Routledge Handbook on Political Parties in the Middle East and North Africa

Francesco Cavatorta, Lise Storm, Valeria Resta, Francesco Cavatorta, Lise Storm, Valeria Resta, Francesco Cavatorta, Lise Storm, Valeria Resta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive Handbook analyses the political parties and party systems across the Middle East and North Africa. Providing an in-depth, empirically grounded and novel study of political parties, the volume focuses on a region where they have been traditionally and often erroneously dismissed.

The book is divided into five sections, examining:

• the trajectories of Islamist, Salafi, leftist, liberal, nationalist, and personalistic parties drawing from different countries;
• the role political parties play in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries;
• the centrality of political parties in democratic or democratising settings;
• the relationship between parties and specific social constituencies, ranging from women to youth to tribes and sects; and
• the policy positions of parties on a number of issues, including neo-liberal economics, identity, foreign policy and the role of violence.

This wide-ranging and systematic analysis is a key resource for students and scholars interested in party politics, democratization and authoritarianism, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780429269219

1

Political parties in MENA

An introduction

Raymond Hinnebusch, Francesco Cavatorta and Lise Storm

Introduction

How much do political parties matter for governance in MENA? Classic studies on parties, notably those in the structural-functional tradition, agree that they are absolutely crucial to good governance in an age of mass politics; they provide the key link between decision-making elites and citizens, enabling key functions necessary to the health of the political system to be preformed. Parties provide vehicles of elite–mass linkage that allows elites and masses to have some leverage over each other, but the balance of the two can vary considerably. Crucial to allowing the citizenry meaningful participation is the function of aggregating interests (Powell, 2007) into a limited number of alternative programs that, in competitive party systems, offer voters a choice and allow them to hold governing elites accountable for their delivery on these in periodic elections. But parties also perform functions – political mobilisation and socialisation – that allow elites to establish support in society while in legislatures party discipline provides support for stable government – both crucial to effective governance.

Modernisation theorists were convinced that as politicisation increased, in a fairly linear fashion from the upper classes to the middle classes and so on to the mass level, parties not only would become more crucial to the functioning of political systems but they would also develop more complex organisational structures enabling them to perform elite–mass linkage functions, until high levels of inclusion were reached. We now know that in an age of financial globalisation subordinating government policy everywhere to the dictates of neo-liberalism, the ability of parties to perform their historic functions, appear, to varying and arguable degrees, been compromised: they may cease to offer major alternatives, such that voters de-align and drop out (Cavatorta, 2010); in parallel, parties inclusionary capacity may decline, and they come close to becoming mere parliamentary factions as they had been when they were first born in the age of liberal upper-class oligarchy (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Kitchelt 2000; Gallagher et al. 2005; van Biezen and Poguntke 2014, Storm 2020). A the same time, there is a rising risk that the particularistic demands of special interests or media demagogues will fill the vacuum left by party decline, resulting in the debilitation of governance and the loss of trust in political systems, as multiple surveys suggest. The apparent results of party decline therefore actually make the point as to how pivotal parties are to good governance.

In regard to MENA there was scepticism even before globalisation as to the role parties played given the prevalence of authoritarian governance in the region. Parties seemed unable to fully perform the functions attributed to them elsewhere for multiple reasons: the dominance of the executive – presidents or kings – and the weakness of parliaments through which parties could try to hold them accountable; the scarcity of multi-party free elections, hence of the party competition needed for them to perform their accountability functions; the formalistic character of many parties, colonised by “traditional” practices, such as personal dominance of party leaders and lack of internal democracy or endemic factionalism based on “shillas” (small groups bound by primordial or personal ties), with party organisations “facades” for the “real” politics of clientelism; and the ability of about a third of the states in the region to do without parties, arguably more than anywhere else in the world. It is indisputable that all this weakens and debilitates the ability of parties to do what is expected of them. Symptomatically, few of the general texts on MENA politics have chapters on parties. But it does not follow that they do not matter.

