Islam, Identity, and Elections

• In Event: The Future of Political Islam: Behavior and Ideology

Abstract

More than 70 years after the first Islamist party stood for legislative elections, scholars continue to try to understand why individuals support them. When a citizen casts a ballot for a party that promises to implement Allah’s law, is she indicating her assent to its identitarian ideological program; inferring honesty and trustworthiness from its politicians’ personal piety and use of religious symbols; or simply responding to the efficient distribution of goods and services for which these parties are renowned? The commonsense answer, of course, is that the factors that cause individuals to support Islamists vary across time and space. Nonetheless, certain systematic relationships likely exist between the attributes (socioeconomic, ascriptive, and attitudinal) of voters and those of politicians. Building on recent experimental work by Pepinsky et al (2012), Benstead et al (2015), and Grewal et al (2019), this paper explores these relationships with a series of large-scale survey experiments conducted in three Muslim-majority countries (Indonesia, Tunisia, and Jordan).

Authors

• Tarek E. Masoud, Harvard University

• Amaney Jamal, Princeton University