Ancien Régime: Legacies of Previous Authoritarian Regimes and the Struggle for Democratization in the Arab World

Abstract

Arab Spring, or the series of uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011, has raised hopes that the region is finally catching up with democracy. The fall of four long-established authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, respectively, shook the foundations of the ‘Arab exceptionalism’ thesis which dominated much of the literature on the region. Four years after the Arab Spring, however, the prospects of democratization in the region appear to be dim; out of the four regime changes in Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia, only the latter seems to be leading a relatively successful democratic transition. This paper attempts to address the variations witnessed in the four cases’ post-Arab Spring experiences. Analyzing the four countries against the backdrop of their institutional contexts, I argue that institutional legacies of previous regime type could account for the success of democracy in Tunisia and its failure in the rest of the cases. This paper also controls for socioeconomic conditions and the role of leadership in each country.