Electoral Weakness of Secular Parties in the Middle East and North Africa during the Post-Uprisings Era of the 2010s

Abstract

This dissertation aims to shed new light on Islamist-secular competition in the Middle East and North Africa region by bringing secular parties to the center stage and exploring their poor electoral performance in the aftermath of the popular uprisings of the early 2010s. In particular, I examine the evolution and current electoral performance of historical secular parties which were founded by professional middle classes, or newly rising second-generation elites, in the early 20th century and were leaders of the national independence struggles of their respective countries. In many countries of the region, these parties maintained a positive historical legacy (if used selectively) and territorially extensive network of activists. In the aftermath of the uprisings in the region in the early 2010s, they were the most prominent candidates to form a robust electoral alternative to the Islamist parties, but they have so far failed in electoral competitions, even though there was subtle intertemporal and subnational variation. In this dissertation, I examine two countries that exemplify the underperformance of secular parties: Tunisia and Turkey. The Tunisian secular party, Nidaa Tounes (The Call of Tunisia), and the Turkish secular party, Republican People’s Party, are the least likely cases of secular party weakness in the region, and they also provide valuable cross-case variation in terms of party system and party institutionalization, ideological stances, and relationship to previous authoritarian regimes. Thus, factors that play a role in the electoral performance of both of these two secular parties are very likely to be important for similar parties across the region and beyond. I argue that the electoral underperformance of secular parties in the 2010s stems from a valence deficit: Secular parties cannot convince voters that they have the capacity for solving pressing problems of their country and for delivering rapid and just socioeconomic development. In the theory chapter (Chapter 2), I argue that this valence deficit has two organizational sources: First, secular parties lack organizational cohesion, i.e. capacity and willingness of activist networks to work in unison, and they are characterized by intra-party fighting. As the chapter on the historical evolution (Chapter 3) describes, this lack of organizational cohesion is, to a large extent, due to the legacy of incorporating other social segments beyond the core constituency, such as provincial notables, urban petit bourgeoisie, and the working class, via patronage networks. As secular parties had access to state resources during the state-building phase, such a strategy of party expansion was all too likely. While such networks ensure organizational survival, their constant competition for state resources damages the cohesion of the party and its capacity to act in unison. The second organizational source of the valence deficit for secular parties in the current era is negative political selection: as opposed to the Islamist parties, secular parties are not able to select the most competent citizens from their voter bases as candidates (i.e., candidates with highest educational attainment levels and a propensity for collective work). Two empirical chapters (Chapter 4 in Tunisia and Chapter 6 in Turkey) demonstrate the relatively negative political selection of secular parties by bringing novel candidate surveys together with household surveys. Data from interviews and a conjoint experiment suggest that secular party elites prioritize loyalty over both competence and previous experience in civil society organizations. By contrast, Islamist party elites implement well-designed policies to recruit highly educated candidates. Secular disadvantage in political selection is also affected by the characteristics and quality of people who self-select into party activism and seek elected political office. Survey data in both countries provide suggestive evidence on the differential effects of competence (proxied by educational attainment) on the likelihood of joining active party politics across the secular-Islamist divide. I argue that this is because the best qualified supporters of secular parties are more likely to use the “exit” option – they prefer to work for multinational companies, think-tanks or international organizations or even emigrate than to invest in party politics in their own country. Two other empirical chapters of the dissertation (Chapter 5 in Tunisia and Chapter 7 in Turkey) explore whether the organizational cohesion of secular parties has any role in explaining the variation in electoral performance at the local level. Novel candidate surveys in Tunisia and Turkey enabled observation of secular parties’ organizational and ideological characteristics at the local level. Findings suggest that organizational cohesion is positively associated with their electoral outcomes. Case studies of four towns in Tunisia and further analyses of household survey data in Turkey suggest that a cohesive organization is more likely to earn trust from voters and signal good governance credentials.