Tug of faith: Understanding the emergence and success of Islamic parties

Recent geopolitical fortunes have brought Islamic parties into sharp salience for the scientific, political, and diplomatic communities. Islamic parties have experienced varying and ill-explained levels of development and success across time and geographic region. Using historical and quantitative analyses, this dissertation examines the case of Pakistan to more accurately describe Islamic parties and account for variations in their formation and electoral success. While the broad distinction between Muslim Democratic from Islamist party types is a clear one, this study finds that the latter must be further divided into the Hierarchical and Network subtypes. Each of these forms of political party features distinctive characteristics of formation, organization, policy, elites, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Despite these differences, the parties share a formation process that reflects (1) organization of elites, (2) state legitimization, and (3) mass recruitment. Islamist parties hold significant advantages over Muslim Democratic parties in the recruitment phase because they offer lower entry stakes for entrepreneurs, are more broadly embedded in the electorate, exercise religious authority and affiliated message-delivery tools, and provide a combination of advancement, spiritual values and material goods. Despite these advantages, Muslim Democratic parties have proven to perform better than either subtype of Islamist party at broad levels of aggregation, largely because their more moderate postures are associated with better levels of incorporation into state machinery and in-group policing. However, Islamist groups fare better than Muslim Democrats at the local level because of the strategic voting patterns of an electorate strongly influenced by religious-sect affiliation. These factors are explicated and analyzed to arrive at a set of definitions and dynamics that differentiate these party types and their relative successes at achieving political power under various conditions. Implications of this study are both theoretical and applied.;"Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam." - Leon Trotsky1;1Trotsky, History of Russian Revolution, 1930...