Challenging dominant parties issue ownership a study of the religious parties the BJP and the PAS

Chapter 1

Introduction
Research Question
In this thesis I explore the following question – why do some religious political
parties emerge to form democratically elected governments in some democracies, while
others fail to do so? This is an important question because in recent decades, religion
has undergone a form of revivalism or renaissance which has seen it figure rather
prominently in various guises in the politics of many states. The so-called return of
religion to the public domain is exemplified by momentous events like the 1979 Iranian
Revolution and the prominent role of Pope John Paul II in bringing down the ‘Iron
Curtain’ across Europe, amongst others things. Religion has undergone a renaissance
because secular nationalism in the postcolonial era has simply failed to make good on
its promises of economic modernisation, material well-being and social justice for all. At
the same time, secular nationalism has been blamed as the cause of moral decadence
and the widespread rise of social ‘evils’ at the societal level.1
Religious activists and leaders have therefore aggressively promoted religion as
the panacea for the apparent failures of secular nationalism. Religion can hold great
appeal across a wide section of society because the ends that it pursues are
transcendent and all-encompassing, and religion is considered the guarantor of
1

Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 21-23.
1


orderliness in a world that has already experienced great dislocation and chaos
resulting from the excesses of the modernisation project.2 Religious ideals and precepts
of various guises and forms have therefore permeated politics at the governmental
level, in civil society, and even at the inter-state level.

This thesis focuses on religious political parties – entities that are clear and
tangible manifestations of how religion has become very much part of the political
landscape in many states. But even as religion has conspicuously stamped its mark in
the politics of many states worldwide, religious political parties per se have not made
much headway in elections on the whole. Only very few have actually won them, and
amongst these not all have formed the government. Examples of religious political
parties that have come to power democratically through elections in recent years
include the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) in
Turkey, and the Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP) in India. The
Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS) won the 1991 elections in
Algeria, but the results were invalidated and the FIS was outlawed by the army,
plunging Algeria into years of civil war thereafter. In the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ in the
Arab world, several Islamist parties have also come to power as well, like the Ennahda
in Tunisia and the Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt. On the other hand, many others
have floundered or have not achieved similar levels of success.
This thesis focuses specifically on non-anti-systemic religious political parties that
operate in political systems where a dominant political party is experiencing a crisis or a
2

Ibid., 24; 32
2


decline in its dominance. The time periods in which a dominant political party that is
clearly identified with secular nationalism and the modernisation project is experiencing
an erosion of its dominance provide us with the ideal political and social milieu that
religious political parties can take advantage of. And yet, in spite of the dominant party’s
decline, there is marked variation in how successful religious parties have been in
taking advantage of such favourable circumstances. Why has this been so?
Main Argument

To explain this puzzle, I draw my explanation from the literature on issue
ownership. I begin with the basic premise that forming the government is the undeniable
and intrinsic aim of all religious political parties. Therefore, they must present
themselves as a credible party that is ready to take up the mantle of governance and
leadership. Since elections are the only legitimate means of coming to power in
democracies, it is in the electoral arena where the religious party’s display of credibility
as a governing alternative should be witnessed. The party’s strategies and tactics
during the electoral campaigning period is therefore extremely crucial in influencing its
chances of winning the elections to place it in a good stead to form the government.
I argue that religious parties must successfully display credible issue ownership
over what I label as ‘national-temporal’ issues in elections. This is crucial for two simple
reasons. Firstly, emphasising religious issues that are typically within the domain of the
religious parties will not increase their electoral chances. Religious issues only resonate
with the party’s constituents, who most likely comprise a small segment of the
electorate. Without winning the support of a larger segment of the electorate, the party
3


cannot claim to be representative of a wider section of society. In some cases,
emphasising religious issues might even backfire as an electoral tactic. Secondly, it is
precisely the ownership of these national-temporal issues that have enabled the
dominant party to have formed the government in the first place. Even if the dominant
party did not depend on the ownership of such issues to come to power in the first
place, at the very least it is its ownership over these issues that has helped the party to
prolong and entrench its dominance. It follows that if the religious party then wants to
contest for governmental power by displaying itself as a credible governing alternative, it
has to wrest away or ‘steal’ the ownership of such issues from the dominant party. In
the following chapter I lay out the explanatory framework in further detail to illustrate
how religious parties can hijack the ownership over these ‘national-temporal’ issues.
At this juncture I would like to distinguish between emphasising and aiming to

own national-temporal issues, and the concept of party moderation or the inclusionmoderation hypothesis. Political party moderation involves the rejection of radicalism
and the pacification of strategies by adopting measures that are conciliatory,
cooperative and less confrontational. A party can either go through behavioural or
ideological moderation, or even both.3 The inclusion-moderation hypothesis, which
refers more to Islamist political parties, describes ‘the idea that political groups and
individuals may become more moderate as a result of their inclusion in pluralist political

3

See Günes Murat Tezcür, “The Moderation Theory Revisited: The Case of Islamic Political Actors,” Party Politics
16, no. 1 (2010): 69-88.
4


processes.’4 Discarding religious issues and trumpeting national-temporal issues might
be akin to going through party moderation, conditioned by its inclusion in the democratic
processes of contestation for political power. However, in the process of elaborating my
theoretical framework by no means do I suggest that religious political parties indeed go
through a process of moderation. A party might still be considered ‘radical’ in the sense
that it might still hold dear to its agenda of wanting to enforce a moral order upon
society, but at the same time it might consciously project a ‘moderate’ image during
elections by highlighting and campaigning on issues that are irreligious in nature. How
does one reconcile those two seemingly contradictory ‘faces’ of a religious political
party? In this paper I avoid discussing and making claims about the ‘moderateness’ or
‘radicalness’ of a religious party at any point in time. This subject matter is not the
central concern of this thesis.
I also want to underline that issue ownership is not the only factor that influences
the chances of a religious party in making a successful claim for governmental power.
There are many other factors at play as well, which include successful coalition-building
strategies, the strength of party organisation, the party’s ability to mobilise effectively,

the financial strength of the parties, its links with civil society actors, and many others.
Without dismissing the importance and relevance of these key factors, this thesis aims
to highlight a largely underspecified and under-researched yet vital aspect of electoral
politics that concerns the nature of the political and strategic ‘talk’ employed by religious

4

Jillian Schwedler, “Can Islamists Become Moderates? Rethinking the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis,” World
Politics 63, no. 2 (2011): 348; see also Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in
the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 205-228; Jillian Schwedler, Faith in
Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-34.
5


parties in electoral campaigns. I argue that this is an underrated yet critical factor that
influences the chances of success at the ballot box for a religious party, and this thesis
aims at advancing this aspect of electoral politics in a theoretical and systematic
fashion.
Both the theoretical and analytical components presented in this thesis are
restricted only to the point where religious political parties can defeat the dominant party
in elections and become the party of government. How they will deal with the
commitment problem of actually implementing any of their policies or even their
religious agenda once they come to power is beyond the scope of this paper. 5 Since I
am only interested in how the religious party competes against the dominant party from
the perspective of issue ownership, the focus of this thesis will only be limited to the
paths and strategies adopted during the period of electoral campaigning as part of their
aim in winning elections and governmental power, and no further than that.
Case Selection
I concentrate on cases where a religious party is contesting an election in which
the dominant party is either in decline or facing an extended period of crisis. The

dominant party is therefore not as dominant as before, and so this provides a window of
opportunity for the religious party to stake a credible claim for governmental power. I
select two cases (n=2) based on the paired comparison approach6 to demonstrate my
5

See Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Religious Parties,”
Comparative Politics 32, no. 4 (2000): 379-398.
6

Sidney Tarrow, “The Strategy of Paired Comparison: Toward a Theory of Practice,” Comparative Political Studies
43, no. 2 (2010): 230-259.
6


theoretical framework. I choose to focus on two cases instead of only one because a
paired comparison approach allows the researcher to match the known confounding
variables between the two cases, although admittedly the limited number of cases
makes it difficult to control for a larger number of such variables.7 Analysing two cases
also ‘reduces the possibility that a supposed determining variable is as critical as it
might seem from a single-case study alone.’8 I also do not go beyond two cases as the
paired comparison approach ‘offers a balanced combination of descriptive depth and
analytical challenge that progressively declines as more cases are added’ and ‘as we
increase the number of cases… the leverage afforded by paired comparison becomes
weaker, because the number of unmeasured variables increases.’9 Of course, the
paired comparison approach is not without its own shortcomings and limitations.
However, for the purposes of outlining the causal process involved in the theoretical
framework of this thesis, adopting a paired comparison approach is sufficient to that
end.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India constitutes the first and the ‘success’
case for this thesis. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party that was established in 1980,

but the party traces its roots to its predecessor party, the Indian People’s Organisation
(Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or BJS), founded in 1951. As with the BJP today, the BJS was
regarded as the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer
Organisation, or RSS), which is essentially a paramilitary organisation established in
7

