Local Politics and local activism have long been neglected by conventional political sciences as the discipline mostly focuses on formal institutions and national elites. Wrongly enough: Recent events as the strikes in the Egyptian provincial town of Mahalla that occurred in combination with a bread crisis disrupted the authoritarian routine as did the strike of April 2008. In other cases, local residents fought the police while being forcedly removed from their land in Cairo and people in Dumyiat struggle against the construction of a polluting new industrial site. The paper holds, that Egypt as many other Arab countries is facing huge social, economic and cultural transformations which become visible as LOCAL phenomena. These far-reaching processes of change often escape the view of political scientists who focus on the regime and the possibilities of regime change. The paper argues that authoritarian modernization as well as the erosion of “traditional” patterns of power become most visible on the local level. The following paper addresses some of these problems using the example of the local elections in Egypt in a comparative perspective. I will first present the theoretical framework needed fort he analysis of „the „every day state“ as Salwa Ismail (2006) calls it. This includes qualitative network analysis as well as Bourdieus’ concept of social and cultural capital. The paper will then present the macro-political context of Egyptian authoritarianism under Mubarak. The paper draws on empirical material from 1996/7 and 2008. Through comparing structurally similar events – the local elections – it addresses the following questions: How are state-society-relations spelled out throughout the local elections? What are the differences between the elections of 1997 and 2008? Which state and societal actors are interacting in the local space of different Cairene neighbourhoods? How do they interact in the struggles over local hegemony? Which discourses shape local politics? Did these patterns of local politics change over the last 20 years? And if so, why and what are the reasons for and directions of change? In concluding the paper will relate these empirical question to the broader question of understanding the Arab state from a local perspective.