Imams and Businessmen: Islamist Service Provision in Turkey

• In Event: Business and the State in Developing Economies

Abstract

Islamist political movements are broadly known to win over citizen support through service provision. Yet, Islamist social service networks show substantial variation at the subnational level, which is often attributed to their strategic decisions or to low state capacity. We show that Islamist service provision is also highly dependent on the movement’s ability to mobilize local resources, specifically through associational mobilization by local business elites, while we establish no role for the level of state capacity. We exploit spatial variation in Islamist service provision across Turkey’s 971 districts in the country’s largest Islamist political group, the Gulen movement. Our inferences rely on multiple methods, including an instrumental variable design, which relies on the effect of state-induced associations during the early 20th century, and a panel data analysis. We use novel data on the Erdogan government’s purge of over 100,000 civil servants to map the structure of the Gulen movement, along with other novel data sources on business associations, endowments, banks, and public service infrastructure.

Authors

• Tugba Bozcaga, King's College London

• Fotini Christia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology