The Popular Base of Muslim Democracy: Explaining Individual Support for Islamist Parties in Turkey and Morocco.

Increasing scholarly attention has recently been focused upon the origins and fortunes of Islamic parties. This paper examines the individual determinants of support for these parties utilizing the fifth wave of the World Values Survey. It is argued that the distribution of individual preferences along political cleavages like left-right, secularism-Islamism, and regime-opposition are critical explanatory variables. The cases under investigation are Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and Party of Justice and Development (PJD) in Morocco. The results of the multinomial logit show that Islamic parties obtain support from a broad spectrum of voters and this support base is best understood in relation to the distribution of voter preferences for rival parties. Furthermore, left-right and Islamism appear to be the most important cleavages in the electoral markets under investigation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]