The Face of the Party: Party Leadership Selection, and the Role of Family and Faith

Abstract

Political parties in developing country democracies are often characterized by undemocratic internal party practices, including for selecting party organizational leaders. Scholars identify institutional, party-level, and demographic factors as driving such practices. In this paper, we contribute to this research by considering the effect of two personal factors—personal religiosity and membership in a political family. Politicians act in accordance with personal values and strategic incentives. We argue religiosity influences both in ways that undermine support for democratic intra-party selection practices. We hypothesize that membership in a political family increases the undemocratic effects of high religiosity because it strengthens the capacity of highly religious dynasts to access and mobilize politically through religious and family networks. This strengthens their strategic independence from their party, leading them to support undemocratic leadership selection practices. We test this prediction for the case of Turkey using original data from a 2017 survey of 200 Turkish politicians. We find that religiosity is only associated with reduced support for democratic leadership selection practices among politicians who are members of political families. This result is robust to the inclusion of party-specific effects, religious party membership, and individual characteristics including support for political Islam.

Do Religious Politicians Take Risks Differently? Evidence From Pakistan

“…Furthermore, with the exception of the United States, Western democracies also have less religious populations than most developing democracies (Pew 2013(Pew , 2014 and most developing countries have religious parties that participate in politics with varying level of success (Yadav 2021;Maddeley 2011;Hagopian 2009). Religion is thus more politically salient in most developing country democracies.…”

“…More than 200 religious parties representing different sects in Islam have actively participated in politics over time (Chacko 2020). Such religious parties were explicitly founded to represent their specific religious communities, base their ideology on religious values, and promote policy agendas serving their own religious agendas (Chacko 2020;Yadav 2021). While religious parties have never won enough seats to form the federal government on their own, they frequently win enough seats to make them key players in forming ruling coalitions.…”

“…We would, therefore, expect that the presence and influence of religious parties likely attracted both highly religious and highly secular Pakistanis to become politicians. Since religious political parties are common in developing country democracies (Maddeley 2011;Yadav 2021;Hagopian 2009), this feature of Pakistani politics also resembles that of a typical developing country democracy allowing us to study our question of interest in a more typical case.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, no existing studies examine whether religiosity is systematically correlated with risk preferences among politicians. Yadav and Fidalgo (2021), Guth (2014), andPermoser (2014) study politicians' religiosity in 10 See, for example, Basedou 2018, Noussair et al 2013, Leon and Pfeffer 2013, Dohmen et al 2011 For example, see Norris andInglehart 2004:19-21, Pingle andMelkonyan 2012. Turkey, the United States, and Poland, respectively, and find it influences their intraparty behavior, legislative voting, and foreign policy positions, respectively, but do not examine risk. Sheffer et al (2018) and Linde and Vis (2017) study politicians risk preferences and find that Canadian, Belgian and Israeli, and Dutch are PT decision-makers but they do not examine risk's relationship with religiosity.…”

“…Pakistan has a highly religious population (Pew 2013;World Values Survey 2017), a party landscape that has always included both religious and nonreligious parties (Chacko 2020) and a plethora of politically influential religious organizations (Chacko 2020;Yadav 2021). Conflicting religious and secular visions of the Pakistani state and its society have been at the center of political debates, election campaigns, and legislative politics since Pakistan's independence in 1947 (Chacko 2020;Jalal 2017;Mufti, Shafqat, and Siddiqui 2020).…”