What is it about?
Voting has become an important part of political life even in authoritarian and democratizing countries in the world. Post-Revolutionary Tunisia provides a great opportunity to test some of the substantive theories of voting behavior. This study argues that the secular vs. religious divide was still highly influential in Tunisia after Arab Uprisings, yet, people had other expectations that went beyond the issue of the identity of the country, such as economics and security.
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Why is it important?
The findings show that there was growing discontent with the democratization process in Tunisia, due to increasing economic and political instability in the country. And the new secular party Nidaa Tounes used this opportunity to frame the politics of the country from the secular vs. Islamist cleavage perspective and promised going back to the years of Bourguiba (nostalgia for the old regime), which was alarming for the success of the democratization process.
Perspectives
This study is particularly about the 2014 Elections in Tunisia, and it would be very interesting to replicate the study with another original survey held in 2019 when next general elections in Tunisia are going to be held. It was a pleasure to work on this article and see how the elites and the people were necessarily not on the same page when it comes to their preferences over the future of the country. Especially secularists were keeping the discussion at the post-material or superstructural level, which forced the Islamist movement Ennahda to move further away from their conservative ideological standpoint.
Dr. H. Ege Ozen
City University of New York System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Voting for secular parties in the Middle East: evidence from the 2014 general elections in post-revolutionary Tunisia, The Journal of North African Studies, November 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2018.1544072.
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