This paper examines how the evolution of ideational conflicts between Islamist and leftist intellectual advocates over the past four decades has shaped the dominant discourse and narrative through which leftists have sought to justify the repression of Islamist currents in the aftermath of the 2013 coup. The paper builds its argument on an analysis of a variety of primary sources, including books and articles published by leftist and Islamist intellectuals since the 1970s. Since the mid-1970s, debates and conflicts between Islamist and leftist intellectuals and activists have generated a variety of historical narratives and a repertoire of language that endorsed the political exclusion of ideological rivals. The 1970s and 1980s saw the advent of an Islamist “authenticity critique” of the left. That critique argued that leftist movements do not enjoy an organic connection with Egyptian society, presenting them as foreign implants with questionable national loyalties. In making these arguments, Islamist critics often invoked historical narratives underscoring the pivotal contributions of foreigners to the creation and advancement of the communist movement. The political victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s and Islamist attacks against secular intellectuals in the 1990s, paved the way for a leftist counter-critique of Islamists, one that continues to shape leftist discourse in the contemporary moment. Adopting a strong nationalist veneer, the counter-critique held that it was the Islamist movement that lacked authentic roots in Egyptian society, while arguing that Islamists’ loyalties lie not with Egypt, but with international networks of Islamist groups and governments. Supporting that counter-critique was an effort to construct a historical narrative of Egypt’s Islamist movement that imbues it with an un-Egyptian, anti-nationalist character and, relatedly, alleges its tacit commitment to violence. In situating this historical context, the article brings to light new lines of inquiry about the historical origins of political polarization in post-Mubarak Egypt, and important junctures that contributed to this phenomenon.

CLEAVAGE POLITICS AND PARTY SYSTEM FORMATION This paper examines the impact of political legacies and social cleavage on party systems and how those systems in authoritarian and competitive authoritarian states are first structured. The initial purpose is to extend the debate on cleavage theory, apply it to new contexts, and show how social cleavage structures take shape. A secondary purpose, related to the first, is to reveal the early effect of social cleavage on party systems and party types. Using comparative analysis, the paper investigates the historical basis for understanding social cleavages and how they are expressed and gain saliency by interacting with party systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Turkey. Specifically, it analyzes the cause and effect of post-independence political cleavages on early patterns of political mobilization and party systems, together with the influence of the latter on regime formation. The paper makes several points. First, where elites promoted state-centered nationalism, secular nationalist regimes emerged and were characterized by the dominant or one-party system. This created an ideological cleavage where a rival opposing force ‒ namely, Islamic nationalism ‒ generated several regime types, which also, like the secular elites, varied according to the level of modernization and their attitude to the West. This argument supports the importance of contextualizing cleavage politics in MENA. Second, this paper casts light on the nature of structural cleavages in MENA, conceptualizing those cleavages within its context advances our understanding of the origins and durability of the preponderant parties in the Middle East and their impact on regime type. Third, while traditional cleavages are a social construct, they can be politically constructed and manipulated by and imposed from above (a top-down ideology), particularly during regime transitions, and in responding to the political environment.

How does the political selection compare across secular and Islamist parties in the Middle East and North Africa region? Even though the political selection literature burgeoned in recent years, we know much less about who becomes a politician in the MENA region and across this important socio-political cleavage. This paper studies this question by focusing on most recent local elections in Turkey and Tunisia. Using original sources of data (detailed and large-scale candidate surveys, accompanying household surveys in the same municipalities, and interviews with party officials), the paper demonstrates that in both countries, the Islamist parties are able to select more competent candidates with higher levels of educational attainment, organization-building experience and prior civic engagement, even though the secular-leaning segments of the society are usually more endowed with these assets. In turn, secular party candidates are more likely to have a family history of political engagement and administrative office-holding, suggesting that they are more connected. I argue that the relative negative selection among seculars likely stem from demand-side reasons: Secular parties suffer from intense intra-party competition, as a result of which secular party elites prioritize loyalty over competence in candidate selection. I provide evidence for this argument from interviews with party officials and a conjoint experiment in both Turkey and Tunisia.

This paper challenges the common notion that Ahmadinejad won the 2005 elections thanks to the votes of the marginalized in the rural areas and the lower classes with lower levels of education, and shows that his base was mostly a Persian-speaking well-educated urban middle class. This is achieved employing multinomial logistic regression and ecological inference on Iran’s socioeconomic data to investigate the profile of the Iranian voters who chose to vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and 2009 Iranian Presidential Elections and set it in the context of class cleavages in the Iranian society and politics. Such a result also negates the common notion that Iran’s middle class is the bastion of a liberal-minded reform movement, and its enlargement would result in democratization and progress towards liberal democracy. Rather, the Iran’s new urban middle class consists of at least two large factions, with both having their roots in the post-revolution state-building and developmentalism. The paper suggests that Ahmadinejad’s victory and administration, owing to this “other” middle class, was not an aberration and break from the preceding two presidencies and a class upheaval as it has been suggested by analysts and politicians, but an internal struggle of the middle class with consensus on economy, but differences in social and cultural ideas. Keywords: Iran elections, urban middle class, liberalization, ecological inference