Elections and Electoral Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa
Panel VI-06, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, December 2 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
Most regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are considered authoritarian, but most also feature nominally democratic, coopting institutions, such as elections, parties, and legislatures. Many studies focusing on the region have paid attention to the mere presence of these institutions, rather than the underpinnings, as well as the causes and consequences, of them. Moreover, studies of electoral politics and democratization often treat MENA as exceptional. As such, broader theories of these institutions often overlook cases from the Arab world.
This panel aims to bridge these literatures by assessing variations in nominally democratic institutions in the Arab world in the context of broader theories, including studies examining political institutions in transitioning countries as well as advanced democracies. Each paper uses original, fine-grained data to unpack the micro-processes and workings of electoral institutions in MENA. In doing so, the panel investigates different coopting institutions in the region and presents findings with implications for how these types of institutions operate in other parts of the world.
The papers of this panel address unique questions related to the threats and stresses experienced by democratic institutions, like elections, worldwide. The panel assesses illiberal tendencies in so-called democratic institutions, while building on the literature examining those institutions in other parts of the world. It highlights that micro-institutions can operate under similar logics across regime types and regions, with similar types of actors and strategies hindering democratic practices.
This panel features scholars of diverse backgrounds, ranks, and academic institutions. They adopt different methods to examine nominally democratic institutions across the Arab world, assessing theories of electoral institutions and democratic transition in authoritarian contexts. In doing so, the panel situates the Arab world within broader theories of electoral institutions, rather than as exceptional.
Gender quotas are increasingly being adopted not just by democracies, but also autocracies. Yet in autocracies, while gender quotas may still empower women, they may also grant dictators domestic and international legitimacy for having adopted the quota. Does this trade-off shape public attitudes toward quotas in autocracies? Are citizens living in autocratic regimes less supportive of gender quotas knowing they may legitimize the dictator? Or do the potential benefits of empowering women outweigh these costs? In this paper, we answer these questions by exploring this trade-off directly through a survey experiment in Algeria. The survey was fielded during the 2019-2020 Hirak protests, a mass uprising that toppled long-time dictator Abdelaziz Bouteflika and then continued against the remnants of his regime. In this context of mass frustration with the regime, we hypothesize that the potential costs of legitimizing the regime will outweigh the benefits of empowering women, leading Algerians to negatively evaluate gender quotas when presented with the trade-off. We conduct a survey experiment in which respondents are primed to think of how gender quotas empower women, how they might legitimize dictators, or both, forcing them to evaluate the trade-off. When primed about the gains to women, Algerians tended to become significantly more supportive of gender quotas than in the control. However, when primed about the legitimacy they may grant to the regime, Algerians were no more supportive than the control. Finally, when presented explicitly with the trade-off, the costs tended to outweigh the gains to women, and Algerians were likewise no more supportive than in the control. This finding is supported by cross-national analyses of eleven Arab countries using the Arab Barometer data.
Autocrats use institutions to `coopt' members of the opposition and neutralize their threat as outsiders. But why do opposition actors allow themselves to be coopted? In Morocco, a constitutional monarchy, the constitution grants elected members of parliament the authority to make requests of government ministers, but it does not require that ministers respond. As a result, horizontal accountability between legislature and executive -- and, correspondingly, legislative effectiveness -- is dependent in practice on the incentives of the ministers themselves to answer a given request. Regime-selected technocrats lack incentives to respond to requests, given their importance for attracting electoral support, and should therefore be less responsive to legislative demands. I test this hypothesis with data on more than 27000 written queries raised by elected legislators in the Moroccan parliament as well as information on the ministers to which they were submitted. I use both matching and difference-in-differences approaches to show that ministers with partisan affiliations are more likely to answer requests posed by legislative deputies than technocrats selected by the regime. The results imply that outside (partisan) participation in government strengthen institutions of executive oversight and that, in contrast, technocrats loyal to the regime negatively impact these same institutions.
Theories of democratic governance assume that citizens reward or punish politicians for their performance in providing public services. This study expands the existing debate by shifting the focus to subnational heterogeneities in electoral returns to government performance. I introduce a theory suggesting that electoral returns to local public goods will increase with their excludability, i.e., the degree to which they are used only by the local population, because due to their excludability, the local population will see them as ‘club goods’ and as a signal of favoritism. However, this perception of favoritism and club good effect is less likely to be seen when political, ethnic, or religious cleavages between the government and the local electorate exist. Using a comprehensive panel dataset that contains information on all public education and health investments in Turkey since the 1990s and geocoded mobile call data that shows residents’ mobility patterns, this study finds that electoral returns to health and education investments are higher when public goods have a club good nature. However, excludability does not translate to higher reciprocity in secular districts, where a perception of favoritism is less likely to develop due to the cleavages with the Islamist incumbent party, AKP. By revealing that electoral returns to government investments are conditional on characteristics of community structure and composition of beneficiaries, this paper advances the literature on local public services and electoral accountability.
This paper argues that individuals think differently about different kinds of political leaders in ways that influence evaluations of democracy in their political systems. Specifically, people expect presidents but not kings to represent the people by facing electoral competition for their positions. These expectations make it easier for autocratic monarchs to obscure their authoritarianism relative to autocratic presidents, reducing their vulnerability to demands for democratic governance. A survey experiment implemented in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia provides evidence that people think differently about monarchs and presidents, and observational survey data from the Arab Barometer demonstrates that citizens of authoritarian monarchies are significantly more likely to believe their regimes are democratic. A case study of Egypt and Jordan connects these beliefs to opposition during the Arab Spring. The paper indicates the importance of studying how institutions shape authoritarian regime durability by influencing the public's perceptions of how they are being governed.
