaining to modernization and continuing with meso- (institutional) and microlevel analyses (rational choice) of political parties and individuals. Macrolevel theories along with the inclusion–moderation thesis offer key insights as to how and why Islamist parties in all three countries might have accepted democracy as their preferred system. Yet these theories fail to explain the differences within each party and why some Islamist parties adhered to liberal norms while others committed to majoritarianism after coming to power. The studies that unpack ideational change at the individual level induced by inclusion or exclusion shed greater light on the origins of internal splits within Islamist parties. But they fail to address the issue of aggregation – or, to put it differently, why liberal Islamists prevail in some parties but not in others. Different individuals develop different reactions to the same external impetus. Some Islamists learn and internalize democratic norms when faced with exclusion and repression, while others pursue confrontation and radicalism. Still others, upon their inclusion to the system, instrumentalize electoral politics to pursue Islamist majoritarianism, whereas many adhere to liberal norms and strive to build democratic institutions. When faced with certain constraints and incentives, they develop competing rationalities. Existing studies largely fail to account for this diversity and very few explain how and why a certain strategy gains currency within a party. This, I posit, is a question of power and resources. I theorize this causal relationship in the next chapter.

Here, I start with a critical survey of structural factors that may account for divergent outcomes in the three countries of interest in this book. Specifically, I trace the history of modernization in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia and discuss the role of socioeconomic factors on the democratization of Islamist parties. This section also aims to give a historical context to the three cases studied in this book.

Next, I explore the impact of institutions on party behavior and ideology. Specifically, I discuss the inclusion-moderation thesis to test its claims against the evidence we now have with the rise of Islamist parties to power. Although this thesis suggests that institutions, via electoral considerations and governmental concerns, often tame ideological parties, these constraints do not always yield sustained commitment to democratic principles. This survey reveals the limits of the institutional effects of inclusion. The ideational effects of inclusion offer invaluable insights for ideological change of some, if not all, Islamists. The second part of this section discusses these contributions and their limits in detail.

Finally, I turn to the strategic calculations of Islamist actors as determinants of Islamist party behavior. Specifically, I discuss the role played by external factors, including regional and international developments, in each case. As this critical survey reveals, such accounts offer important yet partial insights into Islamist party behavior.

Modernization and Democratization

Seminal theories of comparative politics that underscore structural factors may shed some light on the trajectories of the three parties in question. Modernization theory, for instance, predicts greater commitment to democracy as societies undergo modernization. With the rise of modernity, the significance of tradition, religion, and personal and communal ties associated with rural lifestyles decline, and in their stead come secularization, scientific education, professional specialization, impersonal ties, and an (often) individualistic and urban lifestyle.Footnote ³ For some, the decline of tradition and the rise of a modern society inevitably lead to democratization.Footnote ⁴ Several scholars, in agreement with the basic premises of modernization theory, add economic development as a key causal mechanism that ties modernization to democratization.Footnote ⁵ Many argue that democracy finds a stronger foothold in wealthier societies where urbanization, education, and professional specialization define the social structure and the middle classes expand and become a dominant force.Footnote ⁶ Such theories, extended to the case of Islamist parties by scholars like Nasr, imply that Islamists commit to democracy in countries with higher levels of modernization, economic development, and a sizable middle class.Footnote ⁷

All three cases in this study share similarities with respect to their modernization processes. They all have a long history of state-building, secularization, and economic development dating back to the nineteenth century. In an attempt at defensive modernization,Footnote ⁸ the ruling elite in the Ottoman Empire and its nominal provinces of Egypt and Tunisia emulated European institutions to preclude further decline. Such reforms were oriented toward centralization and expansion of state capacity through top-down reform.

State-Building in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia

Facing European imperialism, the Ottoman elite pursued centralizing reforms over the course of the nineteenth century to build a strong state with loyal subjects and a vibrant economy. Collectively labeled the tanzimat (regulations), these successive measures aimed to build a modern tax administration, formidable army, an education system to train civilian and military bureaucrats, and a centralized and largely secular legal system. Economic measures accompanied such reforms to modernize the imperial economy according to capitalist production and commerce. For that purpose, the state established factories and encouraged private investment in manufacturing while investing in infrastructure by building ports, railroads, and telegraph lines.

Most of these reforms were met with mixed success and resistance from different quarters of society.Footnote ⁹ Partial centralization failed to deliver expected tax revenues, while ambitious infrastructural projects cost the imperial coffers a heavy debt burden. Turkey, the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, avoided colonial rule yet still bore the brunt of European economic and military domination through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, losing its territories, markets, and financial independence. Still, modernizing reforms changed the Ottoman state in a drastic fashion and cultivated the seeds of further modernization through its nascent administrative, education, and legal systems under the republican elite, as I will discuss shortly.

Egypt’s modernization also dated back to the early nineteenth century. In the wake of Napoleon’s invasion, Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman officer of Albanian origin, arrived in Egypt to thwart French forces. He chose to stay instead of leaving for another position in the imperial bureaucracy with the intention of building his own dynasty on those fertile soils. Under his rule, Egypt remained a nominal Ottoman province with de facto independence. Muhammad Ali Pasha began extensive modernization not only in the state apparatus but also in agriculture and manufacturing. He built a formidable army, a modern taxation system, new administrative units, irrigation systems, textile factories, as well as railways and military and civilian academies. Quite successful in these reforms, this Ottoman province outperformed the imperial heartland militarily and economically. Yet Muhammad Ali’s plans were deeply frustrated by his own ambitions and ensuing British interference. After threatening the Sublime Porte through territorial expansionism, he was forced to reduce the size of his army and ban monopolies over cotton production and manufacturing. Thus, the Egyptian economy was reduced to a supplier of cheap raw materials for global markets. His successors only deepened such frustrations when they undertook major projects for the sake of late development. Chief among them was the Suez Canal, which not only amplified the strategic significance of the country but also created a huge debt burden with its mounting costs. The international context was not helpful either, with cotton prices taking a hit with the end of the American Civil War. The British, taking advantage of the fiscal crisis in Egypt, occupied the country in 1881. British troops would remain in the country until 1954. Despite such setbacks, the ruling elite managed to kick-start modernization of both the state and the economy, which would continue for almost another century.Footnote ¹⁰

