Elections and Democratization in the Middle East

The Tenacious Search for Freedom, Justice, and Dignity

M. Hamad, K. al-Anani, M. Hamad, K. al-Anani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137299253
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Campañas políticas y elecciones

Top scholars of the Middle East set out the history and future of elections in eight Middle East countries. Examining issues associated with elections, the transition of governance, and the ways in which technology shapes popular participation in politics and elections, they discuss the future of governance and democratic transition in the region.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRATIC BEAUTY AND ELECTORAL UGLINESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

NATHAN J. BROWN

DEMOCRACY IS BEAUTIFUL IN PRINCIPLE, but democratic politics is often ugly in practice. The Arab world is entering a new electoral era—one that, as the contributions to this volume make clear, not only is based on the promise of democratic beauty but has also already brought much of the ugliness of democratic politics. The various chapters explore not only what is new but also how much the new is still tethered to the legacy of the past. The question in this complicated political environment is, how much of the beauty of democracy can be recovered? The definite answer will come in next few years, but there are worrying initial signs.

Democracy is beautiful because it promises accountability and a voice for the people in determining who leads them and what polices are adopted. But democratic politics can e divisive, manipulative, fissiparous, and fickle.

In recent years, scholars who specialize in authoritarian systems and those who focus instead on democracy have come into increasingly close intellectual contact. Indeed, the study of political regimes more generally has led scholars to grapple with a very complicated reality based on a series of realizations: authoritarian regimes regularly use democratic mechanisms, transitions away from authoritarianism are not necessarily moves toward democratization, democracies can have illiberal features, democratic politics can deeply disappoint those who toil on its behalf, those societies in which “the people” are sovereign often discover that there is no single “people” with an identifiable will, and even in established democracies some basic democratic institutions (such as political parties) are in crisis.

None of these realizations detract from the normative attractiveness of democracy. Nor have they led scholars to abandon democracy as an object of interest. But they collectively suggest that the upheavals of the Arab world in the past few years are unique only in their details, not in the way in which they combine the beauty of democracy with the ugliness of democratic politics.

Democratic mechanisms, especially of the electoral variety, are not new in the Arab world; indeed, they have been well established in some societies since the middle of the past century. They have hardly resulted in democratic systems, however. In this essay, I will first review what sort of mechanisms and democratic commitments are well established in Arab politics—but also why they came to be democratically meaningless. I will then focus on what is new in the current democratic moment in the Arab world. But in the third section I will explore why the current democratic promise does not seem to be delivering on the tremendous hopes placed in it.

WHAT IS NOT NEW

Those who see the current moment—the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2011—as unprecedented have many things to point to in support of the novelty of the current political moment. But that should not obscure how much past generations of residents of the Arab world were given democratic promises. The contributions to this book show how much democratic mechanisms existed in pre-2011 systems (with Libya perhaps an exception, at least in recent decades), but none of them show such democratic mechanisms as having given birth to a full democracy.

In three particular ways, Arab citizens have heard much democratic talk and even seen pockets of democratic practice.

First, popular sovereignty is well established in constitutional forms and in political rhetoric. There are, to be sure, monarchical systems in the Arab world, but even some of those implicitly acknowledge not simply that they have been entrusted with the welfare of the community but also that a degree of authority comes from the people as well. And the republics—now all Arab states outside of the Arabian Peninsula with only two surviving exceptions (Morocco and Jordan, both with written constitutions and elected parliaments)—openly proclaim the sovereignty of the people.

If the principle that authority stems from the people is firmly established (if not universal) in Arab politics, what about the practice? Arab political systems have claimed to be democratic, many of them since independence. Again, the monarchies are an exception but only a partial one—Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain have all included guarantees for popular representation in legislation and governance. Even blatantly authoritarian governments claimed to be democratic.