Ibid., 244.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid., 246.
7


1925 whose ideology revolves around Hindu nationalism.10 For the 1977 general
elections, the BJS, together with other opposition parties, merged to form the Janata
Party as part of a concerted effort to unite against the Indira Gandhi-led Indian National
Congress (the Congress Party, or simply the Congress) in the aftermath of Emergency
Rule in India (1975-1977). The Janata Party managed to defeat the Congress Party in
the 1977 elections, but party factionalism precipitated its eventual downfall in 1980. 11 In
the wake of the electoral humiliation that the Janata Party suffered in 1980, the BJS
faction left the party to found the BJP. Since then, the BJP has continually contested
subsequent elections, finally winning for the first time in 1996. In that year the BJP won
161 seats to emerge as the largest party in parliament. However, the BJP government
resigned after only thirteen days in power because its leadership knew it would not
survive an impending vote of confidence due to a lack of support from other political

parties. In 1998 there was a snap election which the party again won, but this time
round it managed to form a government that survived a vote of confidence even though
it eventually lasted a little over a year. This precipitated the 1999 elections which the
BJP won yet again, and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government
managed to last its full term through to 2004 before it lost in the elections that year.
Technically speaking, the BJP was therefore in power for six years between 1998 and
2004. In this thesis I focus on the BJP’s electoral campaign in the 1998 General

10

Manjeet S. Pardesi and Jennifer L. Oetken, “Secularism, Democracy, and Hindu Nationalism in India,” Asian
Security 4, no. 1 (2008): 25-26.
11

For details on the Janata Party interregnum between 1977 and 1980, see Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 159-177.
8


Elections as that year marks the start of the six years that the party was in power. I
argue that in 1998 the BJP was successful in wresting away ownership over the issue of
economic reforms from the erstwhile dominant Congress Party.
In contrast, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or PAS) of
Malaysia constitutes the second and the ‘failure’ case for this thesis. The PAS was
established in 1951, the same year of founding as the BJS. In fact, it first grew as an
offshoot of the dominant party in Malaysia today, the United Malays National
Organisation (Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu, or UMNO).12 For much of the
1960s the PAS was identified with an ideology that blended Islam and postcolonial
precepts, while the 1970s saw the PAS project itself more as a Malay-nationalist party.

It is only from the year 1982 onwards that we see the evident emergence of the PAS as
an Islamist political party. Under the tutelage of Yusof Rawa as party president, the
party refashioned its institutions and ideology. Islamic scholars, or ulama, were
parachuted into positions of leadership in the party, and the party underwent an
‘Arabisation’ and radicalisation of its political discourse. Future UMNO-PAS battle lines
were now being waged along the lines of religion (Islam) rather than ethnicity (Malay or
Malay nationalism).13 In this thesis I focus on the PAS’s electoral campaign in the
landmark 2008 Malaysian General Elections. This election is considered a landmark
election because it was the first election in decades whereby the opposition stood a
very good chance of making a huge dent in the electoral prospects of the UMNO-led
12

N. J. Funston, “The Origins of Parti Islam Se Malaysia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 7, no. 1 (1976): 69.

13

Farish A. Noor, Islamic Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS: 19512003 Volume 2 (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2004), 349-371.
9


coalition of parties. Eventually the combined total of seats won by the three major
opposition parties in Malaysia, including the PAS, successfully denied the government
parties its traditional two-thirds majority for the first time since 1969, but this was not
enough for any of the three to form the government. For the PAS in 2008, I argue that it
largely failed to wrest away the ownership over the issue of the economy from the
UMNO, which heads the dominant ruling coalition called the National Front (Barisan
Nasional, or BN).
The selection of the BJP and the PAS is appropriate for this thesis as India and
Malaysia provide us with comparable units of study of two not too dissimilar polities.
Both are former British colonies that endured a combination of both direct and indirect

