Conclusion

Summary

The role of religion in government and public policy constitutes a major challenge to governance in modern times. Religious parties tend to play the role of spoiler to democratization and democratic governance around the world. In Muslim-majority countries, this issue is compounded by the permissive religious institutional environment that religious parties operate within; Islamist parties capitalize on the absence of a centralized hierarchical religious authority and take on hybrid party-movement structures to claim to represent the faith. Governments, as a result, struggle to contain Islamist parties to the political sphere. Contemporary analyses of Islamist parties disproportionately focus on the factors behind their ideological change, social activism, and intraparty conflicts at the expense of their organizational structures, despite the latter’s great political and policy relevance. The Conclusion offers an overview of the debate surrounding Islamist organizational structures and offers multiple policy options for incentivizing organizational reform within Islamist parties, with the end goal of facilitating a process of ideological reform.