Over the past two decades, there has been frequent talk—first in Arab intellectual circles and then in Western scholarship—of an “authoritarian bargain” emerging, sometimes in the guise of Arab socialism, in the postindependence era. Regimes are held to have given the promise of welfare benefits in return for acquiescence in authoritarian rule. The problem with such an image is twofold: the regimes in question never repudiated democracy, and no popular assent to authoritarianism was ever given. There simply was no such bargain, either explicit or implicit, in the Arab world. Rather than promising an end to accountability, regimes promised a new and far more effective set of mechanisms to make those who wielded authority accountable to the population. Even as rickety multiparty systems and parliaments were hollowed out or dismantled, new structures and practices were emerging that promised to represent and serve all the people. The claim was often that the old structures and leaders served only themselves. The central creed of the revolutionary and socialist era, then, was not simply that leaders would act in the people’s interest but that they would speak with the people’s voice. Socially and politically dominant elites could no longer rule for their own benefit; they had to account for their actions to the people.

But of course they never really did. And that brings us to the third element that is not new: not only were Arab peoples told they were sovereign and promised democracy; they were also summoned to the polls regularly to vote in elections. In some Arab countries, elections predated independence; in most of the remaining ones, elections came with or following independence. And with a few exceptions, those elections came regularly on all kinds of issues—who is in parliament, whether a draft constitution should go into effect, who should serve as head of state, and even some fundamental policy issues. In some countries, voters were even given a choice of candidates and parties to vote for; in other countries the choice was helpfully winnowed down for them to a single option.

But in almost all Arab elections—even those in which choices appeared on the ballot—the result was either irrelevant or easily known in advance. Elections served to coax the opposition out into the open or cow it into submission, obtain formal ratification for choices already made, or allow leaders to present themselves as people’s representatives.

Indeed, a central theme in most of these chapters is the legacies of past practices—in Yemen and in Libya we see the recent past affecting the operation of and expectations for democratic futures. In Morocco (and, outside the Arab world, in Turkey), we see past structures founded in nondemocratic orders continuing to affect (in the former case especially effectively) the operation of the democratic mechanisms that do exist. The authors in this book find the necessity of grounding their understandings of current politics historically as well as comparatively.

WHAT IS NEW: DEMOCRATIC BEAUTY

In short, before 2011, democratic forms were everywhere and democratic substance was virtually invisible. What has changed since the uprisings of that year? Three developments are new.

First, Arab societies that have had elections are now more regularly presented with real choices. In the post-uprising societies (Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia), there was no attempt to keep important players off the ballot (the Egyptian presidential elections were a partial exception in this regard, though the disqualifications there seemed to follow a strange and strictly legal rather than political logic). In Morocco, Islamists who had been participating in elections did not find the rules so carefully stacked against them.

Second, Arab voters have gone to the polls several times since 2011 without the result being known in advance. In a sense, uncertainty is a (and in the minds of some, the) defining feature of democracy: if one actor is guaranteed to win any election, democracy is not in operation. In the first parliamentary elections in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, the electoral performance of some parties surprised even their leaders. The Egyptian presidential race of 2012 resulted in a photo finish between two starkly different candidates. In some cases examined in this book—Egypt and Libya, for example—uncertainty seemed especially high. But even in those cases in which there appears some more stability (Tunisia, where some understandings have been reached among the political elite, and Morocco, where the monarchy still dominates), authors seem a bit reluctant to project too much of that stability into the future.

Even referenda have been competitive. In Egypt, in the referendum on constitutional amendments of March 2011 and a permanent constitution proposed on December 2012, a “yes” vote was widely expected, but between a quarter and a third of voters rejected the proposals—a surprisingly high proportion by past regional standards (and indeed constitutions are rarely rejected in referenda anywhere). So elections provide meaningful choices and voters are actually allowed to choose.

But the most fundamental change is also the one least visible from afar: the emergence of an Arab public sphere—or set of public spheres—where political talk is surprisingly extensive and free. In a more purely authoritarian era (and in the remaining pockets of high authoritarianism in the Arab world), talking freely about politics was risky. Few engaged in it, and those who did found few venues.

But that is no longer the norm. In the 1970s and 1980s, some countries partially liberalized their own press, allowing for a few mildly critical voices to be heard. Those voices often challenged what were referred to as “red lines” and were sometimes able to push them outward; at other times they were sharply punished for transgressing unwritten rules. In the 1990s, pan-Arab press emerged as a strong voice that crossed borders in ways that sometimes eluded the rigidly enforced domestic rules. And late in the decade, satellite television became a fixture in many Arab homes and coffee houses, bringing surprisingly lively and entertaining (if not always elevated or edifying) political debates.

