Suchergebnisse

A history of the Labour Party during World War II, offering a fresh look at British politics during the war years. It examines the effect of war on the party's ideology and policy, the experience in government of Labour leaders and the tensions produced within the party by the circumstances of war

The Muslim Brothers in Society: Everyday Politics, Social Action, and Islamism in Mubarak's Egypt, by Marie Vannetzel. Translated by David Tresilian. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2020. 484 pages. $49.95.

Why might citizens adopt exaggerated public antagonism toward outgroups? When this is so, how much do public and private attitudes diverge? I argue that expanding exclusionary rhetoric against outgroups can create social pressures that incentivize ordinary citizens to adopt bigoted attitudes to avoid ostracism from their own majority community. Based on an investigation of Egypt during the Arab Spring, I identify the emergence and diffusion of a norm of discrimination against the country's tiny Shi'a population. Under these conditions, a substantial portion of Sunni citizens adopted and countenanced anti-Shi'a bigotry not because they truly believed it, but rather because they feared the consequences of expressing public support for coexistence. A variety of qualitative evidence traces the growth of anti-Shi'a sentiment during this period, while original survey data show that over 80 percent of Sunni respondents openly expressed anti-Shi'a attitudes. Yet when asked about their attitudes via an item count technique, a method that grants a reprieve from social pressures, the percentage of respondents expressing discriminatory views toward the Shi'a dropped to just over 40 percent. One implication is that sectarian attitudes in the region are as much the product of malleable social and political pressures as deeply rooted preferences.

Under what conditions can parties use social-service provision to generate political support? And what is the causal mechanism connecting social-service provision to citizen mobilization? I argue that service provision conveys to voters a politically valuable image of the provider organization's competence and probity, which is particularly valuable when information about parties and platforms is contradictory or poor. Support comes from an in-depth investigation into the medical networks of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. I combine qualitative evidence, including fieldwork and interviews with Brotherhood social-service providers, with an original 2,483-person survey experiment of Egyptians. Respondents exposed to factual information about the Brotherhood's medical provision are significantly more likely to consider voting for the Brotherhood in elections. A causal mediation analysis, as well as qualitative evidence drawn from the survey instrument itself, supports the hypothesized mechanism by which respondents map the Brotherhood's compassion and professionalism in the provision of medical services onto their views of Brotherhood candidates for elected office. Beyond adding to a growing comparative-politics literature on the politics of non-state social service provision, I identify why Egypt's current rulers have expended such effort to uproot the Muslim Brotherhood's nationwide network of social services.

AbstractThe Arab Spring revived interest into how contentious mobilization diffuses across time and space. We evaluate individual-level attitudinal implications of this literature through laboratory experiments with 681 Egyptian college students. Across two separate experiments, primes based on recent protests in Tunisia, Syria and the Sudan reveal a limited ability to shift respondents' retrospective views of the Arab Spring, the efficacy of protest to achieve political change, Egypt's perceived domestic situation vis-à-vis its neighbours and a personal willingness to assume risk in a computer game-based behavioural extension. Our findings imply the need to continue to improve theorizing and empirically testing key implications from the diffusion literature.

Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000 subdistricts. A multilevel analysis shows that Muslim Brotherhood branches were more likely in subdistricts connected to the railway and where literacy was higher. Branches were less likely in districts with large European populations, and where state administration was more extensive. Qualitative evidence also points to the railway as key to the movement's propagation. These findings challenge the orthodoxy that contact between Muslims and the West spurred the growth of organized political Islam, and instead highlight the critical role of economic and state infrastructure in patterning the early contexts of Islamist activism.