Tunisia, like Egypt, remained under Ottoman rule until the late nineteenth century, albeit with a significant degree of autonomy. Under Ahmad Bey’s (1837–55) leadership, Tunisia also underwent defensive modernization, as did Egypt and the Ottoman heartland, in response to European ascendance (as well as in response to Ottoman centralizing efforts). These reforms concerned the emulation of Western institutions in public administration, justice, military, and education. Like their modernist counterparts, the Tunisian rulers built a modern standing army, overhauled the taxation system, and established higher education institutions to train military officers. Ahmad Bey also started conscription, monopolized the export of agricultural products, created a nascent industry, and invested in infrastructure, which proved to be, along with other reforms, quite costly.Footnote ¹¹ Tunisians borrowed from Europeans to cover these costs, went bankrupt, and eventually fell under French rule in 1881. The country remained a French protectorate until it gained its independence in 1956 under Habib Bourguiba’s leadership. As Gelvin aptly puts it, despite growing European influence, along with Turkey and Egypt, Tunisia proved to be unique among other states of the region with its long history of state-building and professionalized civil and military bureaucracies.Footnote ¹²

Religion and Secularism

Turkey was the first to gain independence (1923); Egypt (1954) and Tunisia (1956) followed suit. The modernization process continued after independence in a more ambitious fashion, touching all aspects of life from religious affairs to economic development. Even though their societies were predominantly Muslim, the ruling elite in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia pushed for greater secularization of both state and society. The Turkish and Tunisian regimes sustained an assertive secular order, whereas in Egypt, Nasser’s assertive secularism was somewhat diluted by his successors after his death in 1970. All three countries also experimented with developmentalism to fortify newly gained political independence with sustained economic development.

In the wake of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was completely dismantled. The British and the French divided up its Arab-populated territories and invaded the Turkish mainland with the help of Greeks. The Turkish nationalist movement, formed by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), had to fight a war of independence to oust these occupying forces. Soon after the nationalists’ surprising victory in 1922, they replaced the monarchy with a secular republic in 1923. A series of Westernizing reforms followed. The elite of the new regime, in a top-down fashion, abolished the Caliphate – the only institution, albeit in a symbolic sense, that represented the unity of the Muslim world – and overhauled the Islamic education and legal systems as well as religious networks in the society. Through sweeping changes, from daily attire and education to the penal and personal status code, the republican elite made sure the new society conformed to “Western” standards. A crucial part of this reform program entailed accelerating late Ottoman secularization of the legal and education systems, the subordination of religion to the state, and breaking the backbone of socioreligious networks represented by traditional Sufi brotherhoods. Specifically, the ruling elite abolished the Islamic foundations (waqfs), thereby ending the financial independence of religious networks in Turkish society. The regime also abolished the Islamic law (sharia) as well as Islamic courts and replaced them with secular legal codes largely borrowed from Europe. The most critical change concerned the regulation of family matters, which had been governed by Islamic law for centuries. The republican elite replaced Islamic family law with the Swiss secular personal status code. In this new legal framework, women were given equal rights in marriage, inheritance, and divorce while polygamy was banned. A few years later, women were also given suffrage rights as well as the right to education and work. These secular principles were institutionalized in a constitutional amendment in 1934, declaring the Turkish Republic a secular state. The republican elite also desired to control Islam, making sure that its predominant interpretation not only conformed to the secular republican regime but also supported the creation of the ideal citizen loyal to the Turkish state. The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) was established in 1924 to meet the religious needs of Muslims, enlighten society in religious matters, and manage places of worship. The directorate sought to monopolize the country’s religious terrain, as every preacher and religious official became a state employee, and it oversaw every mosque in the country. In short, the republican elite aimed to diminish the role of Islam in public life by controlling and confining it largely to the private life of individuals.

The nationalist elite in Egypt largely echoed these sentiments. After coming to power in 1952 through the Free Officers coup, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the republican–nationalist cadres, also pursued a strictly secular agenda, though perhaps less assertive than Turkey’s. He undermined the financial and judicial–institutional power of the Islamic establishment and curtailed the power of social (and political) Islam organized under the banner of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser distanced himself from the Brotherhood soon after his ascent to power and clamped down on the movement, executing several of its leaders and imprisoning thousands of members. Like Atatürk, Nasser also undermined Islam’s institutional power by confiscating waqf property and abolishing sharia courts. Perhaps like Atatürk did in Turkey, Nasser sought to subordinate the largest Islamic institution, Al-Azhar Mosque University, for political expediency. He undermined Al-Azhar’s autonomy as the government took control of the institution through the appointment of its administrators and teachers and a redesign of its schools and curriculum. Thus, Islam, as interpreted by the most profound Islamic institution in the country, could justify Nasser’s developmentalist and Arab socialist programs.

While he waged a political war against Islamic organizations, Nasser did not go for full secularization of the legal system. Perhaps, the most important difference between Atatürk and Nasser concerned the changes to family affairs. On the one hand, Nasser refused to heed the Muslim Brothers’ calls for veiling and recognized suffrage and social rights for women, that is, the rights to work and to maternity leave and childcare. On the other hand, he kept the Islamic family law largely intact, allowing for polygamy and discriminatory practices in divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Nasser also did not go as far as Atatürk in institutionalizing his secularizing measures; instead, he kept Islam as the religion of the state in the 1954 constitution while separating state affairs from religious doctrines.

The Tunisian republican elite was no different in its secular orientation. Habib Bourguiba, the founding father of the modern Tunisian state, established a secular republic based on Tunisian national identity. Taking his inspiration from Atatürk, Bourguiba pursued a very similar reform agenda in his country’s formative years. Soon after independence in 1956, Bourguiba took several steps to exert the state’s control over Islam by ending the autonomy of an array of religious institutions and curtailing their power in public life. More specifically, the government confiscated the property financing mosques and Qur‘an schools through land management, placed Islamic courts within the national judicial system allowing for the appointment of more progressive judges who would support his reforms, and placed the Al-Zaytuna Mosque University, the institutional counterpart of Al-Azhar in Tunisia, under the Ministry of Education and turned it into the Faculty of Theology at the University of Tunis, practically ending the institutional autonomy of one of the oldest Islamic institutions in the region.

Bourguiba proved to be more ambitious than Nasser in arranging family affairs. The government passed the most progressive personal status code in the Arab world that handed women equal rights in marriage and divorce and improved their status in matters of inheritance and child custody. The code also banned polygamy while setting a minimum age for marriage.Footnote ¹³ Instead of following Atatürk’s example in pushing Islam to private life though, Bourguiba, much like Nasser, made sure to provide Islamic justifications for his actions posing as a Muslim reformer, despite his lack of religious training. For Bourguiba, his reforms were perfectly compatible with Islam and in line with ijtihad (independent reasoning). Although the 1959 constitution kept Islam as the religion of the country, there was no role recognized for Islamic principles and injunctions in state affairs.