Parties in the Middle East and North Africa

Why parties matter in MENA

Reasons for thinking that parties matter in MENA are multiple. First, organisations with a family resemblance to parties exist in two-thirds of Arab states and while their roles may be more marginal than in established democracies, similar structures are unlikely to perform wholly dissimilar functions in a political system. Second, that their role is intimately connected to real politics can be seen in the fact that they have evolved in parallel to political change in the region, both a reflection of this and affecting it: notably the expansion in politicisation has been accompanied by ideological and organisational development of parties, which, in turn, have been instruments of political mobilisation. Third, few regional polities have been able to do without parties once modernisation has advanced enough to politicise the middle class. They are absent only where exceptional conditions hold: small tribal societies where face to face links between ruler and people, consultative councils and the distribution of social entitlements enabled by large hydrocarbon revenues to small population ratios can substitute for parties. Fourth, even if parties have not been wholly effective in the functions expected of them, their existence has made a difference for who rules and how. The mass independence parties that made colonial rule too expensive, the sectarian parties that made consociational democracy operative in Lebanon and more recently Iraq; the single-party systems that consolidated authoritarian populist republics, and the dominant party systems that were instruments of authoritarian upgrading under post-populist republics; the pluralist party system under monarchical tutelage in Morocco, and the (near) two-party systems that were the pivotal instruments of democratisation in Turkey and more recently Tunisia all testify to the difference they make. This underlines the paradox that while parties are necessary to democratisation, they also appear to be crucial to the establishment, consolidation and resilience of authoritarian republics (Cavatorta and Storm 2018; Storm 2020): being legitimised on the basis of popular sovereignty, it is incumbent on the latter to provide vehicles of ostensible political participation. Yet, even monarchies that enjoy traditional legitimation, as notably in Morocco, are also not able to avoid permitting parties except at prohibitive cost, unless the special conditions noted above hold. Fifth, even to the extent to which parties are weak or ineffective, they matter since this can be seen as a major explanation for MENA’s dysfunctional governance – lack of responsiveness to publics – and as such, a factor in their periodic de-stabilisation. The question therefore is not whether parties matter in MENA, but how much, under what conditions and to what effect.

How do we know how much and how parties matter?

How do we assess, much less measure, the role of parties? Early structural functionalist approaches identified the functions that parties were expected to play such as interest aggregation and political recruitment, structuring political identity and constituting and supporting governments, and the structures and practices that performed these functions (Almond and Powell, 1966). This remains a fruitful approach; thus, we can measure how much parties matter by examining whether they have the structures needed to perform key political functions expected of parties and also whether instead alternative structures in the political system do this, for example, in authoritarian republics, does the military substitute for the party as the main recruitment channel to top elite positions, as in Nasser’s Egypt?

Literature on the development of party organisations over time notably assessed if they became more elaborate and institutionalised as membership numbers grew, reflective of the expansion of politicisation and inter-party competition for support. Their complexity and institutionalisation are ways of measuring their efficacy at elite–mass linkage at different stages of politicisation; toward this end we might usefully assess membership size and type (notable, cadre or mass parties); degree of centralisation and hierarchy and the capacity to reach beyond the political centre and penetrate the peripheries to mobilise followers; financing modes (mass membership dues or big donors), possession of civil society auxiliary organisations, whether the parliamentary organisation is accountable to mass membership or not; party discipline in parliament versus factionalism. We can also explore the strategies of party elites in seeking to mobilise support, i.e. what mix of ideology/issue/programmatic orientation, patronage or personalistic appeals are made and ask what difference this makes for the performance of party functions (LaPalombara and Weiner 1966; LaPalombara, 1974). This also applies to MENA.

The sociological-oriented literature focused more on state–society relations, asking how party systems reflected societal cleavages emergent as a result of “development crises,” including independence struggles, the drive for state bureaucratic penetration of society, and industrialisation, as it gave rise to new classes; and how parties represented the clashing interests of different social forces and contributed to their resolution (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). This has been and can be done for MENA parties, too, notably asking how far they incorporate and represent constituencies in society, reflective of its main lines of societal cleavage (or seeking to bridge these), as countries encounter developmental “crises.”

Institutionalist approaches would ask what difference the wider institutional set-up makes for the behaviour and efficacy of parties. Much of the literature in democracies focuses on electoral rules and what difference they make for parties, but comparing the impact of different regime types would be important in the MENA. Relevant to this, a literature has evolved assessing party systems, especially the difference made by the number of parties in the system for performance of functions, such as enabling inclusive representation. A central debate relevant to the MENA was how far single-party systems could be inclusive. Conversely multi-party systems have been seen as carrying a risk of ineffective or unstable coalition governments (Huntington, 1968). This debate remains relevant since in the MENA single-party or dominant-party systems have monopolised the political landscape and where they do not exist, the opposite, namely excessive party fragmentation, appears to be the norm; are these systems relatively ineffective at representation as well as at mobilising power compared to two-party systems? Indeed, can it be an accident that it has been the exceptional (near) two-party systems in the MENA that were associated with the exceptional democratic consolidation, namely, in Turkey and Tunisia?

The following sections will briefly explore some of these issues while adumbrating some of the major variations in parties and their roles in MENA.