Many participants in the 2011 uprisings spoke of how the barrier of fear had been broken. And much of it certainly had been removed. But what was on display at that time was less a product of a sudden collapse than it was a result of years of steady erosion. Few taboo subjects existed in personal political conversations in many countries, and open criticism of the rulers could be voiced in many of them. When one moved from personal conversations in homes or small public gatherings to mass media, rulers retained some harsh instruments to police discussions—and they used them. But it had become impossible to reproduce the monotonous and turgid pro-regime public discourse that prevailed a generation earlier; even in places where change in any practical sense seemed impossible, it was easier to debate it.

And after 2011, the authoritarian tools seemed to work no longer in a coherent manner. That is not to say that they were not used—the underlying legal and institutional framework, even in some post-uprising countries, remained unchanged. And new social actors emerged, who attempted to police debate on their own, with some salafi movements earning an unsavory reputation in that regard, especially in Tunisia.

And this was democracy in all its beauty: real debate, real choices, and political power up for grabs with the winners decided by the people.

ELECTORAL UGLINESS

Yet it did not feel like heaven after all. Partly this was inevitable: the hopes that arose in the heady days of early 2011 could never be fully met. But the problems were more than a loss of youthful idealism. In many places, citizens are not merely wizened; they are disappointed, frightened, and angry. And they are deeply divided. The actual experience of electoral politics proved a bit less pretty than expected and in some countries aggravated existing problems, frustrated a wide spectrum of actors, and led to far less pretty politics than expected. Why did democratic beauty give birth to electoral ugliness in the Arab world?

There were four main reasons, and some of them can be traced back to authoritarian legacies.

First, most actors went into democratic politics a bit suspicious. It was not so much that they lacked democratic commitments (though some did) but more that they doubted their adversaries and regarded any democratic process as full of potential pitfalls. Here they paid for decades of their rulers’ dishonesty of delivering democratic promises and mechanisms but no democratic substance.

The emergence of democracy in Europe generally came as a result of more bitter but also more honest struggle. For most of the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth), the chief battle about democracy focused on two very specific institutional questions: who would vote in parliamentary elections, and what authority did parliament have (especially over the executive). The battle over democracy not only had clear battle lines; it was also fought quite frankly, with none of the pious fiction that everyone is democratic. Those who opposed democratic reform said so and resisted extending the franchise or empowering the legislature. In some countries the battle was slow; it was also sometimes violent.

In the Arab world, by contrast, those two battles were generally easily won—on paper. When elections were first introduced in some countries, there was some experimentation with two-stage elections, and some even openly called for literacy requirements. Women were sometimes denied the right to vote. But most of those battles were brief and not seriously fought (only women’s suffrage proved a bit of an extended struggle, especially in Kuwait but also much earlier in Egypt).

And parliaments proliferated with all sorts of legislative and oversight powers. Indeed, the frequent recourse to constitutional language promising that various rights and procedures would be “defined by law” maximized parliamentary authority.

And political practice hollowed out these promises. Rigged elections, single-party systems, and patronage systems that encouraged everyone to toe the line, all these devices meant, as we have seen, that democracy existed only on paper. Entering the post-uprising environment, therefore, all political actors had learned to read the fine print on every promise and procedure and to not believe those until seeing them in action. In short, there was a deeply engrained mistrust that apparently democratic procedures would really be fair. Democratic promises had been so freely made in the past, they had lost a considerable portion of their street value.

The reasons for this mistrust emerge most clearly in the Moroccan case, but they have deeply infected all the other cases examined in this volume.

Second, the sudden burst of democracy opened every single contentious issue before ways had been devised for resolving them. In the authoritarian era, social differences were suppressed or denied; in the post-2011 flowering, it became possible to mobilize on the basis of religion, ethnicity, and sect. There were good reasons to place these issues and identity in the public sphere for deliberation, debate, and decision, but plunging directly into such divisive issues tended to overheat the political atmosphere before clear structures could arise for managing tensions or even deciding some basic issues.