British rule.14 The similarities in the institutional and political make up of both states
strongly bear the imprints of British imperialism, seeing that they both have
parliamentary systems of government with first-past-the-post single member plurality
electoral systems. Both are also federal states, and therefore both central governments
share power with the respective state governments. Elections are thus held at both the
state and the federal levels.15 In terms of pure numbers, India’s population far outpaces
Malaysia’s (1.2 billion versus just 30 million) but more importantly, in terms of the level
of ethnic fractionalisation, they are rather comparable. India’s ethnic and cultural
fractionalisation indices are 0.811 and 0.667 respectively, while Malaysia’s are 0.596

14

Matthew Lange, Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5.
15

In this thesis I focus largely on elections at the federal level, since I am analysing the religious party’s success at
the national level.
10


and 0.564.16 India and Malaysia are in fact highly heterogeneous and compose of
fractured societies, which makes the BJP’s success all the more stellar considering how
abnormally large and fractured India’s electorate is. Also, as stated earlier, both states
have a history of dominant governing parties. The Congress has governed India for
much of its independence since 1947, while the UMNO-led coalitions (first, the Alliance,
and from 1974 onwards, the BN) have governed Malaysia since its independence in
1957.
The last point that I want to clarify in this section is the issue of regime type
comparability. While India is generally regarded as a democracy, Malaysia is usually

classified as an authoritarian state. But even this distinction is a moot point. Malaysia
and India have both been classified as democracies by some scholars.17 India, for one,
has also been classified as quasi-democratic.18 In fact, Ayesha Jalal has gone on to
argue that even under India’s first and most prominent Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
the Congress Party had an institutionalised brand of authoritarianism that was covert. 19
Malaysia, on the other hand, is at best a ‘hybrid regime’, or more specifically, a type of

16

James D. Fearon, “Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country,” Journal of Economic Growth 8, no. 2 (2003): 215219.
17

Edward Friedman and Joseph Wong, “Learning to Lose: Dominant Parties, Dominant Party Systems, and Their
Transitions,” in Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose, eds. Edward Friedman and Joseph
Wong (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3.
18

Marco Rimanelli, “Introduction: Peaceful Democratization Trends in Single-Party-Dominant Countries,” in
Comparative Democratization and Peaceful Change in Single-Party-Dominant Countries, ed. Marco Rimanelli (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 14.
19

Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38-48.
11


hybrid regime termed as ‘competitive authoritarianism.’20 It has also been described as
‘semi-democratic’.21
The terminological morass might befuddle the interested reader, but what is more

important is that in both cases the conduct of elections ensures that they remain
competitive and meaningful. Since elections remain the primary means for religious
parties to contest for power, it is paramount that the conditions under which regular
elections are held are both meaningful and competitive. Kenneth Greene makes a clear
distinction between dominant parties in democratic and authoritarian systems (dominant
party democratic regimes, DPDRs, and dominant party authoritarian regimes, DPARs),
but he concedes that in both types of regimes elections are meaningful and feature a
large element of uncertainty in its results.22 Elections under so-called competitive
authoritarian regimes like Malaysia are considered legitimate, meaningful and
competitively contested under relatively free and fair conditions.23 Even if the claim can
be made that the ostensibly authoritarian regime in Malaysia has the means of ensuring
favourable electoral results at its disposal, the opposition parties in India have likewise
been disadvantaged to the point that elections can grossly favour the Congress Party.24

20

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2
(2002): 52.
21

William Case, “UMNO Paramountcy: A Report on Single-Party Dominance in Malaysia,” Party Politics 2, no. 1
(1996): 115-127.
22

Kenneth F. Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 258-259.
23

Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” 54-55.

24

Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose, 259.
12


What is of the greatest concern here is not the regime type classification, but at least
the fact that elections in both India and Malaysia are competitively held and its results
do not always guarantee a win for the dominant party. Data compiled in the Polity IV
Project also lends credibility to the comparability of the regime types of both India and
Malaysia.25 India was coded as ‘9’ in 1998, which firmly establishes it as a democracy.
In 2008 Malaysia was coded as ‘6’, up from ‘3’ which was its score for much of the late
1990s and 2000s. This effectively places Malaysia within the bracket of ‘democratic
countries’ as well. Therefore, selecting the cases of the BJP in 1998 and the PAS in
2008 should not pose any serious issues of incomparability of cases for the purposes of
this thesis.
Methods
I rely extensively on a reading of local newspaper reports from India and
Malaysia to explicate my argument. Newspapers remain an important medium through
which information and coverage on political parties are disseminated to the electorate,
and they are a readily accessible source of data for a study on elections and electoral
campaigning. Since the focus of this thesis is the electoral campaigning period of each
party, as a general rule I mostly take into consideration newspaper articles featured
from the point when the respective parliaments were dissolved up to the day of the
elections itself.26 For the Indian case study, I am only limited to an analysis of the major

