Islam’s Electoral Disadvantage: Islamist Political Parties and Electoral Mobilization in Pakistan (1947-2024)

• In Event: Political Parties in Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Why are some ideologically motivated political parties unable to convert their success in social mobilization into electoral success at the national level? This paper develops and empirically tests a novel theory explaining the low electoral performance of some Islamist parties that are unable to transform themselves into mass electoral machines despite their success in social mobilization. It argues that the low electoral success of Islamist parties despite high levels of social mobilization is associated with their structural fragmentation that encompasses ideological and partisan pathways. This fragmentation constraints the ability of Islamist parties to reorient their electoral strategies by, for instance, changing party positions and impinges on their electoral success. Three key mechanisms through which this structural fragmentation operates are 1) a high level of fusion between ideology and partisanship for Islamist parties, 2) a high number of cleavages within the party system, and 3) a large size of the cleavage group. To adjudicate its claims, the paper analyzes the case of Pakistan, a country of 220 million where Islamist parties have never achieved electoral success at the national level in any fair election in the country's history. The paper constructs a unique dataset of Islamist mobilization, which includes the most comprehensive data on Pakistani elections for twelve election cycles (1970-2024), governmental and newspaper reports from 1940 onwards, and eleven months of fieldwork data, including semi-structured interviews and focus groups, to buttress its claims.

Author

• Muhammad Bilal Shakir, McGill University