Democratic Inclusion and Religious Nationalists in Israel

Extract

DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION HAS BEEN LINKED to the moderation of religious parties in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from Christian parties in nineteenth-century Europe and Islamist parties in Turkey and Indonesia, to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, among others. At the same time, political inclusion does not necessarily lead to moderation. Unlike the moderating effects generally seen elsewhere in Europe, radical religious parties in Greece, Poland, and Bosnia have not substantively moderated despite their participation in electoral politics. In authoritarian contexts, for example, despite analogous political openings in Yemen and Jordan, Islamist parties moderated only in the latter.¹ Why does including radical religious movements in the democratic game sometimes lead to their moderation and sometimes not?

This article argues that the balance of the countervailing trends unleashed by democratic inclusion is one source of this variation. The inclusion of radical parties in democratic politics and, more specifically, in the government itself, certainly provides strong institutional incentives for moderation. At the same time, the very temperance fostered by inclusion forces the moderating party to confront two political challenges that, if not overcome, can undermine any moderation. First, moderation makes the once-radical party less distinct from mainstream parties and thus more susceptible to losing support to these (usually larger and more significant) parties. Second, moderation also creates an opening for ideological hardliners to capture the newly vacated political space, creating radical flank effects. Most pathways through which inclusion is believed to foster moderation assume that these flank effects are positive. That is, to work as expected, the inclusion–moderation hypothesis (IMH) assumes that even if radical faction emerges to challenge the moderating wing of a movement, it will either be too marginal to matter, or its emergence would lead to increased external support for the relative moderates by third parties.