Parliamentary politics and the democratic reform in Iran The failure of democratic reform and the rise of populism in Iranian politics in the past decade have motivated scholars and analysts to provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Existing explanations generally highlight the role of Iran’s unelected institutions. However, the significant role of parliamentary politics in this process has been relatively overlooked. This paper argues that pursuing democratization agenda through the Iranian parliament ran afoul of deep-seated existing parliamentary settings of Iran and led to an abortive attempt to reform Iran’s political institutions. That is, Iran’s parliamentary politics is associated with clientelism as well as routine administrative tasks. However, in the reformist era, a period of drastic change in legislative process emerged which was unsuccessful in breaking through the established parliamentary politics of Iran. The first part of the paper explores the dynamic of clientelism in Iran’s parliamentary politics through the interviews with some members of the parliament and activists. The findings of this section show that clientelistic accountability is dominant in the relationship between citizens and the members of the Parliament in Iran. The Iranian MPs (Members of Parliament) are assumed to deliver private goods in their districts as a routine responsibility, and only few question the legitimacy of private goods disbursement by MPs. The primary mechanism of this clientelistic linkage is the politicized disbursement of private goods such as jobs, low interest rate loan, permit for industrial activities and other tangible goods to the electorate through the local bureaucracy. The secondary way of maintaining this linkage is through the allocation of club goods that provide benefit for the local constituencies and impose costs on the national level such as hard infrastructures in the district. Afterwards, the paper explicates the difficulties of the reformists in breaking through this established clientelistic politics. That is, the reformists tried to prioritize democratization in the legislative process by expanding the scope of conflict over the issue of democratic reform to change this subsystem. They were successful in enlarging the scope of conflict in the early stages. However, when the issue declined from the public attention, the existing system remained in place, and pursuing democratic change through Iran’s parliament failed.

The Kuwaiti Constitution of 1962 created an interesting hybrid political system, combining a hereditary executive and a freely elected national assembly. To this end, the political history of Kuwait has been one of a game of power balancing between the unelected executive and the elected national assembly, causing recurring political gridlock. At the heart of this game of power balancing is a struggle over the nature of the electoral system and electoral districts. The executive in Kuwait sought to manipulate electoral districts and the electoral system to its advantage, but has generally been unsuccessful in controlling the outcomes of elections to the national assembly and has not been able to quell opposition. Yet what is more surprising is that even when the opposition managed to push back and force its own electoral law and districting scheme, it was not entirely successful in dominating the national assembly. The result was a continuation of the gridlock that characterized Kuwait’s political system since its inception in 1962. This paper seeks to identify the factors that have led to a political system characterized by perpetual gridlock in Kuwait, through an examination of the crucial battle over the electoral system. The study aims to expand on the literature concerning nominally democratic institutions in autocratic regimes in order to explain the strategies of dictators in controlling the opposition, and ultimately, at what point those strategies fail. Such an analysis demonstrates that even the failure of manipulating nominally democratic institutions does not necessarily lead to democratization. Rather, political gridlock becomes the status quo – confounding scholars who have viewed such institutions as either state-subverting or state-sustaining.

What is the function of political parties in authoritarian regimes where they cannot contest the highest executive office? How do parties in such regimes build memberships, address constituencies, and compete with each other? What constitutes political party strength in such regimes? How is such strength measured? This paper seeks to answer these questions through studying the formation and evolution of two political parties in Morocco, Istiqlal and the Party of Justice and Development (PJD). The existing theoretical literature on political parties in authoritarian regimes does not satisfactorily address these questions. Most of this literature focuses on hegemonic parties in single-party or hegemonic-party regimes. Hence, its theoretical propositions do not travel to authoritarian regimes where there is no single, dominant party. The existing literature on political parties in the Arab World also does not provide sufficient answers. Often placing authoritarian incumbents at the center of the analysis, this literature considers party outcomes as functions of authoritarian manipulation. Morocco is an ideal setting for answering the above research questions, as ultimate executive power lies in the hands of the monarch yet there is a vibrant political party scene. The paper examines episodic political party competition and variation over time in competition trends, studying the development of Istiqlal and PDD from 1944-2013. The dependent variable of the study is the political relevance/strength of Istiqlal and PJD. I conceptualize party strength as the quality and quantity of attention afforded to political party cadres in national and foreign media coverage on Morocco, interviews and archival documents. The methodology consists of in-depth content analysis of Moroccan and foreign media sources, supplemented by interviews of Moroccan diplomats / diaspora in Washington, DC and archival research of diplomatic communiques and other primary sources in the National Archive and the Library of Congress. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons to pursue this study. To date, political science research has not theorized the behavior of parties in authoritarian regimes where they cannot gain executive power. The literature has also not yet contributed an effective way of measuring political party strength in authoritarian regimes. Empirically, studying political party behavior in authoritarian settings can help understand the political vacuum characterizing a post-revolutionary Arab world today. Hence this study can contribute important findings to the scholarship on Arab political participation and prospects for democratization.