25

Monty G. Marshall, Keith Jaggers, and Ted Robert Gurr, “Polity IV Dataset,” Centre for Systemic Peace. Accessed
January 19, 2013, />26

There were instances where I included in my analysis newspaper articles that were published outside of the time
frame I had set, but I deemed them important and relevant enough not to be ignored.
13


English dailies and weeklies as I do not know any Indian languages.27 However this
should not constitute a major problem, since English language dailies and weeklies in
India are the more prominent newspapers as they are more widely circulated than the
local language newspapers.28
As a native speaker of the Malay language I am able to analyse both the major
English language and Malay language newspapers in Malaysia.29 However, in Malaysia,
the media companies are only privately-owned in name. Many of the major stakeholders
of the media companies that own these newspapers have links to the ruling UMNO, and
so there is a reporting bias evident in the newspapers. Jason Abbott’s analysis of two
major Malay language newspapers, Berita Harian and Utusan Malaysia, clearly showed
that even though the opposition parties received substantial news coverage during the
2008 elections, pro-government reporting bias was greatly evident.30 However, on the
whole both the English language and Malay language newspapers gave substantial
media coverage to the opposition parties, and certainly much more so relative to
previous election years. In 2008 it was also an open secret that much of the
campaigning by the opposition parties were carried out through the new media as a

27

The dailies include The Hindu, Business Line, The Times of India, The Economic Times, Hindustan Times, The
Indian Express, and India Today. The only weekly analysed in this thesis was Outlook India.
28

In the rare instances I had also included foreign English newspaper articles which were relevant, both in the

Indian and Malaysian case studies.
29

The English language newspapers include The New Straits Times, The Malay Mail, and The Sun Daily. The Malay
language newspapers include Berita Harian, Harian Metro, and Utusan Malaysia. I translated the Malay-language
newspaper reports that I had selected for analysis into English myself.
30

Jason P. Abbott, “Electoral Authoritarianism and the Print Media in Malaysia: Measuring Political Bias and
Analyzing Its Cause,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 38, no. 1 (2011): 1-38.
14


means to circumvent the pro-government bias of the major newspapers. However, the
impact of the new media in 2008 has been exaggerated to some degree, and thus its
role as a tool for political change and generating alternative discourses and narratives in
Malaysia is still questionable.31 Furthermore, a post-electoral survey conducted by
Merdeka Centre found that an overwhelming majority of respondents from peninsular
Malaysia at least still heavily relied on the traditional print media, especially
newspapers, as a source of information for the 2008 elections.32 With limited data at
hand I am only able to work with newspaper reports, which remain an important source
of information for the public and one that is more easily accessible for research
purposes. At the same time I bear in mind the general pro-government biasedness of
the more prominent Malaysian newspapers in the conduct of my research and analysis.
As far as possible I also try to only include and examine direct quotations where the
politician’s words were recorded verbatim in the newspaper reports that I analysed for
both case studies.
Organisation of the Thesis
The organisation of this thesis is as follows. The following chapter will address
the literature on religious political parties, opposition party strategies in dominant party

31

Joseph Chinyong Liow, “Malaysia’s March 2008 General Election: Understanding the New Media Factor,” The
Pacific Review 25, no. 3 (2012): 293-315.
32

Respondents were asked to state their top three sources of information for the elections. As first choice, 55% of
respondents stated ‘Newspapers’, 36.7% stated ‘TV’, and only 3.8% stated ‘Internet/Political Party
Websites/Blogs/Emails’. For their second choice, the figures for the three options were 26.8%, 50.7% and 2.7%
respectively. In another question, respondents were asked the top 3 Internet sources they had referred to – at
least 87% of respondents stated that they did not refer to the Internet as a source of news. See “Peninsula
Malaysia Voter Opinion Poll: Perspective on Issues, the Economy, Leadership and Voting Intentions, 14th – 21st
March 2008,” Merdeka Centre, accessed January 28 2013, />15


systems, dominant political parties, and party issue ownership in elections. It will also
then elaborate on how religious parties attempt to wrest ownership over issues from the
dominant political party. Chapters 3 and 4 will discuss the case studies of the BJP and
the PAS respectively. Chapter 5 will conclude the findings of this thesis and its
implications for future research.

