Democratization

In this dissertation I examine the impact of transformation in opportunity space, organizational structure, and cultural framing efforts of the political actors on Kurdish political identity. Applying a synthesis of social movement theories and theories on nationalism, I seek to…

Do external factors facilitate or hamper domestic democratic development? Do international actors influence the development of the rule of law in domestic systems? How should we conceptualize, identify and evaluate the extent and nature of international influence? More pragmatic…

The dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of the role played by parties in the consolidation of democracy in the context of military tutelage and anti-system challenges. It finds that the conceptualization of parties under internal and external pressures in compe…

This study asks why competitive electoral politics emerged in Turkey and nowhere else in the post-colonial Muslim Middle East. It shows that on the eve of the departure of the imperial powers from the region, the nature of nascent indigenous party systems had a significant impac…

This dissertation examines how ideology structures the behavior of political actors. While studies of confessional Political parties often begin with the assumption that religious beliefs structure behavior by establishing a set of constraints that limit options available to pol…

In this study I examine the questions: "What are elite political attitudes toward the democratization process in the Arab region?" and "What factors, internal and external, have influenced such attitudes?" I address these questions by using two basic data collection techniques: …

This dissertation is a study of the process of democratization and its interaction with Islamism in Morocco, a Muslim state since the seventh century with a history of French colonialism. It presents a discussion of the relevant democratization literature and an analysis of the …

The dissertation examines the conditions under which social movements were able to successfully campaign for democratic change with recourse to progressive Islamic discourses in one case, Indonesia, and not the other, Iran. While both societies have generated over the past half …

Before the end of the Cold War, mainstream scholarship on democratization presented the democratization process as the outcome of domestic conditions not significantly influenced by actors or forces outside the nation-state. During that period, the role of external factors was u…