Pomeps Conversations

Steven Brooke talks about his latest book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. Through an in-depth examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. “One of the kind of key things that we often hear about Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood is that one of the reasons why they're popular is that they provide all sorts of things like clinics and schools and things like that. And this kind of makes people support them in elections or mobilize for them or just think kind of positively about these organizations. And so one of the things I wanted to do with the book was basically empirical—I just wanted to kind of see if I could research these things that everyone talks about and everyone seems to think matter, “said Brooke. He explains, “One of the things that really ca