Economic Development

In short, all three countries went through similar processes of state-building and secularization with limited differences. Modernization is, of course, more than nation-state-building and secularization. It also involves, to a great extent, economic change and development. Much like their state- and nation-building experience, the three countries also share several similarities in their economic development trajectories. The most important commonality among the three concerns the overall economic structure. Unlike their oil-rich neighbors in the region, all three countries lack rich natural resources that could create rentier effects and inhibit the modernization process.Footnote ¹⁴ With limited natural resources and motivated by the goal of economic independence, the ruling elite in these three cases pursued developmentalism under the guidance of the state. The state, in all three cases, undertook a major role in capital accumulation and industrialization, and invested heavily in human development through extensive undertakings in education and healthcare. Developmentalist policies and economic growth boosted urbanization and occupational specialization, while the state’s extensive role in social policies increased literacy rates and raised overall education levels for large segments of the population. Women, in particular, benefited from such programs.

Once these programs proved unsustainable due to high costs, the three countries switched to neoliberalization starting in the 1970s and 1980s, allowing for greater space for private initiative and enterprise. Still, the middle classes expanded and society has become more diverse in all three cases first under state-led developmentalism and later under the neoliberal economic model. Islamists also received their fair share of this expansion, as I will discuss shortly.

Most of these reforms were carried out in an autocratic fashion, as the nationalist elite in all three countries toppled monarchies to build secular developmentalist republics upon independence. Single-party rule marked the political system in all three countries in their early years. Their regime trajectories, however, later diverged. Turkey remained under single-party rule between 1923 and 1950, when it transitioned to multiparty politics with the first free and fair elections of the republican era. The Turkish state largely maintained its assertive secular outlook even after the transition to multiparty politics. Yet after 1950, religious networks in society recovered, thanks to the support of right-wing governments. The Turkish state, presumably the most secular of the three, also reconciled with Islam without changing the constitutional framework after 1980, when the military intervened and changed the official ideology of the state to the Turkish–Islamic synthesis.Footnote ¹⁵ The goal was to counter the growing appeal of leftist movements among the youth by raising conservative generations. As part of this new ideological frame, the military elite injected Islam into the education system and introduced mandatory religion courses for all students. The state also opened greater space for religious orders and organizations in different venues of life.Footnote ¹⁶

Egypt’s secular framework was also diluted following Nasser’s death in 1970. Anwar Sadat portrayed himself as the “believer president” to prop up his popularity among conservatives in a desire to counterbalance left-leaning Nasserists. Turning this discursive shift into institutional change, two constitutional amendments in 1971 and 1980 recognized Islamic law (sharia) as the principal source of legislation. The goal was to buttress regime legitimacy as its popularity started to decline with the demise of pan-Arabism. Such changes notwithstanding, the legislative and executive functions remained largely secular in practice as the Egyptian parliament followed secular norms in legislation.

Similarly, in Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba, who led the independence movement and the secularization of society, relaxed his assertive secularism in the 1970s and 1980s to counterbalance the power of the leftist opposition. The constitution remained intact, yet the regime allowed for greater visibility of Islam on college campuses and among the youth. Ben Ali, however, reversed this trend and brought Bourguiba’s early secularism back and largely limited the visibility of Islam in public space, privatizing religious sensibilities for all Tunisians in the 1990s and 2000s, a topic I will turn to in Chapter 5.

The Islamist movements studied in this book emerged in these national contexts. They not only reacted to top-down secularization but also benefited handsomely from economic modernization, as I will discuss shortly. The roots of these movements go back to the nineteenth-century trauma Muslim societies experienced in their visible decline vis-à-vis Europe. And Islamism largely revolved around the questions and existential crises raised by the processes of modernization and state/nation-building under an increasingly secular frame in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The division of the Muslim world into separate political units with clear borders and the end of the caliphate pushed those who wanted to maintain a greater role for Islam in public life to innovate and think about what role Islam could play in a modern nation-state.Footnote ¹⁷ The question of how to maintain an Islamic order in the age of modernity and secularization proved to be a crucial piece of the puzzle. In the end, all Islamists reacted to the top-down secularization of public life. For them, the emerging national identities had to be centered around religion. They thus advocated a return to the authentic identity of their societies whose essence was inextricable from Islam.Footnote ¹⁸ These movements also agreed that Islam was not only a religion but also a holistic system offering a panacea to societal ills.

The rise of an almighty institution – the modern state – with extensive control over society pushed several (but not all) Islamist groups to seek the capture of the state, through revolution, social reform, or elections. Some groups took an explicitly political direction as they sought to establish an Islamic polity. Others have taken a discursive and reformist turn to advance Islamic values at the societal level to form an Islamic society without initially altering the institutional structure. They sought the re-Islamization of their societies through grassroots activism and proselytization. Such social transformation would lead to the Islamization of decision-makers and the state cadres that would later transform the society in a more Islamic direction. These twin routes, political and social, later merged and became increasingly intertwined.

The three Islamist movements studied here grappled with the issue of political activism in a nation-state built around secular principles. The new sociopolitical context, which was the product of century-long modernization, imposed new realities on these movements. All three adapted to the modern state system and welcomed and benefited from the ruling elite’s greater accommodation of Islamic practices and identities in the public space after the 1970s. They discovered opportunities of expansion in social, political, and economic life, and published periodicals, cultivated intellectual circles, established strongholds on college campuses, and founded civil society organizations (CSOs) and charities, all while constructing Islamic parallel sectors in education, healthcare, social services, and business.

In all three cases, Islamist activists mostly come from middle-class backgrounds,Footnote ¹⁹ and they have received their fair share of benefits from economic growth and upward social mobility. Islamist movements, in Turkey and Egypt in particular, benefited from economic liberalization as they found opportunities to expand their economic activities through more inclusive institutions and reforms after the early 1980s. As I have explained elsewhere, these reforms facilitated the growth of an Islamic middle class in both Turkey and Egypt.Footnote ²⁰ This enrichment further empowered Islamic activism in these countries. Yet these movements also found the state’s growing accommodation of Islam insufficient. For them, Islam promised solutions to the social, economic, and political problems these countries faced, and to instate these solutions, they decided to take up and expand political activism.Footnote ²¹

Turkish Islamists mobilized largely under the banner of the Milli Görüş movement and established successive political parties, while the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt recovered from Nasser’s repression in the 1970s and merged their social and political activism on college campuses, through professional associations, as well in parliament. In Tunisia, Islamic activism on college campuses in the 1970s gave birth to the Islamic Tendency Movement (later rebranded Ennahda) that monopolized the terrain of political Islam in the 1980s.

