Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MENA-PERC (Political Elites and Regime Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Accommodation or Exclusion?)
Période du rapport: 2023-01-01 au 2025-06-30
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has historically experienced recurrent regime crises, characterized by shifts between authoritarianism, democratization efforts, and political instability. Understanding the preferences and strategic choices of political elites during these crises is crucial for explaining not only why some regimes transition toward democracy while others revert to authoritarianism, but also how authoritarian regimes consolidate power, maintain elite coalitions, and navigate internal power-sharing dynamics. While extensive research has explored such issues at the structural level, there is a significant gap in our knowledge regarding the individual-level drivers of these processes—specifically, how political elites' incentives, ideological commitments, and strategic calculations shape their preferences for accommodation or exclusion, and, consequently the dynamics of regime change.
The MENA-PERC project addresses this gap by systematically analyzing elite attitudes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey from the late 19th century to the present. By linking macro-level regime outcomes to micro-level elite behaviors, the project seeks to uncover the mechanisms that drive political transitions and consolidation in these historically and politically significant cases.
MENA-PERC is designed to achieve three core objectives:
1. Mapping Elite Preferences: The project collects and analyzes individual-level data on members of parliament, examining their political preferences, strategic decisions, and ideological shifts over time.
2. Understanding the Drivers of Inclusion and Exclusion: By investigating how political elites navigate crises, the project sheds light on whether inclusive or exclusionary strategies contribute to democratic resilience or authoritarian entrenchment.
3. Integrating Multi-Method Approaches: Through a combination of text-as-data approaches, survey and experimental work, and in-depth fieldwork, MENA-PERC employs a rigorous research design to provide new insights into the dynamics of regime change and stability.
The findings of the MENA-PERC project are expected to have significant scholarly and policy implications:
- Advancing Theoretical and Empirical Understanding: By systematically studying elite behavior during regime crises, the project will contribute to broader debates in comparative politics, democratization studies, and authoritarianism research.
- Enhancing Methodological Innovations in Political Science: MENA-PERC's integration of elite surveys, historical data collection, and experimental research will refine methodological approaches for studying political elites and regime change.
By uncovering the factors that shape political elites’ responses to regime crises, MENA-PERC will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of political transitions and provide critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working on governance and democratization in the MENA region and beyond.
The MENA-PERC project addresses this gap by systematically analyzing elite attitudes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey from the late 19th century to the present. By linking macro-level regime outcomes to micro-level elite behaviors, the project seeks to uncover the mechanisms that drive political transitions and consolidation in these historically and politically significant cases.
MENA-PERC is designed to achieve three core objectives:
1. Mapping Elite Preferences: The project collects and analyzes individual-level data on members of parliament, examining their political preferences, strategic decisions, and ideological shifts over time.
2. Understanding the Drivers of Inclusion and Exclusion: By investigating how political elites navigate crises, the project sheds light on whether inclusive or exclusionary strategies contribute to democratic resilience or authoritarian entrenchment.
3. Integrating Multi-Method Approaches: Through a combination of text-as-data approaches, survey and experimental work, and in-depth fieldwork, MENA-PERC employs a rigorous research design to provide new insights into the dynamics of regime change and stability.
The findings of the MENA-PERC project are expected to have significant scholarly and policy implications:
- Advancing Theoretical and Empirical Understanding: By systematically studying elite behavior during regime crises, the project will contribute to broader debates in comparative politics, democratization studies, and authoritarianism research.
- Enhancing Methodological Innovations in Political Science: MENA-PERC's integration of elite surveys, historical data collection, and experimental research will refine methodological approaches for studying political elites and regime change.
By uncovering the factors that shape political elites’ responses to regime crises, MENA-PERC will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of political transitions and provide critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working on governance and democratization in the MENA region and beyond.
During its first two years, the MENA-PERC project has focused on three interrelated tasks:
1. Theory Refinement: Existing approaches to the study of authoritarian power-sharing, regime change, and consolidation are often based on individual-level assumptions and mechanisms, but are mostly tested on the group or even country level. We take the state of the art as a point of departure to develop a coherent theoretical framework on the individual-level determinants of elite coordination and conflict. We highlight the need to disaggregate regime coalitions and to move beyond theories focusing exclusively on power sharing. Instead, we suggest that, especially in periods of high polarization, elites maximize both their individual power, but also ideological benefits deriving from policy.
2. Data Collection: In order to trace political elites' individual positions across time, we need systematic data which allows us to observe elite interactions for a set of political elites. Parliamentary minutes can play this role. Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey all have a tradition of parliamentary politics stretching back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We have collected large volumes of parliamentary minutes from archives in Cairo and Tunis ans draw on documents provided by the Turkish parliament. In addition, we have collected individual-level background information on MPs from a variety of sources. At the same time, we have also conducted in-depth qualitative fieldwork, particularly on the case of Tunisia. Taken together, these different forms of data allow us to make systematic arguments about the individual-level drivers of elite accommodation and conflict.
3. Data processing and Measurement: On the technical level, working with large amounts of archival documents requires specific procediures of data processing and analysis. We continue to work on digitizing parliamentary minutes drawing on various OCR solutions. We have also developed and validated an LLM-driven process of scaling individual-level ideological positions from these texts. The project thus creates public goods for the larger academic community in the form of digitized parliamentary minutes and contributes to a growing field of applied research drawing on LLMs for automated text analysis.
1. Theory Refinement: Existing approaches to the study of authoritarian power-sharing, regime change, and consolidation are often based on individual-level assumptions and mechanisms, but are mostly tested on the group or even country level. We take the state of the art as a point of departure to develop a coherent theoretical framework on the individual-level determinants of elite coordination and conflict. We highlight the need to disaggregate regime coalitions and to move beyond theories focusing exclusively on power sharing. Instead, we suggest that, especially in periods of high polarization, elites maximize both their individual power, but also ideological benefits deriving from policy.
2. Data Collection: In order to trace political elites' individual positions across time, we need systematic data which allows us to observe elite interactions for a set of political elites. Parliamentary minutes can play this role. Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey all have a tradition of parliamentary politics stretching back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We have collected large volumes of parliamentary minutes from archives in Cairo and Tunis ans draw on documents provided by the Turkish parliament. In addition, we have collected individual-level background information on MPs from a variety of sources. At the same time, we have also conducted in-depth qualitative fieldwork, particularly on the case of Tunisia. Taken together, these different forms of data allow us to make systematic arguments about the individual-level drivers of elite accommodation and conflict.
3. Data processing and Measurement: On the technical level, working with large amounts of archival documents requires specific procediures of data processing and analysis. We continue to work on digitizing parliamentary minutes drawing on various OCR solutions. We have also developed and validated an LLM-driven process of scaling individual-level ideological positions from these texts. The project thus creates public goods for the larger academic community in the form of digitized parliamentary minutes and contributes to a growing field of applied research drawing on LLMs for automated text analysis.
Preliminary results suggest that the research design envisaged by the MENA-PERC project holds considerable promise. First, we were able to demonstrate that parliamentary minutes constitute an underused resource in the study of political elite dynamics which enables scholars to systematically observe elite attitudes even where access to the actors themselves is difficult or impossible; second,we have developed and validated a automated procedure for scaling issue positions from these texts which improves existing approaches to measuring ideological positions in parliamentary speech. These achievements will enable us to make a substantive contribution to the study of elite dynamics under autocracy and in periods of political change.