Abstract
This chapter analyzes macro-political developments in Egypt and Tunisia since the 2011 revolutions in order to reconstruct the broader political context in which socio-economic protests have been unfolding. The chapter offers an account of the puzzling observation that incumbent governments in both countries, despite the different regime trajectories, have had a limited capacity to adopt economic reforms with distributional implications through authoritative state action. It argues that this incapacity transcends regime type because it is caused by more fundamental socio-political dynamics which relate to the socio-political coalitions on which social and political stabilization has depended. What explains the limited political capacity in both cases is the incumbent governments’ vulnerability vis-à-vis representatives of old distributional coalitions (including elements of both state-dependent labor and private business constituencies) whose support (or at least acquiescence) has been essential for post-revolution stabilization, either on a pluralist or on an authoritarian basis.
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Notes
- 1.
Distributional acts are distinctive from redistributional ones depending on the source of money that is collected or dispensed by the state. The former refers to resources that are allocated by the state to social groups or constituencies directly from state non-tax revenues. The latter refers to state action through which income and/or wealth is passed from one group to another through authoritative acts by the state, such as actively through progressive taxation or passively through tax exemptions.
- 2.
Interview with Ennahda’s leader, Tunis, January 2016.
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Adly, A., Meddeb, H. (2020). Beyond Regime Change: The State and the Crisis of Governance in Post-2011 Egypt and Tunisia. In: Weipert-Fenner, I., Wolff, J. (eds) Socioeconomic Protests in MENA and Latin America. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19621-9_2
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