Projektbeschreibung
Regimewechsel und Elitenpräferenzen genauer beleuchten
Elitenkompromisse werden mit dem Entstehen von Demokratie in Verbindung gebracht, während Elitenkonflikte wahrscheinlich zu verschiedenen Formen politischer Herrschaft führen. Doch wie erklärt sich die Vorliebe der Elite für Kompromisse oder Konflikte? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wird das ERC-finanzierte Projekt MENA-PERC Daten auf individueller Ebene über politische Eliten in Ägypten, Tunesien und der Türkei vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart sammeln und analysieren. Um besser zu verstehen, wie Muster von Elitenkonflikten mit Formen des Regimewechsels verknüpft sind, werden diese Informationen in eine Reihe von Vergleichen eingebettet, die sich auf 12 Regimewechsel in diesen drei Ländern über mehr als ein Jahrhundert erstrecken. Eingehende Feldforschung, Elitenbefragungen und experimentelle Arbeiten werden Beweise für kausale Mechanismen liefern, die Elitenkonflikte über die Präferenzen der Eliten für Kompromisse oder Konflikte mit Regimeergebnissen verbinden.
Ziel
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.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Programm/Programme
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedGastgebende Einrichtung
56127 Pisa
Italien