Does the electoral success of religious parties pose a threat to civil liberties? This is an important and timely question. Focusing on Muslim-majority countries, Vineeta Yadav’s Religious Parties and the Politics of Civil Liberties proposes a thought-provoking answer: the effect of having religious parties in government depends on the ability of religious organizations (ROs) to operate as effective religious lobbies. Only when these ROs have sufficient resources to put pressure on governments are religious parties consistently willing and able to implement illiberal policy agendas. Yadav further proposes that the strength of ROs is itself a consequence of two prior causal factors: the presence of a sizable and concentrated Islamist bloc in the national legislature and a substantial inflation crisis.

This is an original and engaging argument, which the book presents in an effective and accessible manner. In the process, it weaves together insights from a remarkable range of research areas—from Islamist ideology and civil rights to interest group strategy and the political economy of inflation. The book is even more impressive in its empirical approach, which relies on an array of quantitative and qualitative methods, including sophisticated cross-national regression models, original surveys of political elites, and in-depth case studies. This is particularly notable given the dearth of methodologically sophisticated cross-national research on the causes and consequences of religious party success.

Laudably, the book takes seriously the organizational complexity of religious communities. Many large-N studies implicitly treat national religious communities as unitary actors by studying them only at the aggregate level. Disaggregating religious communities into component organizations that face different incentives and are often in competition with each other, as this book does, can reveal a much richer and more dynamic picture of religious politics in the Muslim world.

This approach is rare because rigorously measuring organizational strength cross-nationally is a daunting task. Here the book makes a series of potentially significant contributions. It defines ROs in Muslim-majority countries as nongovernmental, national-level groups, led by prominent figures, and founded to renew Islamic beliefs and practices. It then identifies ROs that fit these criteria in all 49 Muslim-majority countries and measures the extent of their socioeconomic institutionalization for every year between 1970 and 2016. It also identifies Islamist parties and measures both their seat concentration in national legislatures and their presence in governments on an annual basis during the same 46-year period. As Yadav notes, only Charles Kurzman and his coauthors (Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi, “Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” Journal of Democracy, 21 [2], 2010; Charles Kurzman and Didem Türkoğlu, “After the Arab Spring: Do Muslims Vote Islamic Now?” Journal of Democracy 26 [4], 2015) have previously produced a comprehensive list of Islamist parties, and no one to my knowledge has attempted to measure the cross-national distribution and strength of the kinds of ROs described here.

It is therefore unfortunate that the current edition of the book is missing appendices A.1-3, which list the observed Islamist parties and sources used to generate the scores for parties and organizations, and that there is no table providing summary descriptions of the key variables. One must glean what one can from tantalizing figures and lines of text. Based on those, the data seem to contain some surprising findings. For example, Figure 4.3 (p. 109), which describes the distribution of the Islamist seat concentration variable, suggests that virtually all country-years in the 49-country sample include Islamist parties and that they almost always secure a sizable share of legislative seats. However, because about half the countries listed in the sample have either no Islamist party or only niche organizations that typically fail to capture any seats, the scores for these countries are missing, which presents a rather distorted view of the distribution. Moreover, even in countries where Islamist parties have achieved some success, such as Jordan or Yemen, this success has typically been limited and sporadic, suggesting that the lower end of the seat concentration distribution should be more densely populated than the figure indicates. For the same reasons, the statement that “religious political parties joined and participated in about 34% of ruling coalitions in the sample” (p. 145) seems inconsistent with prior research on Islamist parties.

The book proposes that ROs have fixed institutional and policy interests that they will persistently pursue through partnerships with Islamist parties (pp. 39–55). The benefits of successful partnerships are persuasively presented, but what about the risks? After all, political parties are notoriously unreliable. Indeed, Yadav explicitly assumes that they are very likely to renege on their promises to religious partners for the sake of political expediency (p. 91), something RO leaders almost certainly realize as well. Moreover, political backstabbing, corruption scandals, and secularist reactions all threaten serious harm to ROs that become too entangled with political parties. The fate of Turkey’s Gülen movement, rebranded by its erstwhile party allies as the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization and brutally persecuted, looms large in this context. So does the dramatic suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after its party’s government was toppled in 2013. These are (or were) two of the most institutionalized and powerful ROs in the Muslim world. It seems counterintuitive that smaller, more vulnerable ROs would be as consistently eager to take on these risks for an unreliable payoff, as Yadav suggests.

