Egypt, by third world standards, traditionally boasted a relatively generous egalitarian insurance- based welfare regime centered on contribution-based pensions and a universal food subsidy system. The onset of neoliberal reforms since 1991 has been associated with hidden retrenchment in the country’s social policies, marked by dilution of universal subsidy benefits and introduction of a new layer of targeted productivist welfare, as a parallel track benefiting segments of the lower middle classes, without overhauling the welfare regime or restructuring its main programs. On the eve of the January 25th uprising, in collaboration with the World Bank Mubarak’s regime took tentative steps towards more explicit restructuring through semi-privatization of Egypt’s pension system, or gradual transitioning from the the Pay As You Go system to the individual accounts system. The controversial bill was approved by Parliament in June 2010 and was expected to voluntarily affect new labor entrants starting from 2012, but was never signed off by the then head of state. The uprising, which called for “bread, freedom and social justice,” ushered in continuation of earlier patterns of welfare reforms through minimizing leakage, and limiting benefits without undermining access, as well as expanding targeted productivist initiatives. However, post-Mubarak elites refrained from seeing through the enactment and implementation of a new pension system, instead the system has undergone organizational parametric reforms in recent years. What are the underlying political economy dynamics that have constrained the pension reform process in Egypt pre and post the uprising? The paper draws on: in-depth interviews with current and ex-officials in charge of the social insurance and pension fund, senior decision-makers at the Ministry of Finance, and specialized technocrats, who were involved in drafting the reform bill under Mubarak. I argue that the dominant coalition maintenance imperatives and cultural norms of citizenship shaped the acceptable contours for policy reform while pressure from labor unions and pensioners’ associations played a limited role in shaping pension reforms in Egypt.

One of the most widely accepted scholarly findings about welfare states is that democracies are more likely to have generous welfare states than autocracies. In democracies, voter preferences and interest group pressure create incentives for elected leaders to adopt generous social welfare policies. Social welfare provision in autocracies is limited, scholars contend, because authoritarian governments are not accountable to voters and repress interest groups. Yet contrary to theoretical expectations, some autocracies in the Middle East and North Africa have adopted comprehensive social programs that have considerably improved the well-being of their citizens. In this paper, I advance an argument to explain the emergence of these relatively generous authoritarian welfare states. I argue that generous authoritarian welfare states have emerged in countries where mass mobilizing parties (MMPs) and infrastructurally powerful states were present during the initial periods of authoritarian regime formation. MMPs are political parties that emerged during the colonial or imperial rule and that sought to fundamentally transform the established political order. These transformative goals required them to generate widespread support in societies that were deeply differentiated along ethnic, racial, and sectarian lines. To mobilize citizens behind the party’s transformational goals, MMPs sought to develop new national solidarities to supplant preexisting sectional identities. This, in turn, required regime-building MMPs to replace communal networks of social support with alternative, national systems of solidarity. To achieve this goal of cultivating national solidarity, MMPs adopted generous social programs that built a substantive bond between citizens and national parties. The development of generous authoritarian welfare states, however, is conditioned by the level of infrastructural power of the state. Building a state with high infrastructural power enabled regime-building MMPs to (1) raise revenues to finance social welfare policies, (2) acquire the bureaucratic capacity to design and implement these policies, and (3) gain autonomy from social groups that might oppose social welfare provision. I illustrate these logics through case studies of Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, three autocracies that have built relatively generous welfare states despite showing significant difference in factors that explain the generous social welfare provision, such as strong labor movements, communal cleavages, and intense conflict among the founding elites.

This article evaluates policies of economic reform primarily in Egypt and in Costa Rica as a comparative case study, specifically focusing on land policy and education policies. In this article I treat neoliberalism as primarily as localized governmentalities with unique policies. These governmentalities and policies reflect historical pacts and guarantees between citizens and their governments regardless of government type or location. The prevalence of international economic institutions supporting neoliberal transformations across the world in the last half century proves the opportunity for a new set of comparative studies. I place these policies within their political environment and identify the winners and losers of these policies, as well as remedial actions that were or were not taken to support losers. The comparative methodology of this article serves to strengthen the conclusions about Egyptian political economy while opening a line of inquiry into the effect of neoliberal economic reform across the world. Decades of economic reform in Egypt under successive autocratic and patrimonial regimes entrenched economic inequalities and stripped economic security from millions, leading to revolution. Costa Rica shared in many of the same economic and geopolitical conditions experienced by Egypt in the latter half of the twentieth century which led the country to adopt neoliberal economic reforms. However, Costa Rica emerged from reform with an intact social safety net and new economic opportunities for a large swathe of its citizens while taking steps to mitigate groups which experienced losses. This article concludes that the historical democratic character of Costa Rica’s economic decision making yielded this relatively more equitable outcome. Meanwhile, the orientation of Egyptian political economy towards cronyism and regime survival turned neoliberal reform policies into a means of eliminating unwanted economic guarantees on which much of the population relied. With the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring in mind, this article makes connections between the socio-economic outcomes of neoliberal reform and the onset of the January 25th revolution in Egypt. As plans for further reform continue under the Sisi regime particularly with privatization and infrastructure development, this article offers a conceptual lens to evaluate new reform policies in the context of almost a half-century of political developments and economic struggles. The fight over the future of the Egyptian social contract is far from settled.