Post-Islamist Political Parties As Agents Of Democratization In Muslim-Majority Countries

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the literature on democracy in Muslimmajority countries by exploring the attitudes and policies of post-Islamist political actors towards democracy and the conditions under which they contribute to democracy. It focuses on post-Islamist political parties as agents of democratization in Muslim-majority countries. It explores how post-Islamist transformation of former Islamist actors has affected the political trajectories of the AKP in Turkey and Ennahda in Tunisia as the parties were in governance, comparing two cases through cross-national comparisons combined with process-tracing. This thesis takes Turkey and Tunisia and two political parties, AKP and Nahda, as two different but comparable examples. In addition to agency-based factors such as discourses, policies, intra-party relations and interactions with other parties, exogenous factors, that is, domestic and international constraints on the post-Islamist actors, and their responses to these constraints are also included in the analysis. The thesis argues that both countries have experienced democratic reversals, led or contributed to by post-Islamist parties, albeit in entirely different ways, and that the post-Islamist transformation of former Islamist actors is necessary but not sufficient to sustain a democracy. It also shows that post-Islamism is an interactive category, affected from the governance processes of these parties.