Conditions and causal mechanisms of large-scale contentious politics in authoritarian regimes : a multimethod analysis of Middle East and North Africa countries, 2010-2012
(2018)
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Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
- Rihoux, Benoît
- Abstract
- Over the 2011 and 2012 period, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen experienced the success of large-scale contentious politics, i.e. a fit between contentious politics and the displacement of incumbents. However, other authoritarian regimes in the MENA region, over the time period corresponding to the ‘Arab Spring’, even if they experienced some form of contentious politics, these did not become successfully ‘large-scale’. The empirical evidence leads us to a two-part puzzle: Why does large-scale contentious politics successfully arise in some MENA countries while in others it does not? And what are the causal mechanisms that facilitate the success of large-scale contentious politics in the typical case of Tunisia? Both research questions are part of a multimethod research design, whose aim is to make cross-case and within-case causal inferences. This research commences by introducing the concept of ‘success of large-scale contentious politics’, and a two-level model is developed to conduct a comparative study of 14 MENA countries and thus answering the first research question. The success v/s failure of large-scale contentious politics is then analyzed comparatively by applying Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), in a revisited version of its two-step variant. This enables us to identify the core combinations of conditions that lead to the match between contentious politics and the displacement of the political incumbent. A core element is identified: the context within which the cases of success of large-scale contentious politics takes place – a non-hereditary regime – and the combination of conditions that plays a conjunctural role within this context: cohesive mobilization, military defection behavior, limited despotic power, absence of foreign rescue and low State capacity. Further, since this research also aims to understand the process of the success of large-scale contentious politics, a theory-testing process-tracing technique (PT) is carried out, in a post-QCA phase, to answer the second research question by tracing the causal mechanisms at play. Three interconnected causal mechanisms are conceptualized and tested: attribution of similarity, carrot and stick policies of repression and accommodation and social appropriation of mobilizing vehicles. The conjuncture of these three causal mechanisms allows one to understand the whole story about how the process of success of large-scale contentious politics takes place in the Tunisian case. The evidence obtained about the presence of such mechanisms increases to some extent our confidence in the theorized causal mechanisms.
- Affiliations
Citations
Álamos-Concha, P. (2018). Conditions and causal mechanisms of large-scale contentious politics in authoritarian regimes : a multimethod analysis of Middle East and North Africa countries, 2010-2012. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/55324