How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties – the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege – recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under siege.

Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy

This article suggests that 2017 has been a year of distinctive democratic setbacks in Indonesia. It offers a tentative framework that explains how democratic regression is likely to continue by virtue of the further mainstreaming of conservative Islamic morality and reactionary hyper-nationalism in Indonesian political discourse and practice. It contends that such mainstreaming has been a growing feature of intraoligarchic competition in Indonesia, the effect of which is to accentuate longstanding illiberal features within Indonesian democracy. While the article focuses on the conflicts surrounding the highly polarising and emotive Jakarta gubernatorial election of 2017 in order to expand on this framework, other controversies are also discussed, including those regarding corruption eradication and continuing impediments to a national ‘reconciliation’ with former Indonesian communists. Developments in Indonesia are set against a global background characterised by growing threats to liberal democracy and t...

Indonesia’s Year of Democratic Setbacks: Towards a New Phase of Deepening Illiberalism?

This research theorises militant groups' meso-level evolution from their emergence to their potential non-violent transformation. The central argument of this thesis is that the timing of militant groups' adoption of violence in semi-authoritarian regimes is crucial in accounting for their subsequent ideational and organisational evolution, according to a path-dependent model. When a militant group predates its legitimisation of armed violence, the time period preceding the latter encourages low-risk activism mobilising patterns, which are defined as safer modes of mobilisation that are not directly opposed by the state and therefore do not entail high individual costs. These mobilizing patterns facilitate the creation of strong horizontal ties between the group's leaders and the development of collective group identity shared by its leaders and members. These three factors collectively ease the internal legitimisation of shared horizontal and vertical organisational norms, which respectively refer to the norms uniting the leaders of the group and the norms uniting the leaders to their followers. Theses norms include the normalisation of the prerogatives of the group's leadership, an internal culture of consensus and shared decision making processes. These factors subsequently shape the group's evolution, whose possible non-violent transformation becomes contingent on the ability of its leadership to exploit external macro stimuli or internal learning processes, and to draw on the group's collective identity to internally legitimise a new strategic direction. Conversely, the second type of militant group is defined by its members' immediate engagement in high-risk activism forms of mobilisation, defined by their high individual cost caused by their intrinsically violent nature (e.g. staging a military coup). The combination of early ideational justifications of violence and its associated mobilising patterns fuel internal factionalism and hinder the legitimisation of internal norms of decision making and the consolidation of a controlled collective group identity. This mobilising pattern often sparks splits over any new tactical and strategic issues which may arise overtime, and eventually impedes the successful consensual transformation of this type of group in changing macro circumstances. This theorisation of militant groups' evolution is applied to the Egyptian Islamic and Jihad Groups. This thesis is based on a social movement theory framework. It is a qualitative small-n comparative case-study research using field research and interviews with numerous leaders and members of these two groups.

Theorising militant groups' meso-level evolution : a comparative study of the Egyptian Islamic and Jihad groups

Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000 subdistricts. A multilevel analysis shows that Muslim Brotherhood branches were more likely in subdistricts connected to the railway and where literacy was higher. Branches were less likely in districts with large European populations, and where state administration was more extensive. Qualitative evidence also points to the railway as key to the movement’s propagation. These findings challenge the orthodoxy that contact between Muslims and the West spurred the growth of organized political Islam, and instead highlight the critical role of economic and state infrastructure in patterning the early contexts of Islamist activism.

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Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam

Hard-to-survey populations

COUNTING ISLAM: RELIGION, CLASS, AND ELECTIONS IN EGYPT Tarek Masoud New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (xxii + 276 pages, bibliography, index) $3499 (paper)In Counting Islam, Tarek Masoud asks how Islamists have performed in Egyptian electoral politics, both under authoritarianism and in their sweeping victories in the democratic elections that followed the overthrow of Husni Mubarak in 2011 In particular, he hopes to solve the puzzle of why impoverished Egyptians chose the economically conservative party of the Muslim Brotherhood over leftists with redistributive politics Masoud challenges two prevailing perspectives on Islamist popularity Ideational approaches consider the discursive advantage Islamists have among Muslim constituents, but neglect variation in their electoral success and tend to essentialize Islam Materialist approaches have theorized about Islamists' abilities in service provision and superior organization and discipline Masoud's approach fits best with that of the materialists, but he seeks to improve upon their lack of empirical evidence and their failure to account for the trajectories of Islamists' leftist opponents Islamists, he argues, have a critical resource advantage: they are "embedded" in the religious institutions that predominate Egypt's "associational landscape" and facilitate communication with voters Leftists, in contrast, are not well organized into unions or other collectives; economic underdevelopment-poverty, limited industrialization, and an extensive informal sector-has marginalized their role in the civic sphere Thus, economic structures shape social and political institutions through which parties communicate with voters; rational voters, in turn, choose the parties they perceive to be materially rewarding In Masoud's explanation of the trajectories of parties from across the Egyptian political spectrum, underdevelopment and materialism trump popular religiosity and ideasMasoud demonstrates this argument first by looking at elections under the authoritarian National Democratic Party (NDP), which used state resources to win and maintain the support of the mass of poor voters That is, the left's otherwise natural constituency was choosing immediate material interests over ideology-as evidenced in the relationship between illiteracy and NDP support, for instance The regime also designed electoral institutions that disadvantaged leftists and other opposition groups, notably the "winner-takes-all" open nomination system that favored independent candidates over organized partiesOne of the book's primary objectives is to establish that, in this context, the Brotherhood developed a middle-class constituency The Brotherhood was never the party of the poor Masoud's creativity in measurement is on full display in these passages He uses original data at the electoral and administrative district level to show that the Muslim Brotherhood was more likely to field candidates in affluent areas He uses the staggering number of its web pages and the extent of Internet searches for the Brotherhood as indicators of the high education and income levels of its activists and supporters The cleverest measure appears in a test of the group's historical mobilization among the middle classes Lacking even indirect indicators of socioeconomic status from the 1930s, Masoud uses the rate of blindness (usually brought on by impoverished living conditions) as a proxy for poverty, revealing that more blindness was related to the absence of Brotherhood branches in districts across the countryTurning to the post-uprising democratic setting, Masoud asks the critical question of why poor voters chose this conservative and rightist group The left had gained prominence during the revolution, the slogan of which was "bread, freedom, and social justice!" Public opinion polls indicated that the majority of Egyptians prioritized the economy on the eve of the 2011 elections …

Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt

Survey research can generate knowledge that is central to the study of collective action, public opinion, and political participation. Unfortunately, many populations—from undocumented migrants to right-wing activists and oligarchs—are hidden, lack sampling frames, or are otherwise hard to survey. An approach to hard-to-survey populations commonly taken by researchers in other disciplines is largely missing from the toolbox of political science methods: respondent-driven sampling (RDS). By leveraging relations of trust, RDS accesses hard-to-survey populations; it also promotes representativeness, systematizes data collection, and, notably, supports population inference. In approximating probability sampling, RDS makes strong assumptions. Yet if strengthened by an integrative multimethod research design, it can shed light on otherwise concealed—and critical—political preferences and behaviors among many populations of interest. Through describing one of the first applications of RDS in political science, this article provides empirically grounded guidance via a study of activist refugees from Syria. Refugees are prototypical hard-to-survey populations, and mobilized ones are even more so; yet the study demonstrates that RDS can provide a systematic and representative account of a vulnerable population engaged in major political phenomena.

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Rana B. Khoury

Papers

Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt

Hard-to-Survey Populations and Respondent-Driven Sampling: Expanding the Political Science Toolbox

As Ohio Goes

As Ohio Goes: Life in the Post-Recession Nation