Polarization, Participation, and Democratic Outcomes in Egypt and Tunisia
Panel 109, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 17 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
The first countries to undergo leadership change in the Arab Uprisings – Tunisia and Egypt – experienced different outcomes, with Tunisia institutionalizing peaceful alternation of political power while Egypt became more authoritarian. This panel explores axes of polarization, conflict, and activism in both countries to explain their divergent political outcomes, their economic challenges, and the effects of legal activism on women’s rights.
The first paper mines press coverage and interviews to explain why competition between secular and Islamist actors was channeled into the creation of democracy in Tunisia while severely undermining the Egyptian transition. The author argues that Tunisian secular and Islamist elites’ exposure to similar repression under authoritarianism facilitated cooperation in the post-Ben Ali period, while different experiences of repression by each group in Mubarak-era Egypt increased polarization after 2011.
While secular and Islamist elites agreed on the terms of Tunisia’s political transition, they were more divided on women’s rights. The second paper asks why Tunisian women’s rights coalitions obtained constitutional rights for women such as parity on electoral lists despite secular-Islamist polarization in the constituent assembly, while Egypt failed to achieve similar gains despite Islamist exclusion from the 2014 constitution-writing process. The paper uses interviews in both countries to argue that forms of polarization such as the secular/ Islamic divide can increase women’s rights if activists exploit critical openings in the emerging political system.
The third paper examines a different legal change in women’s rights – new laws in Egypt and Tunisia between 2013 and 2016 facilitating prosecution of sexual harassers. The political science literature stresses the importance of long-established feminist organizations in prompting such change, but the author uses interviews in Egypt to show that new grassroots groups of youth activists built the momentum for legal change there. Established feminist organizations were essential to the passage of anti-harassment laws in Tunisia, but interviews there suggest that activism against harassment within such groups was similarly facilitated by the work of youth new to feminist activism.
The fourth paper examines the failure of women in Egypt and Tunisia to make economic gains post-2011. Drawing on interviews in Egypt in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and in Tunisia in 2015, and government and international financial institution data, the author argues that this failure is the result of both governments’ decision to pursue economic agendas demanded by international financial institutions, such as devaluing the currency and cutting public spending, that maintain recession-like conditions and high unemployment and exacerbated by stagnation in the EU economy in particular, with slow growth of demand for Egyptian and Tunisian exports.
Public sexual harassment (PSH), defined as unwanted verbal or physical sexual contact in public spaces, is endemic in Egypt and Tunisia. A 2013 U.N. Women survey found that 99% of Egyptian women had been harassed, while the Center for Research, Study, Documentation and Information on Women (CREDIF) reported that 70 to 90% of Tunisian women experienced harassment between 2011 and 2015. Since 2013, new laws in both countries have facilitated criminal prosecution of harassers, and Egypt developed all-women police forces to monitor PSH during Eids. The political science literature stresses the importance of long-established feminist organizations in prompting such change, which is largely true in Tunisia but inaccurate in Egypt. My interviews suggest that activism against PSH in both countries has relied heavily on activists between the ages of 17 and 30, many of whom had never engaged in activism or joined feminist groups prior to the Arab Uprisings.
Htun and Weldon’s article “The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change: Combating Violence against Women in Global Perspective, 1975–2005 (American Political Science Review, 2012) concludes that government action on violence against women (VAW) is most likely in countries with strong, autonomous feminist movements and effective women’s policy agencies, and where reservations placed by the country on its ratification of CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) have been removed. Tunisia’s new PSH legislation, part of a larger anti-VAW law, can credibly be explained by this framework, as Tunisia has a strong feminist movement and effective women’s policy agency and removed its CEDAW reservations in 2014. The framework cannot account for the Egyptian case, however, as prior to the Arab Uprisings Egypt’s feminist movement was relatively weak, and Egypt still has no effective women’s policy machinery and has not removed its CEDAW reservations. I use interviews with youth activists to document the emergence and work of new anti-PSH groups in Egypt beginning in 2012 which battled PSH in the streets, public transport, and universities, and demonstrate how their activism built momentum for the criminal code amendments on PSH. While established feminist organizations were essential to the passage of PSH legislation in Tunisia, preliminary fieldwork there suggests that activism against PSH in the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD), one of Tunisia’s best-institutionalized feminist organizations, was facilitated by the actions of young ATFD members new to activism in the post-2011 period.
Contrary to the reigning impression given in the western media and by the international financial institutions (IFIs), which explicitly or implicitly attribute the lack of foreign direct investment (FDI), sluggish economic growth and consequent lack of employment creation in Egypt and Tunisia to the instability and uncertainty initiated by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010-2011, this paper argues that the causality is actually reversed on the domestic side as well as strongly constrained by the global economy. The paper looks directly at the economic situation of women in 2010, and the expectations for improvement that the overthrow of the anciens regimes entailed, in comparison to the economic situation of women in the two countries as of 2017. While formal political participation of women has been enhanced by some measures in both cases, in neither case has there been much economic improvement, as measured by labor force participation, employment and unemployment rates, and professional and entrepreneurial opportunities. Some measures even show deterioration, such as the rising rate of child poverty in Egypt and the increased intimidation of female protesters demonstrating in Tunisia against rising taxes and the freezing of employment in the public sector. The failure, even deterioration, of the economic situation of women and families is due, first, to the lack of a meaningful economic program on the part of the governments that came to power in 2014 in Egypt and Tunisia, programs that should have addressed the gender, class and spatial inequalities that drove the uprising's demands for bread, freedom and social justice. Instead governments have pursued the programs demanded by the IFIs, such as devaluing the currency and cutting public spending, that maintain recession-like conditions and high unemployment. The situation had been exacerbated by stagnation in the EU economy in particular, with slow growth of demand for Egyptian and Tunisian exports, and stagnation in overseas investment. This analysis is based on interviews in Egypt in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and in Tunisia in 2015, plus data from government, NGO, Arab Investment and Export-Guarantee Corporation, ESCWA, African Development Bank and IFI documents, plus media sources reporting from within Egypt and Tunisia (e.g., Al Monitor and the Oxford Business Group).
Elite polarization has been cited in academic and policy analyses as a major factor in explaining the divergent post-uprising outcomes in Egypt and Tunisia, consistent with established contingent theories of democratic transitions. However, the term "polarization" is rarely defined, and indeed, both affective (based on the classic concept of social-distance) and ideological (based on divergent policy preferences) polarization appear to have played an important role in each country’s initial transition. In this paper, I argue that affective polarization is only important when ideological polarization also exists, and that the two are inextricably linked. By identifying as common victims and as members of a broader opposition movement under the old regime, Tunisian elites were less ideologically polarized, while in Egypt, both affective and ideological polarization among elites derailed important negotiations. I do so through a comparison of elite narratives about the events of 2011-2014 in both Egypt and Tunisia, created through press coverage and original interviews.a
