Party Politics | 2019
Book review: Voting in Old and New Democracies
Abstract
the MB and the Wasat party with respect to their respective perception of Islam, democracy, economic liberalization and social policy – backed by interview data the author provides. He suggests that Islamist MB is more attuned to peripheral interests than its Muslim democratic counterpart, and therefore enjoys greater popular support from the periphery. To support this claim, Yıldırım draws upon extensive interviews he conducted with SME and big business owners providing a detailed account of these actors and their preferences, yet it also suffers from a number of shortcomings. First, Yıldırım infers, and does not prove, that SMEs are politically and economically distant to the Wasat Party, whose socio-economic policies seems to show greater overlap with interests of the peripheral businessmen than Yıldırım is willing to acknowledge. Second, Yıldırım avoids discussing the preferences of peripheral masses, which is critical for electoral success or lack thereof for each party. Third, Yıldırım insists that Wasat’s socioeconomic policies are key in explaining its relative unpopularity within the periphery and omits a comprehensive discussion of factors such as the MB’s almost 90 year-old organizational networks, extensive financial resources, expansive charities and the benefits the MB accrue from its da’wa (Islamic missionary) activities as potential alternative explanations as to why the MB prevails over the Wasat party. Finally, Yıldırım reasserts the primacy of socioe-conomic factors over institutions in explaining the MB’s immoderate stance in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Although his critique of the inclusion-moderation hypothesis is well-taken, the fact that he does not bring up long-standing institutional weaknesses of Egyptian politics, as he did in his discussion of the AKP’s authoritarian turn in Chapter 3, is puzzling. In Chapter 5, Yıldırım provides an analysis of the centre–periphery cleavage, the evolution of Islamists and MDPs and peripheral businesses’ view on democracy, economic liberalization and Islam in Morocco. A central tenet of the chapter is that the peripheral constituency in Morocco is divided in their support for the Muslim democratic Justice and Development Party (PJD) and Islamist Al-Adl wal-Ihsan (AWI). Yıldırım explains this outcome by semicompetitive nature of economic liberalization, which benefited some peripheral actors while hurting others. The split between peripheral businessmen and masses become particularly important in the case of Morocco in explaining the inability of the PJD in dominating the peripheral constituency. Unfortunately, Yıldırım does not provide a detailed analysis of the peripheral masses and why their political preferences align with Islamist AWI instead of MD PJD. Overall, Yıldırım’s book offers an analysis of a phenomenon – the rise and viability of MDPs – of critical importance. The much discussed question of the compatibility of Islam and democracy ultimately rests on the experience of MDPs and the factors that empower them. As such, readers will benefit from such a book length treatment of MDPs with multi-country analysis, although students of Turkish politics will find the volume’s contribution with respect to the rise and fall of Muslim democracy in Turkey quite limited. They would benefit from a detailed treatment of the same phenomenon in Egypt and Morocco.