Islam and Party Politics

Abstract

Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties’ popular support. This chapter demonstrates that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and confer a political advantage only when voters are uncertain about parties’ economic policies. Using experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non-Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. This relationship is driven by the most pious Muslims. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non-Islamic parties, regardless of how pious they are. Islam’s political advantage is real, but circumscribed by parties’ economic platforms and voters’ knowledge of them.