Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop virtually, via Zoom, on Wednesday, April 14 from 11:45am to 1:45pm. Dr. Sebnem Gumuscu will be presenting a draft of a chapter called “Determinants of Islamists’ Democratic Commitments.” The manuscript is attached and the abstract and Zoom call details are below.

Support your peers and engage in a lively discussion. Unfortunately, there is no free wine (but you may provide your own). Feel free to bring a bagged lunch, as it is that time of day!

To receive a copy of the paper, as well as a link to the event, kindly email gccomparative@gmail.com.

Abstract

Do structural changes and modernization transform authoritarian actors into committed democrats? Or is it institutions that tame 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 parties and democracy. Some observers have singled out Islamism as particularly anti-democratic, a claim, as I already detailed, empirically unsupported. Other scholars, in contrast, rejected this essentialist approach and studied the resemblance between Islamist movements and their Catholic or Socialist counterparts. None of these parties, these scholars asserted, carried an unchanging and anti-democratic essence, despite their shared desire to change the political system in line with their ideological outlook.  Instead, they suggested, socio-political context within which such parties operated shaped 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 pitfalls before advancing a complementary framework to unpack democratic trajectories of Islamist parties in the next chapter.

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