Under what conditions do voters reward a candidate who has sacrificed for his political beliefs? A theory linking political sacrifice to an electoral advantage is supported with evidence from Turkey and Tunisia—two countries where Islamist politicians experienced long-standing political repression. Findings from an original survey experiment in Turkey suggest that exposure to information about a candidate's political imprisonment significantly improves respondents' ideological affinity with the candidate. In addition, respondents who identify as co-victims or who have low political knowledge are more likely to vote for a candidate who was imprisoned. These findings hold regardless of which party the candidate belongs to. Respondents presented with a candidate from the Islamist Justice and Development Party also report higher levels of trust and closeness with the imprisoned candidate. The theory is bolstered with further survey evidence from Turkey and Tunisia and 50 in-depth interviews with politicians from Tunisia’s nine largest political parties. Scope conditions are established with null findings from a survey experiment conducted in Tunisia, following a period of backlash against the Islamist Al-Nahda and the subsequent rise of an autocratic successor party Nidaa Tounes to power.

The rise of the religious right in the United States and Islamist political parties in the Arab world are but the most prominent examples of a global resurgence in religious conservatism. This resurgence could spell an era of increasing polarization and gridlock, as religious conservatives are widely believed to be unwilling to compromise on their divinely ordained principles. Recent literature suggests that one avenue to facilitate compromise with religious conservatives may be to engage them with liberal reinterpretations of religious texts. In this study, we examine whether 1) conservatives are truly less willing to compromise when they hold a religious rather than secular justification for their position, and 2) if so, whether engaging religious conservatives with liberal religious counterarguments can facilitate compromise. We investigate these questions through a series of laboratory experiments in Tunisia. While previous scholarship has struggled to measure compromise, we offer a direct, behavioral measure, pairing up one liberal and one conservative respondent to debate a current policy issue and attempt to reach a compromise. Prior to the debate, we prime each side with either religious or secular justifications for their position. We first hold fixed the secular prime given to the liberal, and investigate whether a religious rather than secular justification given to the conservative inhibits compromise. We then hold fixed the religious justification given the conservative, and examine whether priming the liberal with a religious reinterpretation facilitates compromise. We find that priming the conservative side with a religious justification for their side had no impact on the rate of compromise. This suggests that contrary to popular belief, the rise of religious conservatives in politics may not produce greater polarization and gridlock. However, priming the liberal side with a religious counterargument hindered compromise. Through a post-debate questionnaire, we find that a religious counterargument emboldened the liberal side to stand their ground, while making the religious conservative defensive and unwilling to compromise. This suggests that engaging religious conservatives with religious reinterpretations may have the opposite of its intended effect, discouraging compromise.

Research on blame avoidance suggests that dictators should struggle to avoid blame for poor governance outcomes, since they are the most powerful and visible figures in their political systems. Nonetheless, citizens in authoritarian regimes often appear to believe sincerely that the dictator is not responsible when problems emerge. To address this puzzle, my paper develops a theory in which dictators encourage this myth by strategically delegating responsibility for policy implementation to subordinate institutions, which then become scapegoats for unpopular government policies. Delegating in this manner enables the dictator to strengthen perceptions of their good intentions while minimizing perceptions of their control, both of which play an important role in the psychological processes by which individuals assign blame. Drawing on thousands of news articles and social media posts in both Arabic and English from Jordan, the first section of the paper uses qualitative and quantitative text analysis methods to show how the Jordanian monarchy constructs a narrative in which the parliament and cabinet, but not the king, are responsible for contentious social and economic policy issues. In addition, this section leverages a dataset of more than 800 Jordanian ministers from 1946 to the present, as well as interviews with more than 50 Jordanian elites, to further demonstrate the monarchy’s use of delegation to avoid blame. The next section of the paper explores the extent to which this strategy actually shapes how the Jordanian public attributes blame within the political system. It uses observational survey data to show that Jordanians consider the cabinet and parliament to be responsible for policy implementation, and it uses experimental data to show that delegation protects the king by redirecting attributions of responsibility to other political institutions. The final section of the paper argues that autocratic monarchs can use this strategy more effectively than autocratic presidents because of divergent norms about the role these rulers are meant to play in the governing process. To make this argument, the paper uses historical process tracing and experimental survey data from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia. The study illustrates how and when dictators are able to deflect popular dissatisfaction with poor policy outcomes despite their powerful positions.

“Refolution,” a form of revolutionary mobilization tempered by reformist demands, has characterized the currents of political mobilization in MENA up to and including the Arab Spring. In "Revolution without Revolutionaries" (2017), Asef Bayat attributes this pattern to the increasing dominance – and thus increasing internalization – of neo-liberal normative structures that, when paired with patterns of urbanization, encourage revolutionary mobilization through street politics. Describing these movements as “rich in movement, poor in change,” Bayat paints a picture of mass movements with tremendous street power and high potential for creating political openings, but with limited vision of alternative political orders, limited structural impact, and little control over post-opening politics. The causal mechanisms linking the predominance of neo-liberalism to uninspired political action, however, are underspecified. My paper contributes to this literature by highlighting the role of digital communications technology. For the most part, digital communications networks have been linked to modern political movements largely by their effect on mobilization tactics, but there is less consensus in political science of how ex ante structural alterations of digital communications preface modern mobilization. There is little doubt that communications technologies have radically reformulated information delivery and processing throughout MENA, independent of mobilization tactics. The absence of this variable from existing accounts of the causal story is, therefore, puzzling. This paper posits two causal mechanisms by which advances in digital communications technologies contribute to the formation of “refolutions,” derived from psychological studies analyzing behavior in digital contexts. First, the routinization of visible dissonance – as opposed to synthesis – within beliefs systems and between beliefs and behaviors disrupts the formation of alternative political ideologies and group cohesion. Second, political struggles are redirected from the local to the global stage, where the prime currency for mobilization rests in exaggerated signaling of virtue and victimization. I argue that these mechanisms have produced deep cognitive changes that exert enduring influence on the dynamics of political mobilization and the behaviors/preferences of political actors. I point to a number of examples from recent political movements in MENA to illustrate my point. I then contrast these movement dynamics with those of subaltern communities which – unsurprisingly – tend to lack a digital footprint. I conclude with an entreaty for increased study of the effects of cognitive path dependence and the construction of political movements.

In lower and middle-income countries where identity-based divisions shape political life, what do the attitudes of the elite class look like? How do they shift at critical junctures? Our paper investigates these questions at the American University of Beirut (AUB), using an original panel survey conducted shortly before and after the annual student elections - the first survey of its kind conducted in the Middle East. Like many universities in the region, candidate alliances and campaign strategies at AUB mirror those of national parties. A central component of the survey is a choice-based conjoint experiment that measures student support for hypothetical candidates running in the 2018 Parliamentary elections. Through the conjoint, we find that students disfavor candidates allied with Lebanon’s dominant sectarian political factions and those from notable families, while simultaneously expressing strong favoritism toward coreligionist candidates. These preferences predictably diverge between students who vote for mainstream sectarian parties and those that support the on-campus secular movement. We also find, using a difference-in-differences design, that support for mainstream party coalitions and candidates from prominent family backgrounds significantly increases among student voters following the elections. Collectively, these findings suggest that Lebanon’s “future elite” enter university life with strong ethnocentric biases, and that participation in campus politics habituates students to Lebanon’s prevailing political order rather than having a liberalizing or radicalizing effect.