Political Elites and Regime Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Accommodation or Exclusion?core
MENA-PERC · Horizon Europe grant · 2023-01-01–2027-12-31
EC contribution
Total cost
Beneficiaries
About the data
Source: CORDIS (official EU open data), Horizon Europe. Framework HORIZON · call ERC-2021-COG · scheme HORIZON-ERC · topic ERC-2021-COG. CORDIS record →
Objective
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. Why do elites in some cases pursue accommodation while they push for excluding their rivals in others? 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. 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 macrolevel outcomes in terms of regime types to evidence on the microlevel of individual elites. The project draws on evidence on 12 regime spells in three MENA countries across more than a century. Regime coalitions are identified by focusing on members of parliament in Egypt (1882-present), Tunisia (1907-present), and Turkey (1908-present), observing processes of elite change empirically based on individual-level data on these elite members and leveraging these data in a mixed-methods design. Second, the project traces causal mechanism through elite surveys and in-depth fieldwork examining authoritarian consolidation in contemporary Egypt, democratization in Tunisia, and democratic backsliding in Turkey. The project makes three contributions. It theorizes why elites accommodate or exclude during regime crises; it pioneers an innovative way of testing this model by observing elite change over time; and it traces the model’s causal mechanisms in ongoing processes of regime change.
Beneficiaries (1)
| Organisation | Country | Role | EC contribution | SME |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SCUOLA SUPERIORE DI STUDI UNIVERSITARI E DI PERFEZIONAMENTO S ANNA | IT | coordinator | €1,915,601 |
Get the DFM funding briefing — free
New EU defence calls, tenders and awards in your inbox.
Defence Finance Monitor is an analytical and informational product. Grant data is official CORDIS; payment and subscription happen on DFM Analysis.