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Sometimes the terms Islamism and political Islam seem to be used interchangeably and sometimes not.
I appreciate the fact that these concepts may not have a precise consensual definition just yet and journalists may erroneously use them synonymously. Have scholars or political scientists distinguished the two ideas or are they merely the same thing?
The definition is very different from different sources. However, there is a difference according to some sources: according to Oxford, Islamism represents a form of Political Islam that relates to "Islamic militancy or fundamentalism." Meanwhile, Oxford Bibliographies calls political Islam "any interpretation of Islam as a source of political identity and action." Thus, political Islam can be any form of political ideology based around Islam, which can include Islamic democracy, Islamic socialism, and other political ideologies that aren't necessarily militaristic or fundamentalists. Again, some sources use the term interchangeably, but many in academia use one for extremist Islamic ideologies and the other to describe all Islamic political ideologies.