Although the ruling elite in these countries sought Islam’s help to counterbalance the left and accrue legitimacy after the 1970s, they remained vigilant about Islamism. In that vein, all three states prohibited the establishment of religious parties while opening some space for Islamic activism punctuated by occasional repression.Footnote ²² The elites’ oscillation between accommodation and repression created a troubled relationship between Islamists and the state (i.e., the military, judiciary, and the ruling elite), as I will discuss later. Regardless, to varying degrees, Islamist movements have had opportunities for political participation in all three countries.Footnote ²³ Whenever given the chance, these Islamist movements adapted to electoral politics (and democracy) as the main frame within which they operated. They established political parties when they were allowed to or ran in elections as independents when they were not. Their goal was to bring Islam back into the political sphere, often through the existing institutional framework drawn by the secular modernist elite.

Indeed, scholars, myself included, argue that the growing middle-class base for Islamist movements has driven their growing commitments to democratic politics in the 1990s and 2000s.Footnote ²⁴ As argued by scholars such as Lipset and Friedman, economic development and modernization are closely associated with democracy; social changes brought by economic growth give birth to higher levels of education, urbanization, secularization, and specialization, often accepted as prerequisites of democracy. The expansion of the middle classes is also part and parcel of the presumed connection between economic development and democracy. In line with these explanations, the AKP started off with a strong prodemocratic agenda departing from the authoritarian tendencies of its predecessors. Similarly, both the Brotherhood and Ennahda embraced electoral mechanisms and civil liberties and called for free and fair elections in their countries. Echoing Nasr, it is safe to suggest that Islamists’ middle-class orientation, coupled with overall modernization in these countries, has contributed to their growing commitments to electoral politics.Footnote ²⁵

In short, modernization in all three states unfolded somewhat similarly as they shared the desire to build secular nations and modern economies, mostly in a top-down fashion, and molded Islamist movements into modern movements. In the end, in line with increasing modernization, Islamist movements socialized not only into the modern state system and economy but also modern electoral politics. Such similarities in their broader modernization experience notwithstanding, the three countries still exhibited some differences at the time of Islamists’ ascent to power. Twentieth-century reforms yielded somewhat differing levels of education, urbanization, income level, and religiosity in each country. Can these differences then shed light on the diverging trajectories of the three parties in power – AKP’s pivot from liberalism to electoralism, Brotherhood’s persistent electoralism, and Ennahda’s liberalism?

In terms of income levels, all three were lower-middle-income countries at the time Islamists came to power. When the AKP won the 2002 elections, Turkey was at the higher tail of lower-middle-income category with very high levels of urbanization and adult literacy (87 percent in 2004 as reported by the World Bank). In 2011, Tunisia had about the same and Egypt had slightly lower per capita income (still lower-middle-income), with Tunisia enjoying higher levels of urbanization and adult literacy (79 percent) compared to Egypt (43 percent; see Figure 2 for levels of urbanization and Figure 3 for economic development).

Figure 2 Urban population in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia (percentage)

Source: World Bank

Figure 3 Economic development in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia (GNI/capita in current US$)

Source: World Bank

While the Turkish economy had significant troubles in the 1990s, both Egypt and Tunisia registered substantial (albeit uneven) economic growth driven by neoliberal reform programs over the decade preceding the revolution. All three parties, however, faced economic challenges when they took over the government. After coming to power, the AKP rapidly stabilized the Turkish economy, registered sustained economic growth (as shown in Figures 2 and 3), as well as expansion in urbanization and adult literacy, reaching 96 percent in 2017.Footnote ²⁶ The country also enjoyed relative economic stability and lower levels of inflation until 2018, largely avoiding the ripple effects of the 2008 global financial crisis.Footnote ²⁷ Hence, the Turkish society got richer as well as more urbanized and educated under AKP rule (at least until 2018). The Brotherhood’s Morsi did not serve his full term, and the Egyptian economy remained in a crisis mode throughout his year in power. Ennahda had more time and opportunities to fix the Tunisian economy than the Brotherhood, but still, along with other actors, they failed to fix high unemployment and sluggish growth rates in Tunisia, increasing the vulnerability of the political system.

If modernization and a high level of economic development culminated in democratic preferences, then we would expect the AKP to exhibit the highest level of democratic commitment among the three, thanks to Turkey’s overall development and middle-class orientation of Islamists. Indeed, the AKP committed to liberal democracy in its first term in power, yet later pivoted to an increasingly majoritarian understanding of democracy amid increasing growth, economic development, and expanding education and urbanization. Such an unexpected turn culminating in democratic underperformance defied explanations connecting modernization and democratization, hence upending the basic premises of modernization theory.Footnote ²⁸ It is hard to decipher this dramatic pivot by macrostructural changes; what we need is a closer look at political actors, their political calculus, and intra-party dynamics, a topic I will turn to later in this chapter and in Chapter 3.

By a similar logic, Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia would then exhibit commitment to electoral democracy, again thanks to their middle-class status, but perhaps relatively weaker commitments to liberal norms due to the lower levels of economic development of these countries. Yet Tunisia and Egypt diverged significantly in their democratic transitions as Ennahda committed to liberal democracy and the Brotherhood pursued electoral democracy, despite coming from similar backgrounds. Tunisia overperformed given its relatively modest levels of urbanization, education, and economic development, largely, I argue, thanks to the dominance of liberal Islamists within the ranks of Ennahda. By way of contrast, one could suggest that Islamists in Egypt conformed to expectations with its lower levels of development and urbanization.Footnote ²⁹ These factors seem compelling when each country is studied individually. By comparative logic, however, structural conditions in these three cases fail to explain the differences in Islamists’ democratic commitments.