Perhaps the risks of partisan entanglement appear manageable in the book because it argues that virtually all Islamist parties and organizations share a fundamental commitment to highly orthodox interpretations of sharia and sincerely seek its implementation through state policy (pp. 11–14). If so, then ROs can be confident that their partisan allies at least intend to implement their shared agenda. However, this is a contentious proposition that flattens out important differences among religious parties and organizations in the Muslim world. Although the book describes many instances in which different organizations and parties have advocated illiberal policies, it seems unnecessary to present them as indistinguishable in terms of their position on civil liberties.

This assumption of Islamist homogeneity has troublesome empirical consequences. When presenting the survey results of Turkey and Pakistan, the book consistently combines politicians from various parties under the labels “religious parties” and “non-religious parties” (pp. 185–88, 220–24, 247–49, 276–79), obscuring the scores of specific parties. In Turkey, half of the “religious parties” sample comes from a niche party (Saadet) that has never secured seats in the national legislature and that no one, to my knowledge, has considered anything but a hardline Islamist party. The other half comes from the AKP, a party that has governed Turkey for almost two decades and that plays the role of fallen icon in this book due to its once bright, but now much tarnished, image as a beacon of Muslim democracy. The relevant comparison would seem to be between the AKP and other major parties. Despite their shared origin, the AKP and Saadet may be apples and oranges, and aggregating them seems to stack the deck against those who argue that the former has moderated its stance on liberal rights.

Beyond the surveys, the detail and analytical rigor of the case studies are impressive. The chapters on Turkey and Pakistan exhibit a laser-like focus on the key independent and dependent variables and the causal processes that link them. The discussions of ROs’ shifting investments across sectors and the erosion of civil liberties over time are detailed and informative. The price of this focus is somewhat limited engagement with alternative arguments and causal pathways. For example, in the case of Turkey, I found no mention of the state’s embrace of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis ideology in the 1980s, a factor that Turkey specialists like Hakan Yavuz and Banu Eligür have considered critical to the subsequent development of political Islam in that country.

Overall, the paired comparison of Turkey and Pakistan works well. It sheds valuable light on key causal processes and raises fruitful questions. Most usefully, the paired narratives paint a rich picture of the relationships between Islamist ROs and political parties that significantly enhances, and inevitably complicates, the interpretation of the key interaction terms in the models. For example, the careful discussion of the specific policies pursued and implemented by Turkey’s Welfare Party before and after its period in government in 1996–97 shows that it faced significant constraints in implementing its policy agenda and was largely forced to make discreet and symbolic gestures, despite its sizable legislative delegation and the presence of strong ROs. In contrast, in Pakistan, where Islamist parties never obtained more than a tiny fraction of legislative seats and where ROs were less institutionalized than in Turkey, the Islamist policy agenda achieved much greater success than the model would seem to suggest, particularly in terms of bringing about restrictions in civil liberties that are unambiguously consistent with Islamist preferences. Another interesting contrast is that in Turkey the AKP seems to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to constraining civil liberties, with ROs playing a minor role, whereas in post-2008 Pakistan it is the tiny Islamist parties that are big players and the ROs that have effectively pushed for restrictions on civil rights. The empirical richness of the case studies therefore illustrates that the key interactions may work in fundamentally different ways in different cases.

In conclusion, Religious Parties and the Politics of Civil Liberties is an engaging and thought-provoking book that deploys an impressive array of methodological tools to study an important topic from a novel perspective. As such, it is a welcome addition to the growing literature on religious political parties.