The corpus of writings on contemporary Algerian politics is characterized by “top-down,” systemic or macro-institutional approaches based on aggregate data, which is rarely interested in local-level political phenomena. While useful for addressing broad questions of regime-type and political economy, the macro-level approach has led researchers to ignore a number of important questions. For example, the focus on Algeria’s “liberalized autocracy,” has drawn attention from analysis of local-, if not national-level, elections. The intellectual justification is that, in the current political context, elections are a façade and therefore not of interpretive interest. Anthropological approaches have the inverse tendency: While they seek to study particular cultural and social phenomena, they largely ignore the effects of the political regime. The relationship between legislative elections, state institutions and Algerian tribes presents an opportunity to break with certain pathologies inherent in the two approaches. Tribal conflict has become increasingly manifest in Algeria in recent years. The bloody conflict between two tribes along the administrative border of the Provinces of Laghouat and Djelfa in June 2006; and deadly clashes between the Berber community and the Chaamba tribe in the Mzab valley in 2008 and 2009 are noteworthy examples. Tribalism in politics, moreover, is evident in the drawing up of party lists during legislative elections, and in the widely reported presidential visits to tribal notables. While clearly on the rise, tribalism remains an understudied aspect of Algerian politics. Why, after more 132 years of rupture, dating from the French conquest in 1830, the administrative disaggregation of the tribe during colonial period, the rise and success of the nationalism, Socialism and Islamism – ideologies inherently in contradiction with tribalism – is the tribal question so prevalent in contemporary Algeria? Is the revival of tribalism part of a larger social process, or is it an anachronistic anomaly? Using concepts from drawn from political science and anthropology, this paper analyses the relationship between the tribe and the Algerian state in the Province of Tebessa between the 2002 legislative and 2004 presidential elections. Specifically, it looks at the electoral sociology in the local political arena, situating the revival of the tribal question as a part of President Bouteflika’s neo-makhzan strategy to consolidate his regime by playing tribe against social class. Algeria is witnessing a form of “tribalism without tribes:” while the tribe as a system of social organization is structurally impossible, the tribe as a means of social identity is not.