Sociopolitical Trends and Political Cleavages

A possible explanation for differences among the democratic commitments of Islamists in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt is that the extent of modernization had divergent impacts on sociopolitical trends in these three countries and shaped the political calculus of these actors. Often, analysts point to high levels of conservatism in Egypt to explain the Brotherhood’s actions in government. Similarly, they point to the secular and moderate nature of Tunisian society to elucidate Ennahda’s liberal commitments.Footnote ³⁰

Masoud, for instance, offers a compelling argument that connects antecedent socioeconomic conditions such as modernization to the balance of power among different actors and their ensuing strategies. He argues that Islamists were dominant in Egypt but not in Tunisia, thanks to the divergent levels of modernization of the two countries. In Egypt, religious associations dominated the relatively weak civil society, offering a great advantage to Islamists. The Tunisian society, Masoud contends, has been more modernized and had greater associational pluralism, thereby leveling the playing field between Islamists and non-Islamists. Because, Masoud suggests, dominant political actors have no reason to commit to democracy, the Brotherhood had weaker commitments to democracy than Ennahda in Tunisia.Footnote ³¹

The argument is quite compelling but only sheds partial light on the differences observed in Tunisia and Egypt and also fails to answer several questions posed in this book. Let us start with Tunisia. In contrast to observers’ depiction of the Tunisian society as relatively moderate and even secular, there existed strong societal support for a greater role for Islam in public affairs. A poll conducted in January 2014 (at the time when the draft constitution was ratified in the Constituent Assembly [CA]) reveals noteworthy trends: 50 percent of respondents believed that Islamic principles should be considered when making policy or law, and another 20 percent claimed that Islamic texts should form the foundations of making all policies and laws.Footnote ³² Another poll in 2011 showed that the support for secularism stood at 27 percent, while 65 percent of respondents envisioned a political system that was somewhat secular/religious or strongly religious.Footnote ³³ Although support for Islam in public life does not necessarily signify support for Islamists, as Masoud reminds us,Footnote ³⁴ the survey trends clearly showed that Tunisians also sought a greater Islamist presence in politics. In several polls conducted in 2011 and 2012, the average support for Islamist parties in politics hovered around 67 percent.Footnote ³⁵ In short, the majority of the Tunisian people desired a greater role for Islam in politics, and Islamism proved to be a dominant force in Tunisian politics in the wake of the revolution.

Despite such strong support for Islamic politics, liberal leaders of Ennahda refused to maximize political gains and dominate the transition. For instance, in the first elections after the revolution, Ennahda strongly supported a representative electoral system to ensure that the party did not dominate the new assembly (still, it won 42 percent of the seats thanks to its extensive popular support). Moreover, the party sustained its liberal, pluralist, and conciliatory political style even when they were confronted by different actors, despite strong objections from electoralists within the party, as I will discuss at length in Chapter 5. Indeed, several leaders in the party recognized the popular demand for a more assertive Islamist politics. Still, they stayed on a liberal democratic course and resisted polarizing the Tunisian society for partisan gains.Footnote ³⁶

What about Egypt? It is safe to claim that the Egyptian society was the most religiously conservative of the three. Yet this high level of religiosity did not directly translate into support for Islamism. In an Arab Barometer survey in 2011, although an overwhelming majority of respondents identified as religious or somewhat religious, 80 percent of them agreed that religion is a private matter that should be separated from political and social affairs. In the same survey, only 20 percent of respondents desired a system based on Islamic law without parties and elections; likewise, only 20 percent of respondents supported a system in which only Islamist parties could compete. A staggering 83 percent rejected the statement that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Along these lines, 73 percent stated that laws should follow the wishes of the people, and 80 percent said that laws should be in accordance with sharia.Footnote ³⁷

Similarly, in a Pew survey conducted in 2013, 74 percent of respondents in Egypt supported instating Islamic law as the law of the country (as opposed to 12 percent of respondents in Turkey and 56 percent of respondents in Tunisia).Footnote ³⁸ Yet such support did not mean wide-scale support for Islamism. In fact, despite high levels of support for sharia rule in Egypt, this support did not translate into electoral support for Mohammed Morsi in the 2012 presidential elections. He only received 25 percent of the votes in the first round (with a voter turnout of 46 percent), even though the Brotherhood had the strongest party machine in the country. A total of 75 percent of the electorate who turned out to vote cast their ballots for non-Islamist or liberal Islamist candidates. In the second round, Morsi secured a narrow victory which he owed to the fact that his rival was Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik. The narrow majority Morsi attained did not stem from Egyptians’ overwhelming Islamist tendencies, as some claim, but from the institutional and political context. Still, unlike Ennahda’s leaders, electoralists in the Brotherhood took this victory to mean widespread support for their ideological agenda, as I will show in Chapter 4. Owing more than half of his electoral support to the opposition, Morsi refused to compromise and intended to monopolize power at the expense of revolutionary forces. Liberal Brothers, in contrast, recognized the modest support for the Brotherhood and rejected the majoritarian tendencies of the electoralists.

In contrast, a greater role for Islam in politics has found scant support among the Turkish people. In a poll conducted in 2002, the year the AKP came to power, only 9.5 percent of respondents expressed support for the instatement of Islamic law. In 2006, four years into AKP’s first term in office, the support slightly increased to 15 percent, while the party’s vote share increased from 34 percent in 2002 to 47 percent in 2007.Footnote ³⁹ Still, support for turning Islamic law into the law of the land stood at a mere 12 percent in a Pew survey conducted in 2013.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet such limited support for Islamic law did not deter the AKP under Erdoğan’s leadership from polarizing society along secular–Islamic fault lines. Starting in its third term in power, the AKP pursued a gradual program of hegemonic Islamization, as I show in Chapter 3, despite the opposition of liberal voices within the party and from the strong secular civil society. The AKP, under electoralists’ leadership, translated its electoral dominance into a mandate for Islamization.

In short, the Tunisian society was not as “moderate” or secular as many argued, and the Turkish society was not as supportive of an Islamist agenda as Erdoğan portrayed it to be. Still, echoing Berman, both the AKP and Ennahda took initiative and attempted to mold the political scene to their liking, in favor of majoritarianism and polarization in the former, and for inclusion and liberalism in the latter.

Perhaps more importantly, these parties were not monoliths. Different factions within each party perceived their political reality differently. Despite its clear dominance in Tunisian politics, the leading faction in Ennahda, unlike the leading factions in the Brotherhood and the AKP, did not assume their electoral success to be a mandate for majority rule. They remained on a course of conciliation and compromise. The factions at the helm of the other two parties, in contrast, interpreted their electoral success (and weakness of the opposition) as no need for compromise.

The paths of the three parties diverged after the first elections that brought them to power. The AKP moved on to consolidate its dominance;Footnote ⁴¹ the military intervention ended the democratic transition in Egypt before a second election, while Ennahda suffered some electoral losses in 2014 and again in 2019. For many, Ennahda’s electoral decline stemmed from its conciliatory attitude throughout the transition and its growing distance from hegemonic Islamism, not the other way around.Footnote ⁴² Despite such losses, the party stayed on course, as I will show in Chapter 5. This is an outcome neither long-term modernization nor sociocultural trends can explain. This gap invites analyses beyond macrostructural narratives. A more accurate understanding requires, therefore, a closer look at actors, their individual experiences, the constraints and incentives they face, and how these affect Islamists’ behavior and ideology.

