Winning Hearts and Votes

Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage

Steven Brooke

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501730627
• eBook ISBN: 9781501730641
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In non-democratic regimes around the world, non-state organizations provide millions of citizens with medical care, schooling, childrearing, and other critical social services. Why would any authoritarian countenance this type of activism? Under what conditions does the private provision of social services generate political mobilization? And in those cases, what linkage does the provision of social services forge between the provider and recipient?

In Winning Hearts and Votes, Steven Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. But providers who serve poorer citizens, motivated by either charity of clientelism, will be constrained in their ability to mobilize voters because the poor depend on the state for many different goods. Organizations that serve paying customers, in contrast, may produce high quality, consistent, and effective services. This type of provision generates powerful, reputation-based linkages with a middle-class constituency more likely to support the provider on election day.

Brooke backs up his novel argument with an in-depth examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the archetypal organization that combines social service provision with electoral success. With a fascinating array of historical, qualitative, spatial, and experimental data he traces the Brotherhood's provision of medical services from its origins in the 1970s, through its maturation under the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, to its apogee during the country's brief democratic interlude, 2011–2013. In addition to generating new insights into authoritarian regimes, party-voter linkages and clientelism, and the relationship between political parties and social movements, Winning Hearts and Votes details the history, operations, and political effects of the Muslim Brotherhood's much discussed but little understood social service network.

1

SOCIAL SERVICES AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATION IN NONDEMOCRATIC REGIMES

Citizens around the world rely on nonstate actors to school their children, treat their aging parents, or find themselves meaningful employment. In established democracies this type of activity is so commonplace that a prominent strain of democratic theory suggests that it is crucial to “making democracy work” (Putnam 1994). Sometimes these diffuse civic benefits take a backseat to instrumental ones, such as when providers use social services to mobilize voters or build dense organizational ties (Thachil 2014a; Cammett 2014).

Given the mobilizing potential of nonstate provision, why has this phenomenon also proliferated in autocracies? Why do regimes that so tightly monitor and control the political space allow a variety of nonstate providers, opposition organizations prominent among them, to operate social service networks that reach millions of citizens per year? Under what conditions can these organizations use social service provision to mobilize voters against the regime? In these cases, what is the nature of the “linkage” that social service provision forges between provider organization and recipient? (Kitschelt 2000).

This book builds a theory of nonstate social service provision that attempts to answer these questions. I show how nondemocratic regimes often relax constraints on these providers in order to buoy citizen welfare and navigate out of the dangerous waters of economic crisis. But this decision triggers consequences that become clear only in the years that follow. As these provider organizations become increasingly enmeshed in citizens’ daily lives, the regime’s ability to prevent them from politicizing their provision decreases.

Social service provision scatters the seeds of political mobilization widely, but only some fall on fertile soil. I argue that organizations who direct social services toward the poor—motivated, for example, by charity or clientelism—will generally struggle to realize political benefits from their provision. First, relying on an indigent population will restrict the reach and character of their provision, limiting its appeal to those citizens with few other options to satisfy their needs. Second, many of these poorer beneficiaries will already owe their political loyalties to proregime patrons and will be reluctant to risk that relationship by voting for the provider organization instead. In contrast, providers that target the middle class can use the stable financial flows produced by paying customers to generate consistent and quality care that broadcasts a powerful impression of honesty, professionalism, and compassion. By using the less politicized interactions that occur in the realm of social service provision, a provider organization can tangibly demonstrate that its walk matches its talk, producing reputation-based linkages with that very bloc of citizens which is most likely to support the opposition in less-than-democratic elections.

The remainder of this chapter introduces the key themes of the book, situates the argument in the current literature, and summarizes the core contribution. I begin by discussing the case that motivates my investigation: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, specifically, its largest and oldest social service affiliate: the Islamic Medical Association (IMA). Tightly focusing on a single organization consciously exchanges generalizability for specificity. But this trade-off is justifiable given that speculation about the Brotherhood’s social service provision—how it relates to the regime, the ways it is run, and who it serves—has often run beyond the evidence. As it turns out, more closely assessing this evidence reveals a series of puzzles that can generate insight into areas of much broader interest. The following sections synthesize literatures on authoritarianism, party-voter linkages, and Islamist politics to identify three of these questions and ground them in larger contexts. The remaining sections preview the core argument and evidence, describe the research strategy, and outline the plan of the book.