16


Chapter 2

Literature Review and Theoretical Framework
Religious Political Parties
I begin with a seemingly straightforward question – what exactly is a religious
political party? In other words, what makes a political party ‘religious’, as opposed to

being ‘socialist’, or ‘conservative’, or even ‘secular’? Yet even the term ‘political party’ is
difficult to define. Giovanni Sartori argues that political parties are organisations that
embody both an ‘expressive function’, in that they ‘transmit demands backed by
pressure’, as well as a manipulative function, where parties shape public opinion. 33
According to Alan Ware, a political party ‘is an institution that (a) seeks influence in a
state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government, and (b) usually consists of
more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to ‘aggregate
interests.’’34 The first part of Ware’s definition highlights the point that parties, to varying
degrees, ultimately aim at influencing state policies, and the most direct way to do so is
by occupying governmental positions. The second part of his definition reconfigures
Sartori’s point that parties are organisations that both express and manipulate opinions.
From the perspective of rational choice, John Aldrich argues that the political party is an
endogenous institution created and ultimately subject to the whims and fancies of

33

Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976), 28.
34

Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5.
17


political actors, who include the politicians, party activists and office-seekers and officeholders. The political party is a vehicle for them to achieve political ends, and so the
party is maintained or disregarded depending on when it becomes advantageous
towards achieving the required political ends.35
In an attempt to introduce a new typology of political parties in the world today,
Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond provide a conceptual framework that consists of
fifteen ideal-types of political parties based on three broad criteria – the type of party

organisation, the party’s programmatic orientation and whether the party is prodemocracy or anti-systemic.36 Religion, according to Gunther and Diamond, is one of
three programmatic appeals for mass-based parties, the other two being nationalism
and socialism. Mass-based religious parties consist of two types – the denominational
mass-party, which is a term that they adopted from Otto Kirchheimer, and the protohegemonic religious party, also known as the religious fundamentalist party.
Denominational mass-based parties first emerged in Europe, and examples of these are
Christian democratic parties. The core beliefs of these parties are religiously informed,
decided and interpreted by clerics or even a religious institution like the Catholic Church
itself. The religious fundamentalist party, on the other hand, relies on a strict and
parochial interpretation of religious traditions and texts as the fundamentals of the
party’s agenda which it then seeks to impose upon the body politic. The authors argue

35

John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 4-24.

36

See Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond, “Types and Functions of Parties,” in Political Parties and Democracy,
eds. Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 3-39; Gunther and
Diamond, “Species of Political Parties: A New Typology,” Party Politics 9, no. 2 (2003): 167-199.
18


that ‘[t]he principal difference between this and the denominational-mass party is that
the fundamentalist party seeks to reorganize state and society around a strict reading of
religious doctrinal principles, while denominational-mass parties are pluralist and
incremental in their agenda.’37
Manfred Brocker and Mirjam Künkler suggest a looser definition of religious
political parties. For them, religious political parties are ‘parties that hold an ideology or
a worldview based on religion (having, thus, a cross-class appeal), and mobilize support

on the basis of the citizens’ religious identity.’38 While any other party can appropriate
religious symbols and terminologies as part of their programmatic appeal, the difference
between them and religious parties is that these symbols and terminologies are so
central and fundamental to the religious parties.39 At various points in time religious
parties might aggregate and promote non-religious issues in elections, but as both
Gunther and Diamond, and Brocker and Künkler point out, at the very core of what
defines the identity of such parties is religion and its principles, either as a way to
maintain a semblance of ideological purity or even as a means of ‘product
differentiation’40 vis-à-vis other competing parties.
I posit that the other defining feature of a religious political party is the
paramountcy of governmental capture as an overriding party objective. Although Ware’s

37

Gunther and Diamond, “Species of Political Parties,” 182.

38

Manfred Brocker and Mirjam Künkler, “Religious Parties: Revisiting the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis –
Introduction,” Party Politics 19, no. 2 (2013): 175.
39

Ibid., 176.