Explaining Islamist Change: Actors and Institutional Constraints

So far, I have outlined the long-term political and economic trends and how they informed Islamist politics. Now I turn to the impact of institutions that are presumed to induce action from political actors – in this case, Islamists – through a set of incentives and constraints. Can institutional constraints, for instance, explain why some Islamist parties commit to democracy while others do not? Can incentives and constraints provided by democratic inclusion and exclusion shape their democratic commitments?

In the extensive scholarly literature on the relationship between democratic inclusion and political moderation, scholars have spent considerable time unpacking what they call the “paradox of democracy,” that nondemocratic actors can come to power through free and fair elections and go on to subvert democracy. Many posited that the socializing effects of democracy, namely inclusion-moderation thesis and its variants, would appear in the transformative effects of the democratic game on political actors. One can identify two main branches of this thesis: institutional and ideational.Footnote ⁴³ First, I summarize the institutional variant of the thesis and discuss its application to Islamist movements. Then, I turn to the ideational variants of the thesis and its premises vis-à-vis Islamists’ democratic commitments for a critical assessment.

Inclusion–Moderation in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia

How do these theories apply to Islamist parties in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia? Can institutional constraints and incentives help us understand why Ennahda remained committed to democratic norms while the AKP and the Brotherhood did not? I now turn to this question to survey plausible explanations (and their shortcomings) for the divergent paths of the three Islamist parties (see Table 1 for a summary).

As I noted earlier, in all three countries, secular regimes set incentives for Islamist parties to play the electoral game while placing constraints on their Islamic agenda. That is, the regimes combined inclusion and threat of exclusion to socialize these parties. Before the onset of the uprisings in 2011, only Turkey among the three cases had established democratic institutions. That is how, despite its undemocratic secular practices and occasional military interventions, Turkey offered the greatest space for Islamist political participation upon the condition that they accepted the secular nature of the state. Turkish Islamists have actively participated in politics under the banner of legal parties since 1970, checked by the Constitutional Court for their secular credentials and shut down whenever they engaged in antisecular activities. The same provision indeed existed in Tunisia and Egypt, whereby Islamist movements enjoyed different levels of accommodation by these secular regimes. Tunisian Islamists had the opportunity to run in elections in the 1980s when the ruling elite experimented with top-down liberalization, only to face heavy repression under Ben Ali, who forced Ennahda into exile in the early 1990s. In Egypt, in contrast, Nasser heavily repressed and criminalized the Brotherhood in the 1960s, as I discussed earlier, while his successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak allowed the movement to participate in politics through controlled elections and civil associational life as independents while denying legal status to the movement. Waves of repression punctuated such accommodation, as thousands of Muslim Brothers were tried in military courts and imprisoned on a regular basis.

Several studies suggested that the threat of exclusion and incentives for inclusion pressured Islamists to moderate in Turkey in the late 1990s. The primary mechanism in the process entailed both strategic calculation and political learning.Footnote ⁹³ Once Islamists realized that challenging the secular nature of the state was not feasible (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3), they capitalized on the incentive to remain in the system.Footnote ⁹⁴ Turkish Islamism had experienced ideological change within the context of electoral incentives coupled with judicial sanctions in the late 1990s.Footnote ⁹⁵ The future leaders of the AKP learned the value of democracy in this process, the argument goes, as selective incentives for inclusion, combined with such sanctions, induced ideological transformation in Turkish Islamism.Footnote ⁹⁶

The Brothers in Egypt also enjoyed growing opportunities for inclusion in the system after Mubarak took over in 1981. The movement, denied legal party status because of its explicit Islamic character, still ran in elections with independent candidates and won seats in parliament. Such participation in formal politics allowed the movement to reach out to different parts of the society with limited political risks. However, as I noted before, the regime still occasionally cracked down on the Brotherhood. The combination of inclusion and the threat of exclusion, many suggested, pushed the movement toward a more democratic position and the Brotherhood raised the banner of political liberalization, free and fair elections, and respect for political freedoms in the 1990s and 2000s.Footnote ⁹⁷

The case of Ennahda differed somewhat from its counterparts in Turkey and Egypt. Islamists were very briefly included in the political system in the 1980s, and this inclusion was followed by a period of intense repression starting in the 1990s. Scholars attribute Ennahda’s ideological moderation to this intense exclusion. Cavatorta and Merone, for instance, highlight exclusion in the form of political and social marginalization under the Ben Ali regime as a driving factor of Nahdawis’ (as Ennahda members are called) ideological moderation.Footnote ⁹⁸ Likewise, for McCarthy, Ennahda’s democratization was a product of Nahdawis’ long-term political exclusion and their prison experience, which exposed them to long debates with leftists in prisons.Footnote ⁹⁹ Nugent agrees with McCarthy on the impact of repression. She finds that Ben Ali’s blanket repression of leftists and Islamists reduced the political distance between the two and facilitated their collaboration after the revolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Certainly, these experiences shaped the democratic attitudes of individual Islamists to a large degree. Many experimented with electoral practices, worked with their ideological rivals, and learned the value of democratic rights and norms. However, these lessons were not uniform across the movement, and significant differences have arisen within the ranks of Islamists. Some pursued democracy for strategic reasons and for its instrumental value, while others experienced ideological change and bridged Islamic norms with democratic ones. To what extent these norms were internalized within the movement was not clear until after the rise of the three parties to power, first in Turkey and then in Tunisia and Egypt. For instance, there was simply no way to know to what extent the democratic commitments were strategic and instrumental as opposed to ideological; to what extent these democratic commitments were internalized and the lessons were learned collectively; and to what extent individual experiences translated into group behavior. Many of these assertions were tested rigorously after these parties won elections.

If inclusion primed Islamist parties’ subsequent behavior toward greater commitment to democracy, then we would expect the AKP to be the most and Ennahda to be the least democratic of the three. After all, Turkish Islamists had the longest experience with multiparty politics and their Tunisian counterparts had the shortest. The experience of Egyptian Islamists under Mubarak’s electoral authoritarian regime fell somewhere in between. Sustained political participation in Turkey, however, has not secured Islamists’ long-term commitment to democracy. The earlier commitment to democratic norms was traded for majoritarian Islamism after 2011. This reversal raised several questions about the effect of democratic incentives and the learning curve of Islamists, as I will discuss in Chapter 3. Equally surprising, severe repression and exclusion of Islamists in Tunisia did not lead to a similar shift for Ennahda after their ascent to power. The party remained committed to liberal democracy throughout its term and refrained from instrumentalizing electoral politics in a majoritarian fashion. Despite operating in a lesser repressive environment than Ennahda, the Brotherhood opted for majoritarian Islamism after Morsi’s election as president. Clearly, inclusion had mixed results for long-lasting democratization in these cases, although it might have played a critical role in the internalization of electoral politics.