This paper argues that parties are the most critical actors developing, impeding, or undermining democratic institutions in the post-Arab spring Middle East cases of Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Tunisia. We argue that party behavior in these nascent democracies is deeply conditioned by the development of cleavage structures in the prior authoritarian period. We trace the development of cleavage structures, explaining the absence of left-right cleavages and the prevalence of either universalist-transformative or particularistic-redistributive cleavage structures. We then modify classic models of democratization, recognizing that contenders weigh costs of toleration and suppression when they decide whether to accept or subvert democratic institutions. We go beyond the conventional emphasis on economic distributional issues, however, to understand how the cleavages mobilized by political parties shape these relative costs and hence set the parameters for party behavior and the likelihood of democratic consolidation.

Mainstream academic and policy literature emphasises the nexus between an increase in civil society institutions and greater political accountability. As a result, support for civil society has become central to international policy efforts to strengthen democracy in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. However, the empirical evidence presented in this paper questions the accuracy of this assumption. Drawing upon semi-structured interview data collected from civil society organisations (CSOs) in each of the seven administrative regions of Turkey, the paper analyses the relationship between the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi -AKP) and civil society in Turkey. The results that emerge demonstrate that the AKP government are creating their ‘own civil society’ as a method of drowning out critical voices that might challenge their authority. Independent CSOs report that they are becoming increasingly excluded from policy and legislative discussions as CSOs that ‘toe the party line’ are created to replace them. These findings, which are supplemented by an analysis of policy and government White Paper documents, suggest that an increase in the number of civil society organisations in Turkey is serving to sustain the government’s power rather than increasing political accountability to the people. These results and their implications have significant consequences for our understanding and general theorising of civil society and its role in supporting democracy.

This paper aims to explain why the processes of consolidating transitions have taken different shapes in two Arab Spring countries: Egypt and Tunisia. Studies that seek to explain the challenges facing Arab Spring countries mostly rely on cultural, economic or external factors (e.g. socio-economic difficulties, existence of a predominantly conservative culture, lack of historical democratic experience; unsupportive regional and international factors, etc.), but they largely overlook elite behavior. The proposed study thus asks in how far inter-elite trust can help explain the differentiated democratization paths in Egypt and Tunisia in the three years following the removal of their former rulers. By measuring and explaining variations of trust among the party elites in both countries – through a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods – we argue that post-Mubarak’s Egypt has been facing more serious challenges than post-Ben Ali’s Tunisia because inter-elite trust has been comparatively lower in the former. Our theoretical framework rests on two main arguments. Firstly, that in many ways, a successful transition depends on a reasonable degree of inter-elite trust, as it is this trust that facilitates the kind of compromises and consensus-building behavior necessary for any stable transition. Secondly, that several institutional and structural factors have contributed to creating a differentiated level of inter-elite trust in Egypt and Tunisia – some of them date back to the pre-transition era. Concerning our use of data, a triangulation approach is employed. Data collection is done through a mix of elite interviews, an elite survey of relevant politicians as well as text analysis of party press releases, party press as well as of other relevant media. The purpose here is to gauge the extent and reasons of the negative image of opponents (mostly ordered along the Islamist –non-Islamist division line) in both countries.