The Mysterious Muslim Brotherhood

Egypt under Anwar al-Sadat (r. 1970–81) and Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981–2011) was a prototypical example of those regimes that combine limited electoral competition with an array of coercive strategies both heavy-handed and subtle (Brownlee 2007).¹ But under both men, nonstate social service providers, Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood prominent among them, also dramatically expanded their profile. In her pioneering book Mobilizing Islam Carrie Wickham (2002) captured the dramatic growth of this “parallel Islamic sector” that encompassed charitable societies, cultural and social organizations, mosques, and businesses.

This seems odd. Why would any authoritarian regime countenance the existence of an opposition network with the ability to, as Sheri Berman put it, reach into “practically every nook and cranny of Egyptian life” (2003, 261)? This would be a dangerous strategy for even the most secure autocrat. As Tarek Masoud argues in his own intricate account of this era, “no authoritarian regime worthy of the name would allow such a thing” (2014a, 76). But as we will see, the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral potency stemmed in large part from its expansive social service networks.

Ideally, arguments about the Brotherhood’s social service networks could be adjudicated with reference to evidence. But data on the phenomenon are frustratingly hard to come by. One cannot identify whom the Brotherhood’s networks serve, how large they are, how they function, where they exist, or how they relate to the state.² Even those most familiar with Egypt and the Brotherhood have described the difficulties of studying this sector of the group’s activism (Bibars 2001, 107; Shukr 2006, 7; Masoud 2008, 147). One author even claims that examining the subject is an “impossible task” (M. Abdelrahman 2004, 122). This is why, as Melani Cammett and Pauline Jones Luong concluded in a recent review article, critical aspects of Islamist social service efforts have been “presumed rather than demonstrated” (2014, 188).

In the face of anecdotal and conflicting evidence, it is difficult to investigate even the most basic claims about the Brotherhood’s social services, let alone attempt to understand this activity in light of broader theoretical literature. Thus the purpose of this book is twofold. First, I produce a variety of new historical, qualitative, spatial, and experimental data on the largest and oldest component of the Muslim Brotherhood’s social service network—the Islamic Medical Association—to add empirical weight to a subject long shrouded in speculation and presumption. Second, I use this specific and prominent case to gain theoretical insights into the broader phenomenon of nonstate social service provision, opposition activism, and political mobilization in nondemocratic regimes. The following section zooms back out, extracting from this specific case the three interrelated theoretical questions that drive this book.

Three Perspectives, Three Puzzles

Three interlinked questions structure the inquiry that follows. Scholars have begun to devote increasing attention to the political impact of nonstate service providers but have generally neglected cases in which opportunities for political mobilization are far more circumscribed. Thus the first question isolates the regime, specifically asking why the same autocrats who jealously guard political power allow a variety of opposition organizations to engage in activities that reach broad swaths of the citizenry. Operating under these regimes, however, are multiple nonstate providers, only some of whom transform their provision into political mobilization. Thus the second guiding question shifts the level of analysis to the organization to identify the conditions under which providers operating in nondemocratic contexts are able to use social service provision to amass electoral support. The final question centers on the individual: In cases where social service provision is producing political effects, what exactly is the nature of the relationship between provider and beneficiary?