What about electoral and governance pressures? Could different levels of electoral strength, then, explain AKP’s and Brotherhood’s hegemonic turn and Ennahda’s democratic commitments? Has Ennahda stayed on the path of democracy because it was electorally weak? Masoud, for instance, argues that Islamists in Tunisia were forced to compromise and work with non-Islamists because they could not dominate the founding elections and the playing field was even. In contrast, he asserts, Islamists in Egypt dominated the founding elections, so they had no reason to commit to democracy.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In fact, all three parties were clear victors of the first elections that brought them to power. The AKP came to power with 34 percent of the votes, Ennahda received 37 percent, and Brotherhood’s FJP received 37 percent. (Morsi received 25 percent of the votes in the first round of presidential elections, as I discussed above.) All three proved to be the best organized political party in their countries with strong ties to the electorate through their local organizations, dominating their closest rivals in these elections. In fact, Ennahda’s success over its rivals was much more impressive compared to both the AKP and the Brotherhood, given the fact that the Tunisian electoral system favored smaller parties.

The translation of vote shares to seats in parliament has shown significant differences though. These vote shares yielded disproportionate power to the AKP in its first term with 66 percent of the seats, while Ennahda had 41 percent, and the FJP had 47 percent. The “relative weakness” of Ennahda in terms of seats, however, was its own doing. The party endorsed a perfectly representative electoral system in the founding elections, handing over seats to smaller parties so as not to dominate the CA. Both the AKP and the Brotherhood, in contrast, benefited from majoritarian institutions and electoral rules that inflated their electoral power and showed no intention to change these rules that favored them over their rivals. For Turkey, this was the 10 percent electoral threshold, which basically erased smaller parties from the political scene in favor of bigger parties; for Egypt, it was the presidential system, which culminated in a winner-takes-all logic instead of proportional representation and power-sharing.

Although Islamists under different party banners had a stronger showing in Egypt than the other two cases, such support was restricted to the parliamentary elections. The Brotherhood’s FJP and Salafi Nour Party together captured around 70 percent of the seats in the founding elections. Yet Egypt’s parliament, unlike in Turkey and Tunisia, was not the executive branch during the transition; it was the presidency. The Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi only received 25 percent of the votes in the first round and had a narrow victory in the second round, as I noted above. Indeed, veteran Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh told me in an interview that an accurate estimate of the Brotherhood’s electoral support would hover around 25 percent in free and fair elections. The first round of the presidential race affirmed his assessment. Indeed, people who voted for the Brotherhood in the parliamentary elections supported other candidates in the presidential race.

In short, early electoral differences among the three parties were not as pronounced and were partly the function of institutional differences and the parties’ deliberate choices. What about long-term electoral pressures and governance concerns? Here, the Turkish and Tunisian cases help us decipher the answer. For both cases, electoral and governance pressures fail to explain parties’ behavior. Of the three, only the AKP managed to win successive elections and establish political dominance.Footnote ¹⁰² In its first two terms, the party received these votes as a centrist party – and there were no incentives for it to pivot far-right. There were no powerful right-wing contenders on the Turkish political scene, nor was there any demand for an Islamic hegemonic agenda from society, as I discussed earlier. By way of contrast, Ennahda had incentives to shift to the right, as the party base demanded explicitly Islamic politics from the party leadership, which resisted this pressure. In the end, the party ended up losing votes in subsequent elections and some members left to join political coalitions with a hegemonic Islamic agenda.Footnote ¹⁰³ In short, accounts that underline electoral pressures as determinant of party behavior cannot explain the AKP’s pivot to hegemonic Islamism or Ennahda’s sustained commitments to liberal democracy. As we see in both cases, party leadership has determined the reaction of the party to electoral pressures.

Balance of Power Considerations and Political Strategies

The AKP’s recent turn to hegemonic Islamism and the Brotherhood’s clear majoritarian tendencies seem to challenge the inclusion-moderation and political learning theses, at least at the group level, and vindicate the thesis that the moderation was primarily strategic, as advanced by Hamid and others. These scholars argued that when there are no forces that keep Islamists in line, there is no reason for Islamists to follow democratic norms. Islamists’ sustained commitment to democracy, they implied, required external pressure on such parties because they are ultimately motivated by survival.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The argument implies that when such veto powers are weakened, that is, under competitive regimes, Islamists will monopolize power with the intention of Islamizing society. In short, exclusion can induce behavioral change, yet, for Hamid, this change is short-term, tactical, and cosmetic.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

That is partly why recent analyses concur on the impact of external f/actors on Islamist party trajectories, suggesting that interaction among different actors and their balance of power considerations dictate Islamists’ democratic commitments. One can identify several sources of external pressure from within and outside of a society, including the military establishment, the judiciary, civil society, popular protests, and regional and international politics, among others.

For instance, scholars have attributed the AKP’s transformation from a centrist party into a hegemonic Islamic party to the waning influence of the Turkish military and judiciary after 2010 and shallow ideological change among the ranks of the AKP.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These veto powers put pressure on the party in its first term to make sure the party complied with the secular republican principles entrenched in the constitution. Following the controversial presidential elections in 2007, the party chose to confront the veto powers and weaken them through legalistic measures. With the declining power of the secular establishment, the AKP could have very well stayed on a democratic course, yet it chose not to, hinting at leaders’ weak democratic commitments.

This account sheds some light on the political calculus of AKP leadership, but it remains incomplete and reductionist. For instance, it overlooks significant disagreements among the party ranks that arise in the wake of the party’s dominance. The argument attributes a singular strategy and homogenous ideology to the party, an empirically questionable assertion. As I show in Chapter 3, a split indeed occurred within the AKP in the wake of the decline of the secular establishment. While one faction took the new power matrix as a pass for hegemonic rule, others remained committed to pluralism. By unpacking the balance of power among different groups inside the party, Chapter 3 offers a more accurate account of AKP’s trajectory than existing accounts.

Similarly, the veto powers received their due credit in such analyses of Egypt for keeping the Muslim Brotherhood in check. Both the military and the judiciary, and later popular protests, put pressure on Brothers, who, however, chose to accommodate the military while confronting the judiciary and the protesters. None of the veto powers showed any sign of decline, and the judiciary signaled its willingness to balance the Brotherhood government. Morsi, however, defied the courts and undermined horizontal checks in the system in favor of the presidency. When protesters took to the streets to contest the legitimacy of his actions, Morsi chose to delegitimize and demonize them while polarizing Egyptian politics. For him, he had greater legitimacy than other actors in the system. Neither societal pressure nor the military’s or judiciary’s vetoes could deter Morsi from his strong attachment to electoralism.

