Political Elites and Regime Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Accommodation or Exclusion?

Introduction

Whether political elites accommodate or exclude their rivals during regime crises can be a matter of life and death. Following the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), elite compromise sustained a democratic transition in Tunisia, while elite conflict triggered a coup in Egypt. Tunisia has since seen three democratic elections, while thousands of Egyptians were jailed or killed by the new military regime.

Research Question

Why do elites in some cases pursue accommodation while they push for excluding their rivals in others?

Proposed Answer

MENA-PERC proposes an answer to this puzzle: the degrees of asymmetry and polarization between regime coalitions and their challengers shape elite preferences for accommodation or exclusion. These preferences, in turn, determine the type of regime emerging from crisis.

Role of Regime Coalitions

Regime coalitions comprise elites who provide crucial links to social constituencies and whose collective support stabilizes the regime. The project theorizes the role of these actors, linking macro-level outcomes in terms of regime types to evidence on the micro-level of individual elites.

Methodology

The project draws on evidence from 12 regime spells in three MENA countries across more than a century.

1. Identification of Regime Coalitions:

   • Focus on members of parliament in Egypt (1882-present), Tunisia (1907-present), and Turkey (1908-present).
   • Observe processes of elite change empirically based on individual-level data on these elite members.
   • Leverage these data in a mixed-methods design.

2. Tracing Causal Mechanisms:

   • Conduct elite surveys and in-depth fieldwork examining:
     • Authoritarian consolidation in contemporary Egypt.
     • Democratization in Tunisia.
     • Democratic backsliding in Turkey.

Contributions

The project makes three contributions:

1. It theorizes why elites accommodate or exclude during regime crises.
2. It pioneers an innovative way of testing this model by observing elite change over time.
3. It traces the model's causal mechanisms in ongoing processes of regime change.