Democracy is in crisis. Increasing number of elected officials seek aggrandizement and prolonged power at the expense of democratic rules. From Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Victor Orban in Hungary and to Donald Trump in the US, aspiring autocrats have abused their executive power to unlevel the playing field. Although they are at the forefront of this concerted effort, autocrats rarely act alone. They rise on the back of their political parties. The BJP in India, Fidesz in Hungary, the AKP in Turkey, and the GOP in the US, for instance, provided the cadres, resources, manpower, and organizational capacity essential to electoral victories and political battles after the elections. So, what role do parties play in democracy’s current crisis? Parties played a critical role in this process. Rather than being the victims of their environments (Berman 1997), they defined, articulated, and aggregated interests, signaled what is important to their constituency, and shaped their worldviews (Iversen 1994). While some have chosen polarization, majoritarianism, and power maximization, others have chosen pluralism, compromise, and mutual tolerance. Why? In this paper, relying on 113 interviews with mid and high level leaders of three Islamist parties, the AKP, Ennahda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, I argue that the answer lies in intra-party dynamics. Political parties are no monoliths; they are a grand coalition of factions. Each faction has distinct political preferences, and all factions strive for dominance within the party organization. Access to organizational resources determine the fate of factional alliances. Those who control collective and selective incentives in the party organization also dominate the party, and its political trajectory. Depending on an autocrat’s ability to build and sustain a dominant alliance by co-opting other factions, a party may follow different trajectories. Neither personalist accounts nor group level explanations help us decipher the role parties play in democratic crises. A refined understanding of when a political party becomes an enabler of or an ultimate check on democratic backsliding requires a study of intra-party dynamics.