40

Herbert Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 118.
19

definition of political parties implicitly assumes that most parties eventually aim to
occupy governmental positions at least in the longer term, for the religious party this
objective is imperative. Religious parties are driven by their self-professed aim that a
religiously-inspired moral order (but not a religious order per se) needs to be
established in a polity, and that they are the agents and facilitators of such a change.
They therefore need to become the government. In polities where elections serve as the
only legitimate means of governmental capture, religious parties simply must perform
well in elections. However, if the religious party becomes part of a coalition government
but not its dominant or leading party, it might find it difficult to get the backing of other
non-religious parties in the coalition to lend support for the enforcement of the party’s
moral governing order. Winning elections and then being able to form a majority
government on their own is therefore the ideal objective of all religious parties. This
contrasts with other types of political parties, especially those that at most only aim to
influence the policy agendas of governments, and are thus content to do so from the
margins of power. Religious parties can be considered as office-seeking parties, but not
of the strictly rationalist vein, where the pursuit and control of political office to derive
material benefits is the party’s end goal.41 Religious parties pursue office as a stepping
stone in the hope that they can enforce their moral order upon society.

41

For Kaare Strøm, office-seeking parties aim to ‘maximise… their control over political office’, so that they can
attain the ‘private goods bestowed on recipients of politically discretionary governmental and subgovernmental
appointment.’ See Kaare Strøm, “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties,” American Journal of
Political Science 34, no. 2 (1990): 567; see also Steven B. Woelinetz, “Beyond the Catch-All Party: Approaches to
the Study of Parties and Party Organization in Contemporary Democracies,” in Political Parties: Old Concepts and
New Challenges, eds. Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montéro, and Juan J. Linz (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 152-153.
20

Opposition Political Parties and Dominant Political Parties
As do most opposition parties many religious parties begin from the margins of
power, outside of the governmental fold. Starting out as peripheral parties as part of the
opposition camp, the aim of governmental capture for many religious political parties is
made difficult by the very fact of the incumbency of the parties in government. This task
is made even more onerous when the party in power is of the dominant type. The
literature on dominant political parties is replete with a myriad of definitions of a
‘dominant political party’, and also the ways in which a party becomes and maintains its
dominance.
Maurice Duverger postulates that ‘a party is dominant when it is identified with an
epoch; when its doctrines, ideas, methods, its style, so to speak, coincide with those of
the epoch.’42 Dominance is ultimately a function of both influence and belief – a party is
said to be dominant when the public essentially holds a party to be dominant. 43
Giovanni Sartori cautions the reader on confusing ‘dominant parties’ and ‘dominant
party systems’, or what he terms as ‘predominant party systems.’44 Predominant party
systems are those where the major party consistently wins an absolute majority of the
legislative seats for at least four consecutive elections, as a direct consequence of
winning a majority of the electoral votes.45 T.J. Pempel suggests a four-dimensional

42

Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. Barbara North
and Robert North (New York: Wiley, 1954), 308.
43

Ibid.

44

Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, 192-195.

45

Ibid., 196.
21


definition of dominance of parties in democracies. To be considered as ‘dominant’ a
party must be numerically dominant (larger number of seats vis-à-vis its opponents), be
in a dominant bargaining position (by holding a position within the party system that
allows it to bargain effectively with other smaller parties in coalition-building efforts,
especially when it cannot win outright majorities), be chronologically dominant (in power
for a substantial period of time), and governmentally dominant (by carrying out a
‘historical project’, which involves mutually-supportive policies that shape a national
agenda as a legacy of the dominant party).46
Marco Rimanelli describes single-party-dominant polities as the ‘systemic
monopolisation of domestic political power, all national structures, and the decisionmaking process, by an entrenched, single party over a long period of time.’47 Hermann
Giliomee and Charles Simkins accept T.J. Pempel’s definition of one-party dominance,
but unlike him they argue that it is very difficult to distinguish between dominant parties
in ‘full’ democracies, which are mostly industrialised countries, and in dominant oneparty regimes in industrialising countries. They conceive the dominant party as a
separate regime type with its own unique features, where at least some democratic
procedures are upheld.48 Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek emphasise the
structural effects of the political systems and the strategic effects of choices by parties
in electoral competition as a response to the prevailing structures that enable parties to
46

T. J. Pempel, “Introduction,” in Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes, ed. T.J. Pempel
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3-4.

47

Rimanelli, “Introduction,” 14.

