Trust and the Islamic Advantage: Religious-Based Movements in Turkey and the Muslim World

In much of the Muslim world, Islamic political and economic movements appear to have a comparative advantage. Relative to similar secular groups, they are better able to mobilize supporters and sustain their cooperation long-term. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Turkey, a historically secular country that has experienced a sharp rise in Islamic-based political and economic activity. Drawing on rich data sources and econometric methods, Avital Livny challenges existing explanations - such as personal faith - for the success of these movements. Instead, Livny shows that the Islamic advantage is rooted in feelings of trust among individuals with a shared, religious group-identity. This group-based trust serves as an effective substitute for more generalized feelings of interpersonal trust, which are largely absent in many Muslim-plurality countries. The book presents a new argument for conceptualizing religion as both a personal belief system and collective identity.

Review: 'One of the central obsessions of scholars of the Muslim world has been to explain why many of that world's most successful political parties have been ones dedicated to legislating Islamic law. Avital Livny offers a fresh answer to this old question: Religion matters, not by shaping what voters want, but by providing group members with a shared identity. Drawing on a variety of data both qualitative and quantitative, observational and experimental, Livny demonstrates that Islamists' shared religious identity enables them to overcome the mistrust that plagues developing societies, rendering them in turn more capable than their opponents of acting collectively and of garnering the votes of their compatriots. This is a deeply impressive work of social science that speaks powerfully to anyone interested in understanding how religion and religious identity function in political life.' Tarek Masoud, Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Massachusetts
'... Trust and Islamic Advantage makes an empirically rich and theoretically engaging contribution to the scholarship on religion and politics and Middle Eastern politics. With its meticulous empirical analyses, it will stimulate high-quality scholarly discussions on the role of identity-based trust in political processes in Muslim-majority countries and beyond.' Gunes Murat Tezcur, Perspectives on Politics