Third, in those countries that did not experience uprisings but knew limited democratic politics, the effect of the uprisings was sometimes to enhance the promise of democracy without delivering anything in practice. And the result was to harden divisions. In both Jordan and Kuwait, opposition movements that had reluctantly played the political game for the benefits that it offered saw the possibility of pushing for more openness. When they did not get it, they boycotted elections.

In this volume, the nature of the dilemmas for electoral politics is illustrated most clearly in the Iraqi case. Iraqis have been summoned to the polls on several different occasions, but it is not clear that they have yet been able to construct a system that avoids entrenching their divisions but instead helps them navigate and manage them.

And that leads to the fourth problem: in both the post-uprising countries and those that did not experience an uprising, the basic rules of electoral competition are mistrusted and contested. A stable democratic system is one in which the rules are known in advance but the victor is not. Arab elections lacked both features in the past: the rules were constantly written to serve those in power with the result that elections only returned those already in power. Now the Arab world is divided between societies where results are foreordained (as in the past) and those where they are not. But in no country are the rules by which elections operate stable or accepted. In that respect, there is a continuity from the pre-2011 period. In every case examined in this volume, the basic rules of democratic politics are not merely contested but shifting. Tunisia may have achieved a precarious stability (or at least a clear trajectory). Other countries have found that the fact that elections should be held gives little guidance on how to hold them and have their results accepted.

And indeed, this point can be made more generally. The 2011 uprisings changed a lot, but they did not erase the legacies of authoritarian rule.

A SWAN SONG OR A LAST LAUGH FOR ARAB AUTOCRATS

Democracy itself is not the cause of all the electoral ugliness that Arab politics has uncovered. While the mundane realities of democratic politics are not particularly pretty anywhere, they still offer real possibilities that Arab societies still strongly aspire to obtain for themselves. But democracy is not born pristine; it is erected on the foundations of politics built under autocratic rule. And here is where it has turned out to be easier to get rid of autocrats than the stains on political practice they left behind.

Authoritarian politics is poor practice for democracy. By discrediting democratic promises, leaving a legacy of distrust and suspicion, suppressing healthy organizations in both civil and political society, and failing to bridge gaps among various ethnic and sectarian groups (or allowing them to develop language or mechanisms for discussing those gaps), autocrats have left democrats with a difficult legacy. They may learn to cope with the results, but it will not always be pretty.

CHAPTER 2

TUNISIA BETWEEN DEMOCRATIZATION AND INSTITUTIONALIZING UNCERTAINTY

KEVIN KOEHLER & JANA WARKOTSCH

THE TUNISIAN REVOLUTION NOT ONLY LED to the fall of one of the region’s most entrenched dictators, but it also made Tunisia stand out among the countries of the Arab Spring as the country in which the taming of political dynamics by way of electoral processes has progressed furthest. While in Egypt extra-institutional forms of contention are commonplace and Libya and Yemen are plagued by intermittent fighting, in Tunisia the transitional process proceeded more orderly. The October 2011 elections have produced a National Constituent Assembly (al-Majlis al-Taʾsīsī al-Waṭanī, NCA) that by and large worked within a framework of pre-established rules. No major political force has contested the legitimacy of this assembly, and a constitutional draft has been presented to the public in late 2012. While political conflict is by no means absent from the Tunisian political scene, the degree to which elite contestation is carried out via institutional channels is what sets Tunisia apart from other countries.¹

At the same time a less sanguine picture presents itself if we look at the degree to which the emerging political landscape is actually able to institutionalize political contestation by non-elite actors.² Not only has elite-level compromise so far not been translated into mass-level demobilization, but also t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1. Introduction: Democratic Beauty and Electoral Ugliness in the Middle East
• 2. Tunisia between Democratization and Institutionalizing Uncertainty
• 3. Egypt: Transition in the Midst of Revolution
• 4. Libya: Legacy of Dictatorship and the Long Path to Democracy
• 5. Morocco’s “spring”: The Monarchical Advantage and Electoral Futility
• 6. Elections and Transition in Yemen
• 7. Iraq: Democracy and Electoral Politics in Post-Saddam Era
• 8. Elections and Authoritarianism in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• 9. Elections and Regime Change in Turkey: Tenacious Rise of Political Islam
• 10. Elections and Beyond: Democratization, Democratic Consolidation, or What?
• About the Authors
• References
• Index