48

Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins, “Introduction,’ in The Awkward Embrace: One-Party Domination and
Democracy, eds. Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999), xv-xviii.
22


become dominant.49 Patrick Dunleavy offers a method of identifying ‘dominance’
independent of the party’s tenure in office, which means that we can potentially move
away from a post hoc determination of a party’s dominance. He links dominance to a
party’s level of efficacy – a party is said to be dominant when it is accepted by voters to
be ‘exceptionally effective.’50 Jean-François Caulier and Patrick Dumont propose a
mathematical method of measuring party dominance, which they understand to be ‘the
access to government or the ability to control majority decision-making in parliament.’51
They propose employing voting power indices which reflect the extent of dominance
that the largest party in a parliament holds vis-à-vis other parties in controlling the
decision-making and voting processes in parliament, arguing that this is a better
measurement of party dominance than the traditional effective number of parties (ENP)
index proposed earlier by Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera.52
What are the means through which parties become, and remain, dominant? The
answers to this question simultaneously address why attempts by various opposition
political parties, including religious parties, to defeat the dominant parties in elections
repeatedly fail. The list of reasons include the entrenchment of resource asymmetries
49

Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek, “Introduction: Setting a New Agenda for Research,” in Dominant

Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, eds. Matthijs Bogaards and
Françoise Boucek (New York: Routledge, 2010), 7-8.
50

Patrick Dunleavy, “Rethinking Dominant Party Systems,” in Dominant Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts,
Measures, Cases and Comparisons, eds. Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2344.
51

Jean-François Caulier and Patrick Dumont, “Measuring One-Party Dominance with Voting Power Indices,” in
Dominant Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, eds. Matthijs Bogaards
and Françoise Boucek (New York: Routledge, 2010), 45.
52

Ibid., 46-57.
23


that favour dominant parties,53 the practice of clientelism by the dominant party with
added protection for the beneficiaries of such a system,54 the failure of opposition
parties to co-operate on electoral strategies,55 the near-monopoly of the media, the
press and means of advertising by the dominant party,56 and/or the co-optation of antiregime or anti-dominant party elites.57
Dominant parties also aim at ensuring that they attain an overriding monopoly of
the vote in elections. In that way, they send out signals to any potential challengers that
the party is too strong to be challenged. Therefore any potential within-party challengers
or even opposition candidates will have to think very carefully about rebelling against
the dominant party. This means that it pays off for all parties involved to stick to the
status quo, thus ensuring elite unity in the dominant party and the preference for the
opposition camp to remain as the ‘loyal opposition’. Voters also see no reason to
change the status quo by voting against the dominant party, since they benefit
materially from doing so. Unless this balance is upset, one would expect this intricate

53

Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose, 1-70.

54

Ethan Scheiner, Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-30.
55

Ray Christensen, Ending the LDP Hegemony: Party Cooperation in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2000), 1-8.
56

James J. Zaffiro, “The Press and Political Opposition in an African Democracy: The Case of Botswana,” The Journal
of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 27, no. 1 (1989): 51-73.
57

Carlene J. Edie, “Democracy in the Gambia: Past, Present and Prospects for the Future,” Africa Development 25,
no. 3&4 (2000): 161-198; David White, “Dominant Party Systems: A Framework for Conceptualizing Opposition
Strategies in Russia,” Democratization 18, no. 3 (2011): 655-681.
24


order to perpetuate.58 Attempts at opposition coalition building can also repeatedly fail
because some component parties suffer from an ‘organisational crisis’. To build
coalitions, component parties have to give up some of their party aims and goals to
come to a compromise with other component parties. However, for parties whose only
differentiation factor and incentive for attracting party membership solely rely upon the

purity of party ideology and identity, the compromise of such ideals for the sake of
coalition-building leads its disillusioned members to believe that the party leadership
has ‘sold out’ the party. The decline in intra-party cohesion ensues, which greatly
destabilises the party and as a result inter-party coalitions become short-lived.59
While much has been theorised about the emergence of party dominance and its
perpetuation, dominant party decline is another matter altogether. This describes the
period whereby a dominant party might still be in power, but aspects of its dominance
are being threatened greatly. The dominant party is muddling through, but it is still
hanging on. However, much scholarship is devoted only towards discussing the demise
of the dominant party as part of the larger process of democratisation, or only
concentrate on specific time periods where the dominant party is already faced with the
prospect of losing in elections. Bogaards and Boucek claim to ‘explain why dominant
parties endure, decline and break down’,60 but they do not actually provide any
overarching theory to explain the decline of dominant parties. From the perspective of
58

Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-43.
59

Stephen Johnson, Opposition Politics in Japan: Strategies under a One-Party Dominant Regime (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 57-61.
60

Bogaards and Boucek ”Introduction,” 2.
25