Scholars have put forward various answers for each of these three questions. They have juxtaposed the opposition’s civil society potency with state debility, focused on the ideological (religious) nature of certain provider groups to explain their mobilizing potential, and turned to sprawling literatures on clientelism to explain the mechanism through which this provision generates political support. While all these accounts provide important insights into the broad phenomenon, they also leave conspicuous questions unanswered and often stand at odds with key pieces of evidence drawn from perhaps the most prominent case of an organization that combined social service provision and political success, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

The Regime

Coordination between the opposition usually augurs the end of nondemocratic regimes (Van de Walle 2006; Gandhi and Reuter 2008). Autocrats understand this well, so they spend a great deal of energy and rely on a variety of strategies to keep citizens isolated and demobilized (Kuran 1991). At the extreme, the Eastern bloc–style totalitarian regimes systematically pulverized their societies, stripping citizens of even the most benign social ties that could potentially produce organized opposition (Arendt 1973; Linz 1975; Howard 2003). Even “milder” authoritarian regimes use styles of corporatist management to segment societies (Schmitter 1979; Bianchi 1989) and tinker with electoral institutions to keep opposition parties from coalescing (Lust-Okar 2005).

At the same time, scholars have noticed among Middle Eastern autocrats “a now well-entrenched trend … to hand over economic activities to nonstate actors” (Vandewalle 1992, 110). But nonstate social service provision could reasonably be expected to produce the very types of social capital and group solidarities that make risky collective action, up to and including insurgency and revolution, happen (McAdam 1986; Wickham 2002). More mildly, this activity also seems ideally placed to provide exactly the types of face-to-face interactions that have proven to be such a potent driver of electoral mobilization elsewhere (Gerber and Green 2000; Calvo and Murillo 2013). Regimes, assumedly, know this too: Nathan Brown explains that “social services formally provided by the state have been taken on by a welter of movements … but regimes become suspicious and repressive when such social activity is linked to political opposition (2012, 1). Despite these clear risks, even hegemonic single-party regimes like China (Spires 2011) and pre-Arab Spring Syria (Pierret and Selvik 2009) feature social service organizations that have managed to carve out some degree of independence. Why would any autocrat voluntarily trigger the very process that might culminate in their overthrow?

Perhaps certain providers are particularly proficient at staying off the radar of the regime. Spires (2011), in his study of unsanctioned civil society activism in China, finds that these associations manage to exist because of bureaucratic fragmentation that makes effective oversight difficult. Indeed, in her aforementioned study Carrie Wickham explains that “the flexibility and decentralization of the parallel Islamic sector were not coincidental; rather, they reflect the Islamists’ efforts to evade government control” (2002, 105).³ In his study of Mubarak-era corporatism, Robert Bianchi explains how Islamists evaded regime interference by remaining “extralegal organizations that refuse to register with the Ministry of Social Affairs” (1989, 193). Other authors often analyze Islamists’ social service activism as a classic Gramscian “war of position” purposively directed toward those spaces where the state is weakest (Awadi 2004, 2005). As Quintan Wiktorowicz and Suha Taji-Farouki summarize, “rather than directly confronting the state or participating in formal politics, Islamic NGOs are engaged in social struggle at the level of cultural discourse and values” (2000, 686).

These types of explanations are attractive in that they track with a general narrative of the declining capacity of the post-1967 Arab state. Indeed, I argue that state weakness, in particular fiscal weakness, plays an important role in the emergence of nonstate providers in nondemocratic regimes. But what complicates the above explanations is that while certain state capacities indeed shrank during this period, the state’s ability to monitor and control civil society remained quite robust. If anything, it dramatically expanded over the years to the point of hegemony (Wiktorowicz 2004; Tadros 2011).

During the 1960s laws designed to regulate the social and charitable sector diffused across the Arab World (Jamal 2009). Egypt was no different (Agati 2006). There, the “landmark piece of corporatist legislation” that is Law 32 of 1964 and its successor, Law 84 of 2002, gave the regime “uniform and virtually complete control over all [associations]” (Berger 1970, 96). In Denis Sullivan’s study of Egyptian voluntary organizations, he tells us that “the Private Voluntary Organization (PVO) structure and networks provide the government with direct oversight, and in many cases control, over these nongovernmental organizations” (1994, 1–2). The result, as Sami Zubaida puts it simply, is that in Egypt “civil society in the form of voluntary associations is essentially dependent on the ‘law-state’” (1992, 4).

