After coming to power in 2002, the AKP in Turkey took the country on a roller coaster from democratic reforms to authoritarian retreat. Starting off as a “conservative democratic” party with liberal tendencies, the AKP pivoted back to majoritarianism over the years. This chapter aims to make sense of this drastic shift and offers an account of the AKP’s swing from liberalism to electoralism. It discusses the AKP’s origins, its trajectory in government, and how it has taken a hegemonic direction despite its branding in its inception as a conservative party with an explicitly democratic agenda. To explain this transformation, the chapter identifies major forces inside the AKP, their diverging understandings of democracy, and describes how one wing prevailed over the other to take the party into a majoritarian direction. A key part of this process involves the rise of a dominant coalition under Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership. His growing command over organizational resources weakened his rivals with more liberal democratic orientations. This chapter traces these processes and their political consequences for Turkish democracy, with specific focus on Erdoğan’s righteous majoritarianism.

This chapter synthesizes the similarities and differences among three Islamist parties – the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda – in power and shows how internal dynamics matter more in charting their democratic commitments than do external forces. The chapter then assesses how far this theory travels to other cases of Islamist parties and regimes like Iran and discusses the implications of these findings for the relationship among Islam, Islamism, and democracy. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the rise of right-wing populism elsewhere in the world and the role of party capture in fueling such authoritarian trends.

Only a few weeks after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, Ennahda returned to Tunisia from exile. The same year Ennahda won Tunisia’s first free and fair elections in its history. On the night of the election, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, vowed to uphold the revolutionary goals of building a free and prosperous Tunisia. And his party kept this promise to build Tunisian democracy with other stakeholders. Why did Ennahda adhere to democratic principles in power and became a force for compromise, deliberation, and engagement? This chapter shows that competing political visions have coexisted within the party organization since its establishment in the 1980s, and since the 1990s liberal Islamists pulled Ennahda towards democratic commitments not only when they were in opposition but also after coming to power in 2011. To explain this process, the chapter first turns to the origins of the Islamist movement in Tunisia and its political and ideological evolution over time including Ghannouchi’s philosophical contributions. Then it explores the shifting balance of power among factions and factors, determining this balance with a specific emphasis on organizational resources and implications for Tunisian democracy.

After 84 years of struggle, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence in Egyptian politics in the wake of the Arab uprisings. On the night of his election, Mohamed Morsi promised to unite all Egyptians – Muslim and Christians, men and women – and to advance the revolutionary cause for democracy, human rights, and dignity. Over the next 365 days, rather than uniting and democratizing his country, he alienated large segments of the population through exclusionary politics, majoritarianism, and polarization. Why did the Muslim Brotherhood follow majoritarian and polarizing politics after coming to power? This chapter seeks to solve this puzzle by way of unpacking the Brotherhood’s internal power dynamics and disagreements regarding democratic politics. To that end, the chapter begins with a short historical account, tracing the Brotherhood’s changing relationship to politics and emerging splits within. Then, it turns to the shifting power balance between the old guard and liberal Islamists, and how the former sidelined the latter. The chapter discusses three critical episodes in this process: the Wasat Party initiative of 1996, the 2009–10 internal elections, and the post-2011 purge of the liberals. It concludes with a discussion of what the old guard’s perception of democracy looks like in action with details from Morsi’s year in presidency.

This chapter unpacks internal dynamics of political parties and introduces a factional theory of party behavior. The central assertion is that political parties are factional coalitions with different perspectives on political issues. The aim herein is twofold. First, the chapter traces how individual preferences aggregate into group preferences in the form of factional politics. Second, it explores the conditions under which one faction prevails over others. This chapter thus offers a theory of coalition-building within political parties by identifying different types of incentive structures and organizational resources. Factions strive for control over such resources to capture and control the party. Once they form a dominant coalition, they align the party’s trajectory with their own worldview. This chapter builds on the existing studies of behavioral and ideological change to address the issue of aggregation and fill the gap in the literature. It concludes with a brief discussion of these dynamics in the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda.