Content area
Full text
The general rise in the power and popularity of Islamist parties across the Muslim world-as exemplified by the impressive showing of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates in Egypt's 2005 legislative balloting, Hamas's triumph in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, and Hezbollah's political successes in Lebanon-has lent fresh interest and urgency to the old question of how revolutionary or "antisystem" movements respond when they take part in democratic procedures and institutions.1
A pair of clashing views dominates the debate. Pessimists argue that such movements' own revolutionary natures will drive their leaders to use any power they may gain at the ballot box to subvert or attack the system to whose destruction or transformation they are sworn. Many contemporary Middle Eastern despots use precisely this argument to justify their continued grip on power, claiming that giving political opportunities to Islamists can only lead to terrible consequences both at home and abroad. In 1992, for example, the Algerian government invoked this logic while abrogating an electoral process that the radical Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was about to win, and Washington and Paris were sympathetic to the move. As Edward Djerejian, then U.S. assistant secretary of state, put it, the United States favored democratization but did not support groups that were committed to "one person, one vote, one time."2
In contrast to this, optimists believe that a group's ostensibly radical nature is less important than the political context in which it operates, and that participation in democratic institutions and processes can turn extremists into moderates. Although the precise means by which this moderation is supposed to occur are often left unspecified, the optimists seem to believe that three basic dynamics will take hold.
The first dynamic is one that we might call "Downsian" (after the economist Anthony Downs) and involves electoral incentives.3 According to Downs's median-voter model, once parties commit to playing the electoral game, they find themselves forced to attract a majority or at least a plurality of voters, depending on the type of electoral system. Since it is very difficult to attract enough support with narrowly targeted extremist or sectarian appeals, over time the competition for votes will force revolutionary parties to jettison radical positions and adopt broader, more centrist platforms capable of attracting support outside their original core...