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Based on a wealth of new primary data, this book offers the first account of the internal regime factors that ultimately caused the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's long dictatorship in Tunisia during the Arab Uprisings. Anne Wolf's account challenges studies that focus on the role of mass mobilization alone, and demonstrates that in the last decade of Ben Ali's presidency, dissent within his ruling party - the Constitutional Democratic Rally - mounted to such an extent that followers began challenging their own powerbroker. The culmination of this was a secret coup d'état staged by regime figures against Ben Ali in January 2011, an event that has not previously been uncovered. Wolf proposes a new theory of power and contention within ruling parties in authoritarian regimes to explain how dictators seek to fortify their rule and foster party-political stability, but also when, why, and how they succumb to internal contention and with what effect.
Why was the longtime Tunisian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali ousted on January 14, 2011? Prevailing theories focus on popular mobilization, grievances, and the role of the army to explain the collapse of the authoritarian regime. I evaluate these arguments in light of new empirical evidence, which shows that they are insufficient to explain Ben Ali's ousting. Analyzing key decisional moments and counterfactual scenarios, I propose that the regime collapsed because of a set of erroneous beliefs, which flourished amid the contingent revolutionary context. Erroneous beliefs are endogenous to highly contingent revolutionary periods and a potential contingency themselves in that they can change collective outcomes. This study shows how the microanalysis of events can furnish new insights into highly impactful events in history—the collapse of the Ben Ali regime gave rise to the wider Arab Uprisings—and topics of key concern to scholars of contentious politics, authoritarianism, and democratization.
Scholars have mostly investigated the fall of dictatorships during the Arab Uprisings through the lens of contentious politics, uncovering new information about the protest dynamics and how they spread both within countries and throughout the wider region. However, the longer structural vulnerabilities within regimes have received little attention; yet such factors internal to states and their regimes proved paramount to the social revolutions investigated by Theda Skocpol. Focusing on the case of Tunisia, the author shows how the economic downturn and a succession crisis contributed to the decay of the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime starting in the 2000s. Importantly, they heightened internecine conflicts within the regime and, in particular, within the longtime ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally. It is through this backdrop that the events of the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution must be understood: far from supporting the regime in times of crisis, members of Ben Ali's ruling party engaged in contentious activities against him, thus crucially weakening the regime from within.
Öffentliche Verwaltungen werden seit Jahren wiederholt für die Art ihrer Aufgabenwahrnehmung kritisiert. Eine systematische Analyse der sowohl angebotenen als auch zukünftig anzubietenden Verwaltungsprodukte, orientiert an den Anforderungen der Umwelt, könnte den Umgang mit den zur Verfügung stehenden Ressourcen öffentlicher Verwaltungen effektiver und effizienter gestalten. Der Einsatz einer im privatwirtschaftlichen Sektor anerkannten Produktplanungsmethode, dem Quality Function Deployment (QFD), könnte diese Analyse gewährleisten. Daher wird in dem folgenden Artikel kritisch analysiert, ob das QFD für den Einsatz im öffentlichen Sektor geeignet ist. Es wird belegt werden, dass öffentliche Produkte mit ihren Eigenschaften keinen Widerspruch zum Produktverständnis des QFD-Ansatzes darstellen und dass die Kundinnen und Kunden öffentlicher Verwaltungen zum Verständnis des Kundenbegriffs nach QFD passen. Auch wird der Artikel belegen, dass öffentliche Verwaltungen die allgemein anerkannten Voraussetzungen, welche für den Einsatz von QFD notwendig sind, erfüllen können.