In light of this expanding monitoring capacity, we might expect that, as the authors above intuited, Islamists tried to remain informal or create shell companies to evade surveillance. But the empirical evidence suggests that the Brotherhood’s social service enterprises were anything but under the radar. In fact, the Brotherhood’s Islamic Medical Association was so integrated into the Egyptian state’s health care infrastructure that it submitted receipts to, and received reimbursements from, the government for health care provided to the citizenry. Other examples of the Brotherhood’s meticulous fidelity to regime rules are legion in the empirical record. For instance, the January 1979 issue of the official Egyptian legal gazette—al-Waqa ʾ i ʿ al-Misriyya—carried a short notification. The IMA had received as a donation a 1975 Volkswagen Microbus (motor number 823029, vehicle registration number 368642) that was being used as an ambulance/hearse. Seeking an official tax exemption for the vehicle, the IMA had submitted this information to the Egyptian government. The government granted the request and printed the material in the public record.⁴ This type of minute and voluntary compliance with the regime’s bureaucracy is hard to square with suggestions that “the main focus of the [Islamist] movement has been upon informal grass-roots associations, avoiding formal institutions since these tend to be controlled and monitored by the state” (M. Zaki 1995, 63). Instead, the regime was able to wrap the Brotherhood’s social service activism in various layers of legal control, seemingly with full compliance from the Muslim Brotherhood itself.

The Organization

Given extensive regime oversight of its social service activism, how and why was the Brotherhood able to realize political support from these endeavors? The group’s ability to make consistent electoral gains was remarkable in Egypt, where for almost forty years a froth of electoral competition lay atop a deep well of authoritarian stability (Kassem 1999; Kienle 2001; Brownlee 2007; Blaydes 2011, Masoud 2014a).

Comparative cases would suggest that particular characteristics of an organization, such as a powerful internal structure or ideologically cohesive membership, might explain how social service provision generates political support (Van Cott 2005; Anria 2013). Tariq Thachil argues that the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was able to draw on the “thick organizational resources” of an affiliated social movement to provide social services that proved effective at winning the support of poorer voters (2014a, 263). This “motivated cadre of … ideologically committed activists are willing to work for low pay,” he finds, “thereby minimizing the costs of providing basic welfare” (23). Thachil even suggests that the Brotherhood might be a prime case of this argument at work beyond India (17).

Organizations able to command the support of disciplined and motivated cadres would gain a large advantage over their opponents in many spheres of activity, including political mobilization. Many authors use the Brotherhood’s tight internal organization, which includes long-term programs of socialization and ideological culturing, to explain the group’s social and political prowess (Trager 2011; Kandil 2014; Anani 2016). And, as I show in chapter 7, in the final months of Mohammed Morsi’s turn as president, the Brotherhood began an allout social service–based mobilization to win the support of poorer voters in a manner not dissimilar to what Thachil identified in India. The Brotherhood was one of the few Egyptian parties that could pull this off, in large part because of its ability to leverage the support of ideologically committed members willing to devote their time, talents, and treasure to further the group’s political goals.

But this flurry of activity during 2013 was notable for how dissimilar it was from the Brotherhood’s method of social service provision during decades of authoritarianism. For example, I began my fieldwork under the assumption that the Brotherhood’s social services relied heavily on unpaid volunteers drawn from the movement. But none of those I encountered at the IMA’s facilities—from the janitors to the managers—worked for free. In fact, they were paid at a rate that many conceded was quite generous relative to what they would be paid for similar work elsewhere (Clark 2004). I stubbornly persisted in my search for volunteers until one of the organization’s executives told me, somewhat exasperatedly, that there was not a single volunteer worker in the IMA’s network.⁵ And while the employees at the headquarters as well as the management teams of individual hospitals were almost exclusively ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• 1. Social Services and Political Mobilization in Nondemocratic Regimes
• 2. Middle-Class Provision, Reputation, and Electoral Success
• 3. Rebuilding the Brotherhood Brand
• 4. Inside the Islamist Advantage
• 5. The Political Geography of Islamist Social Service Provision
• 6. Electing to Serve
• 7. Mohammed Morsi’s Machine
• 8. The Politics of Social Service Provision
• Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index