Methodological Advances in the Study of Middle East and North African Elections
Panel 059, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 15 at 10:15 am
Panel Description
Increasingly, scholars and students of contemporary politics in the Middle East and North Africa are turning to the dynamics of participation and contestation in electoral politics. Traditional approaches to the study of electoral politics in the region have emphasized the institutional modalities of authoritarian rule, the role of repression and coercion, and the factors affecting the survival of the region’s political regimes. These approaches draw on a variety of methodological tools, often combining theory with case- and area-specific knowledge. This panel aims to transcend these boundaries by bringing a diverse group of recent studies of electoral politics into conversation with one another. Why do citizens participate in national and municipal elections? What kinds of clientelistic or programmatic citizen-elite linkages do these elections produce? How have the dynamics of opposition participation in these elections evolved? How well do patterns from case-based studies hold across time and space?
This panel aims to demonstrate how creative approaches and methodological advances to the study of elections may offer a new challenge to foundational theories in comparative politics. In particular, the papers included in this panel draw attention to how elections influence the quality of representation, citizen attitudes towards social policy and welfare, and the size and strength of political oppositions. Too often, elections are assumed to be residual phenomena of a variety of state-imposed pathologies, such as clientelism, sectarianism, and economic inequality. Many foundational studies of regional elections have produced a set of assumptions that have not been empirically assessed. The multi-method studies proposed in this panel aim to bridge this critical gap in knowledge. New electoral forces—such as populist oppositions and parties operating in new democracies—remain poorly understood by political scientists and students and scholars of MENA more broadly. The papers included in this panel draw on evidence from four different countries, using data from historical elections and censuses, surveys, and interviews.
First democratic local elections trigger an intensive period of party-building, as existing parties incorporate new cadres. These elections can make dominant parties either more open and diverse organizations or push them under further control of the incumbent central elites, depending on the cost-benefit calculations of the latter. This paper seeks to document which strategies have been adopted by the Tunisian parties in the first democratic local elections of the country after the collapse of the authoritarian regime in 2011, focusing on the main Islamist (Ennahdha) and secular party (Nidaa Tounes) of the country. Using data from an original survey of more than 1900 candidates, interviews with party officials in seven municipalities, and existing survey data, I show that upper-middle-class professionals, the core constituency of secular-modernist parties in the Middle East, are in a process of disengagement from party politics. Meanwhile, the Islamist party is implementing successful strategies to incorporate more segments of this class to its ranks. The implications of these trends for the future of the party system in Tunisia are also discussed.
Under what conditions do governments decentralize political authority, and to what end? Scholars have framed empowering local government as a way to improve service delivery and enhance elite accountability. Yet others observe that decentralization initiatives can be engineered from within by authoritarian regimes seeking to entrench their power. In postwar Lebanon, I argue that municipal institutions were designed and employed by ethnosectarian party representatives to coopt peripheral, usually clan-based elites into national clientelist networks. This process has subsequently de-escalated demands placed on the central state. Using Arabic-language primary source documents, 130 interviews across over a dozen municipalities, and analysis of an original candidate-level local elections dataset, I show that the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) provided the impetus for central state officials to abdicate responsibility for everyday governance to municipal authorities. Simultaneously, the ethnosectarian parties that formed during and immediately following the war leveraged the precarity of municipal institutions to co-opt elites into party networks via a variety of material incentives. Parties have subsequently achieved high rates of success in electing partisan candidates to municipal positions, particularly in electorally profitable urban areas. These findings illustrate how policy decentralization can be engineered to serve the interests of non-democratic regimes, particularly in the aftermath of civil war.
Why do citizens in electoral autocracies vote for 'the opposition'? Previous efforts to understand the causes and effects of electoral institutions under authoritarian rule have largely ignored the social origins of opposition candidates, political parties, and factions. This neglect is surprising, given how central opposition cohesion is for processes of democratization and liberalization. I develop a theory of opposition electoral success grounded in the choice of electoral institutions, the coalitional capacity of opposition elites, and the political behavior of voters. How do mechanisms of socialization rooted in historic patterns of voter behavior affect contemporary political attitudes and voter behavior? What factors lead to an increase in support for the ‘opposition’ across time and space in electoral autocracies? This paper explores these questions in Kuwait, using a novel dataset of district- and neighborhood-level election returns from 1963 to the present. I supplement this data with interview material collected from current and former Members of Parliament and candidates.
What are the determinants of public goods provision in authoritarian countries, and why do they differ across sectors? Scholars examining democracies have debated that office-seeking politicians allocate goods and services to either “core” or “swing” voters, whereas the literature on developing countries has demonstrated that patronage and clientelism shape social service provision. However, existing work does not provide an adequate explanation for (i) why authoritarian governments may invest in providing any benefits at all or (ii) why public goods provision may vary across sectors in autocracies. Using data on social service allocation in postwar Algeria (1998-2008), we find that education – enrollment and literacy rates – grew more rapidly in areas that voted in greater numbers for the Algeria’s ruling party prior to the civil war. However, we do not find the same pattern of other government benefits; for instance, water and electricity provision grew more rapidly in pre-war opposition strongholds. To explain the results, we argue that education is distinctive from other public goods because education works to advance the social status of government supporters. However, other public goods simply keep citizens afloat without providing the upward mobility. We also support our theory by qualitatively analyzing the centralization of the educational system and the decentralization of infrastructural authorities in Algeria.
