Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to gain political support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in...

Indonesia’s 1999 decentralization law gave local governments in Indonesia an unprecedented opportunity to adopt pro-development policies. We estimate the effect of decentralization (enacted in 2001) on national economic performance using a synthetic case control methodology. Our results...