Dr. Steven Brooke will be visiting the University of Alabama Political Science Department on Thursday, April 4th to give a talk in ten Hoor 30 from 12:30pm-1:45 pm.

Talk title: “Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage”

Abstract: Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are often thought to gain significant political support from their provision of social services such as schools and hospitals. At the same time, there exists relatively few concrete details about this provision, let alone the conditions under which it transforms into political support. Based on extended fieldwork with the Muslim Brotherhood’s oldest and largest social service affiliate, the Islamic Medical Association, as well as an original survey experiment of almost 2500 Egyptians, I show how the Brotherhood’s particular style of social service provision generates powerful reputation-based linkages with middle class voters. Instead of walking out of the Brotherhood’s social services convinced by the necessity of applying Shari’a law or convinced that the group would pursue pro-poor redistributive policies, Egyptians believed that the professional, honest care they received was a harbinger of how the group’s politicians would behave in elected office.

Biography: Steven Brooke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville, as well as an Associate Fellow (non-Resident) at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Faculty Fellow with the Association for Analytic Learning About Islam and Muslim Societies. His first book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, was published in early 2019 by Cornell University Press. His work has also appeared in The American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and the British Journal of Middle East Studies, as well as numerous edited volumes. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

This event in the Spring 2019 Middle East Studies Speakers Series is organized by the Program for Middle East Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science.