A. Kadir Yildirim

A. Kadir Yildirim, PhD, is a Nonresident Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas. His main research interests include politics and religion, political Islam, and the politics of the Middle East and Turkey. Yildirim is the author of two books. His most recent book, The Politics of Religious Party Change: Islamist and Catholic Parties in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2023), addresses the comparative effect of religious institutions on the evolution of religious parties in the Middle East and western Europe. He received the Smith Richardson Foundation’s prestigious Strategy and Policy Fellows grant for this work.  Muslim Democratic Parties in the Middle East: Economy and Politics of Islamist Moderation (Indiana University Press, 2015), his first book, analyzes Islamist parties’ moderation trajectories and the impact of economic liberalization processes on moderation in Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey. 

Dr. Yildirim also served as the principal investigator for a study funded by the Henry Luce Foundation on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on religiosity in the Muslim world. Previously, he led two major research projects at the Baker Institute. In a project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Dr. Yildirim and his colleagues examined pluralism and inclusion in the Middle East since the beginning of the Arab Spring protests. In a second project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, he analyzed the relationship between religious authority and US foreign policy in the Middle East, using an experimental survey design.

Featured Work: “Preaching Politics: How Politicization Undermines Religious Authority in the Middle East”