The experience of citizen-led resistance and authoritarian collapse in Egypt has changed individuals’ views about their relationship to the state, their views toward democracy and autocracy, as well as their openness religiously–based political parties. This paper explores how religious values translate into political party support in Egyptian parliamentary elections. Egyptian voters are increasingly offered the choice not just to support an Islamist candidate, but to choose from a broad set of candidates espousing religious values as part of their political agenda. This paper will explore the spatial and socioeconomic bases of support for various types of Islamist political parties and candidates in Egypt. The paper will also examine the correlation between Islamist party support during the Mubarak era and Islamist candidate success in the 2011-12 elections as well as the empirical relationship between district-level political violence in the months following the Egyptian uprising and Islamist vote share in the parliamentary elections. The results of this project have implications for understanding the future of representative politics in Egypt and provide a deeper understanding of the politics of vote choice in Egypt’s more competitive electoral environment.

In the Constituent Assembly elections of October 2011, the first elections following the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, Ennahda won around forty percent of the popular vote. This electoral success has been attributed to a number of factors including the party’s superior organization and mobilization efforts, its social service provision, the party’s association with religion, its long-standing opposition to the previous regime, the weakness of competing parties, and its future vision for the country. Shortly before the election, the second wave of the Arab Barometer was carried out in Tunisia asking ordinary citizens questions about a range of political, social and economic issues including party support. This survey reveals that nearly twice as many Tunisians stated their intention to vote for Ennahda compared to the percentage that Ennahda was the party that best represented their own ideological views. Generally speaking, this suggests that half of Ennahda’s support was sincere while half was strategic in nature. This paper seeks to compare the difference in types of support for Ennahda to test these theories of the reasons for Ennahda’s success. Two key comparisons are made. First, what leads some ordinary citizens to support Ennahda relative to other parties? Second, what accounts for the difference in sincere and strategic support for Ennahda? Answering these questions can help to shed light on the factors accounting for this parties success and offer insight into the factors underlying the success of similar parties throughout the region.

The median number of seats won by Islamist political movements, parties, and associations in the 261 parliamentary elections held in Muslim-majority countries since 1970 is precisely zero. This might be surprising, given the attention scholars pay to Islamists’ electoral participation in prominent cases, such as Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Indonesia. While Islamists won at least one seat in 101 elections, they did not even participate in 146 others. This paper explores spatial and temporal variation in Islamist electoral participation and performance using an original dataset of all parliamentary elections held in Muslim-majority countries since 1970. I find that Islamist participation in elections varies dramatically by region. When Islamists do participate, however, their vote shares exhibit a remarkably similar trend over time. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Palestine, Iraq, Egypt after Mubarak), Islamists’ vote shares tend to increase from election to election until they stabilize around 11-20%. In countries with the most parliamentary elections since 1970 and where Islamists participate, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, Islamist vote shares oscillate around this stable level. I use these data and results to put electoral Islamism in the Arab world in a wider comparative context. Since few free elections have been held in Arab countries, it is difficult to assess how Islamist performance will change with democratization and if Islamists’ recent electoral successes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco are signs of wider regional or global trends. Using this unique global dataset, I explore related questions, such as: 1) Do Islamists perform better in free elections than in less free ones? 2) Do Islamists perform better after a democratic transition if they had participated in elections under authoritarianism? 3) Does the participation and performance of Islamist movements in one state affect the electoral prospects of similar movements in neighboring states? To better understand processes of change over time and identify factors that my “large-N” analysis may have ignored, I compare two Islamist movements that significantly expanded their vote share over time (Turkish and Egyptian Islamists) to those that did not (Indonesian and Bangladeshi). I conclude by drawing implications for Islamists in a more democratic Middle East.

This study examines the factors affecting Islamic political activism in Israel among Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel (API). In 1996, the Islamic movement in Israel split into the northern, “radical” branch led by Shaykh Ra’id Salah, and southern, “moderate” branch led by Shaykh Abdullah Nimr Darwish (the founder of the movement). Since the split, the movement as a whole has grown but attempts at reconciliation have failed. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reasons for the split as well as the constraints and motivations for reconciliation. More specially, I focus on how external events, such as the Intifada, Iraq War, and “Arab Spring”, have affected the prospects for cooperation and conflict between the movements. The findings will contribute to a broader understanding of Islamic movements that operate in different contexts.