How parties develop with modernisation: from notable to mass parties

Parties are arguably more authentic to the extent they reflect the state of society, its cleavages and level of socio-economic development. Parties appear once traditional legitimacy is eroded and constitutions, parliaments and elections are permitted. Once this occurred, emergent elites in MENA adopted a new “political technology”–party ideology and organisation – in order to mobilise support for their agendas (Halpern, 1963). The earliest precursors of political parties appeared in the late Ottoman period when groupings of officers, bureaucrats or professionals formed to press for constitutional rule. In Ottoman Turkey and Iran parties were precipitated by the creation of parliaments where factions of deputies grouped together in “conservative” or “liberal” blocs supporting or opposing the government. In the early Iranian majlis, caucuses (maslaks) of royalists and liberals appeared. In the Arab world such proto-parties further developed where nationalist agitation spurred political mobilisation, into large-scale mass independence movements, such as the Egyptian Wafd, the Moroccan Istiqlal, and Tunisia’s Destour Party. Their dependence on the clientele networks of notables plus their mobilisation of a socially heterogeneous base around the single issue of independence doomed most of them to fragment after independence when they tended to lose their intellectual activists (which formed opposition parties) and their mass bases, being thereby reduced to rumps of notables.

In the immediate post-independence years in the Arab world these parties of “notables” dominated; they were initially the instruments of small groups of wealthy local leaders (ayan, zuama), normally great landlords or merchants, whose extended families controlled certain urban quarters or villages. Linked more by personal ties than ideology, they were ephemeral and vulnerable to factionalism. Able to count on the dependents of the notables, such as peasants on their estates or clients in urban quarters, to win elections, notable parties had little need for party cadres or organisation. Classic examples of such parties were the Liberal-Constitutionalists of Egypt, the various royal parties in Morocco and Jordan, and the National and Constitutional blocs in Lebanon.

The main initial opposition to the upper-class notable parties grew as a still-small Westernised middle class emerged. New parties formed, led by intellectuals and professionals, subscribing to liberal or radical ideologies, often organised around a political newspaper. However, they lacked voter-mobilising machines, and could not access the mass voters embedded in the dependencies and clientele networks of the notables. Yet these middle-class parties allowed individuals and groups to cooperate on a less asymmetric basis by comparison to the clientele networks of the notables.

This early party development reflected the main emergent cleavage in these societies, the new middle class versus the oligarchy. Politics still remained relatively limited to the upper and middle classes and seldom penetrated rural areas. But the accelerating spread of literacy, and some industrialisation and class formation propelled politicisation and the consequent development of larger-scale parties. The evolution of parties beyond the personal factions of notables took place via development of the party organisation needed to incorporate larger numbers of participants being politicised from ever further down in the stratification system: in the first stage, middle-class-led parties created branches in the provincial towns that were dominated by educated professionals and civil servants. The potential of the region’s liberal oligarchies to make a democratic transition was, however, aborted because their party systems were too fragmented or polarised to widen participation and manage peaceful change simultaneously: to a considerable extent the failure of early democratisation was a function of lags in (multi-) party development. This opened the way for the emergence of single-party regimes, “the modern form of authoritarianism,” (Huntington, 1968; Perlmutter, 1981) which consolidated non-democratic regimes across the Arab world. At the same time, however, Turkey embarked on the transition to democracy via its two-party system. These single- and two-party systems would take party development to the next stage, becoming mass parties, with cells in factories and villages that brought in workers and peasants and a permanent staff at the centre. In parallel, as party recruitment widened from the upper class to include activists of middle- and then lower-class origin, the ideologies of parties came to appeal to wider constituencies, promoting more egalitarian and reformist programs, with indeed “socialism” widely embraced, thereby potentially changing the balance of social class power in the region.

How parties consolidate and sustain authoritarianism: from single-party systems to dominant party rule in the republics and multi-party royalism

Institutional configurations matter, particularly the number of parties and amount of party competition permitted.

Single-party systems and Revolution from above

With the rise of populist-authoritarian republics in the Arab world, parties came to matter for their mass incorporating capacity, hence the stability of regimes. Middle-class political leaders, variously originating in middle-class parties and/or the military, established single-party systems as an indispensable new “political technology” in the launching of “revolutions from above” that mobilised and organised large sectors ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Editors
• List of Contributors
• 1 Political parties in MENA: An introduction
• Part I Party families
• Part II Political parties in authoritarian settings
• Part III Political parties in democratic settings
• Part IV Political parties and social constituencies
• Part V Political parties and policy positions
• Index