Can Islamic groups play a positive role in democratization? If so, under what conditions? I examine the case of Indonesia, where Islamic actors variously resisted, supported, and acquiesced with a secularist dictatorship over three decades. At the beginning of that timeframe, the two major Islamic groups espoused syariah and the integration of religious authority into the state. But by the end of it, one of them had made an ideological shift to support pluralism. How did this change come about? How did it contribute to the outcome of regime transition?;Much of the scholarship on Islamic groups treats ideology as a primary motivation or, more recently, focuses on regime rules and policies. How and why Islamic groups themselves make decisions is understudied. This dissertation proposes that the answer to the puzzle presented above lies in the incentives that shape social choice and the costs of collective action for Islamic groups as political organizations. It explores two key variables: (1) how opposition parties under dictatorships mobilize support from their base, and (2) how the organizations are structured. These factors determine a group's ideological adaptability and shape the survival strategies that Islamic groups devise in response to autocratic regime policies. Such adaptations affect their later behavior in the transitional period. Democracy results when religious groups make different strategic decisions and are divided.;Outlining several distinct time periods, I examine how the Indonesian state's approach to Islamic groups defines opportunities and constraints. I then explore the other side of the puzzle---the internal dynamics of Islamic groups that stem from variable organizational and mobilizational attributes. Ideology functions as an intermediate factor in my explanation, both a cause and a product of political dynamics. My model combines analytical tools from strategic and mobilization approaches to explain the behavior of Islamic groups. It shows that an Islamic group functions as a democratizing force when its strategic considerations and its capacity for flexibility lead it to co-operate with secular actors, standing in the way of a religious autocracy on the one hand and discouraging a military takeover on the other.
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