By way of contrast, in Tunisia, there were no veto powers in the military or the judiciary. Instead, it was civil society along with protests that put pressure on Ennahda. Wolf, for instance, suggests that Ennahda’s leader, Rached Ghannouchi, strategically embraced nonviolence and developed the doctrine of Islamic democracy because of the pressure of the Tunisian civil society and the international community over the party.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Indeed, the wave of protests in July 2013 and pressure from the organized civil society challenged Ennahda. In response to this popular mobilization, unlike their counterparts in Turkey and Egypt, the leaders of Ennahda engaged with opposition leaders and CSOs for a peaceful resolution to the crisis instead of opting for polarization and demonization of their rivals. Unlike the Brotherhood in Egypt, Ennahda had no reason to fear a military takeover. The secular parties were far from posing a serious threat to the party. Besides, there was strong internal push within the party to dismiss protesters’ demands. Still, Ennahda leaders responded to external pressures with compromise, while the other two parties embraced confrontation and hegemonic politics.

This fact also raises doubts about the role of regional developments in shaping party trajectories. Some claim that the military intervention in Egypt against the Brotherhood left an imprint on Turkey and Tunisia, altering their threat perception and hence their behavior. However, as discussed above, neither party had a reason to fear a military intervention by the summer of 2013. The AKP had already sidelined the Turkish armed forces through political and judicial measures, thanks to its partner, the Gülen movement, which had been infiltrating the military and the judiciary since the 1980s. Besides, the AKP had already risen to hegemony in Turkey and had no reason to fear any backlash from the secular establishment. Similarly, the Tunisian military was weak and politically inactive, unlike the Egyptian armed forces. It posed no threat to Ennahda, and there was no viable autocratic alternative to Ben Ali’s regime.

One could extend the list of external f/actors to explain the divergent trajectory of Islamist parties in these three countries. Clearly, these factors have an impact on party behavior. Based on a retrospective reading of events, such arguments sound quite plausible. Yet these accounts are incomplete and often gravitate toward reductionism. First, they assume that Islamist parties are unitary and dismiss ideological and behavioral pluralism within these organizations. So they study group-level change at the surface level without accounting for internal processes and disagreements.

These accounts either assume that there is a singular homogenous ideology that defines party goals or that survival and maximization of partisan gains drive the behavior of Islamist parties. I assert, in light of the empirical evidence I will discuss in greater detail later, that there are a plethora of political objectives within Islamist parties. Partly due to their experiences and learning curves, some adhere to democratic norms and prioritize them over partisan goals. In contrast, other Islamists within the same party pursue the maximization of power by any means possible, often by instrumentalizing electoral politics. In short, the existing accounts preclude such ideological pluralism and identify any democratization as strategically motivated.

These accounts also present the strategy that a party adopts as the only rational strategy available to it. Given the plurality of the positions within each party, such explanations are not empirically accurate, since there might be multiple rational strategies.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Indeed, when faced with external pressures, significant internal disagreements have arisen within all three parties. Under the same set of constraints, different factions disagreed on what constituted the best strategy for their party. Each faction read the external pressures exerted by veto powers, popular protests, international actors, and regional developments in a different light. Liberal Islamists prioritized democracy-building over partisan gains, anchored their actions in international organizations and alliances, perceived the opposition as legitimate partners, and took protests and civil society seriously. Electoralists, in contrast, capitalized on their electoral mandates, dismissed external/international pressures as Islamophobic, delegitimized the opposition, and viewed popular protests and civil society activism as signs of the opposition’s electoral weakness. Each faction acted rationally to find the best strategy to fulfill their goals, given external constraints and their perception of the power balances. Depending on their preferences, ideas, and interests, they arrived at different conclusions. These different visions clashed within the party to produce a dominant strategy and charter the course of the organization. What scholars have depicted thus far as party strategy has been, in fact, the strategy of the dominant faction that happened to prevail in internal power struggles.

Such accounts based on external pressures hence suffer from hindsight bias. This leads to the rationalization of all choices made by actors after the fact, rendering these explanations unfalsifiable.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For instance, the AKP’s repressive measures against protests in the absence of the threat of a military takeover, the Brotherhood’s choice to confront the protesters despite the real threat of a counterrevolution, and Ennahda’s strategy to compromise with a much lower threat of a counterrevolution are all rationalized in hindsight by strategic calculations. These accounts obscure and dismiss competing strategies discussed within parties while presenting the strategy of the dominant alliance as the only rational strategy. As such, these accounts are partial at best, since they do not explore the full range of actions and strategies available to a party and why in the end one strategy prevails over the others. Without unpacking internal power dynamics, I argue, we cannot solve the puzzle of party behavior.

Conclusion

Islamist movements were born into modernity and have come to grips with the rise of nation-states, economic development, urbanization, secularization, and modern education. They have also socialized into electoral politics as structural changes created a sizable middle class among the ranks of Islamist movements, and the opportunity space created by ruling regimes expanded and offered incentives for inclusion while keeping the threat of exclusion real. These long-term structural factors and medium-term institutional factors transformed Islamists into actors willing to play the game of democracy. However, this long-term transformation has not generated a uniform perception of democratic politics among Islamists. Some internalized democratic norms and committed to pluralism, deliberation, and conciliation, while others perceived democracy to be a numbers’ game, where the winner took all and had a right to impose its ideological agenda in a hegemonic fashion. More recent accounts often fail to capture this diversity and assume that all Islamist parties are majoritarian in their orientation. They can commit to democracy only when counterbalanced by non-Islamist forces, be it secular parties and civil society, veto powers in the state, or regional and international actors. The reality is more complex and nuanced.

These accounts share a common shortcoming. They prioritize factors external to political parties – be it modernization, inclusion, and balance of power considerations – over internal factors. Such external forces certainly bear an impact on the behavior of Islamist parties. However, they do not dictate a particular behavior for these organizations. Individual Islamists react differently to the same external stimuli, draw different lessons from similar experiences, and develop different strategies under the same circumstances. Existing accounts overlook such differences and fail to explain how such individual experiences translate into party behavior. This chapter explains why without unpacking party organizations, we cannot shed light on how certain strategies, ideological positions, or political narratives win over others within the party apparatus. It is the internal struggle for power that shapes a party’s trajectory in office. The next chapter explains how.