Suchergebnisse

What are the drivers of citizens' support for electoral gender quotas in transitioning and authoritarian states? Despite extensive research examining public support for women in politics in democracies, we know little about how the public perceives them in less democratic settings. To address this shortcoming, we use original survey data from authoritarian Morocco and transitioning Tunisia – two Arab countries hailed for their progressive gender policies. We argue that in these countries where citizens lack political information, they instead rely on their assessment of the government's performance to form attitudes toward gender quotas. Furthermore, electoral legitimacy plays an important role in shaping citizens' support for quotas, which are closely linked to how elections and legislatures operate. The findings offer strong support for our theoretical expectations and uncover important gender differences.

AbstractWhen are executives in authoritarian regimes more likely to comply with formal legislative powers? Building from theories of authoritarian power‐sharing, we argue that executives will be more likely to respect legislative prerogatives when protests or elite organization increase the ability of legislators to undermine the executive's political position. We evaluate this argument by analyzing novel protest and legislative data in Jordan between 2010 and 2015. In line with our expectations, we find that parliamentary queries were more likely to receive the required response from the cabinet during months of higher protest activity and when they were submitted by MPs from Jordan's only well‐organized opposition bloc in the parliament. This study extends the burgeoning scholarship on authoritarian legislatures by contributing to understanding of executive‐legislative interactions under autocracy and providing new insights into the conditions under which these legislatures are more likely to influence decision‐making processes.

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in women's presence in local politics. According to the newly published United Nations (UN) Women in Local Government data set, women constitute 36% of local deliberative bodies worldwide compared to merely 25% in national parliaments.1 Much of this increase is the result of gender quotas: the Gender Quotas Database (International IDEA 2022) shows that as of 2021, 75 countries had some form of gender quota on the local level, 24 of which were authoritarian regimes. Yet, extant work on gender politics in authoritarian regimes tends to focus on the national level, given the highly centralized decision-making processes in such contexts. We contend that the study of women's engagement and representation in local politics can help scholars better understand not only gender and politics, but also authoritarian politics more generally.

AbstractTo what extent, if any, do the issue priorities of elites overlap with that of the public under competitive authoritarianism? While previous studies examined the overlap of the priorities of elites and ordinary citizens in democracies, our knowledge is still limited when we move beyond these contexts. This article aims to contribute to the democratisation and legislative politics literature by testing congruence of issue priorities under competitive authoritarianism. Analysing more than 10,000 legislative texts from the 2012 Moroccan parliament, we found high levels of congruence between the issue priorities of legislators and citizens, especially in non-legislative activities (i.e. parliamentary questions). Moreover, contrary to earlier studies on clientelism and citizen-elite linkage in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, our results demonstrate a higher correlation between the priorities of the two largest political parties and the mass public, when compared with those parties' core supporters.

Previous work on political tolerance has overwhelmingly focused on established democracies. Consequently, our knowledge continues to be limited with regard to the drivers of tolerance in less democratic transitional and nondemocratic settings. In this paper, we examine what could best promote tolerance of least-favored political groups in such contexts. We use a survey experiment in Egypt to test competing theories through exposing respondents to different primes, emphasizing the importance of tolerance on the basis of religious, economic, or government endorsements. Respondents were then asked questions to gauge their tolerance levels toward their least-favored group. We control for the level of trust in government, religiosity, interpersonal trust, contact, and political knowledge. Our data show soaring levels of intolerance among Egyptians. However, we found evidence that priming respondents with the economic benefits of having a tolerant society is the most effective way to promote tolerant attitudes, especially among those with lower levels of education and younger age groups. Additionally, our analysis demonstrated that respondents' level of trust in government has a strong effect on tolerance attitudes.

Extant studies have predominantly focused on women's numerical presence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)'s legislatures, yet, research examining the role played by female politicians continues to be limited. To bridge this gap, we study one of the most important, albeit overlooked,
bodies within these assemblies: legislative committees. Using an original dataset on committee memberships (n=4580), our data show that females are significantly marginalized from influential committees and tend to be sidelined to social issues and women's committees. To explain this, we develop
a theory of provisional gender stereotyping. We argue that the duration of quota implementation shapes women's access to influential committees. We focus on two mechanisms to support our argument: a redistribution of power dynamics within legislative bodies and women's political expertise.

Teaching gender politics has been an increasingly contentious topic in established democracies, with instructors encountering a myriad of pedagogical, institutional, and ideological challenges (Butler 2021; Evans 2019).1 Challenges to teaching gender politics are exacerbated in nondemocratic contexts, where academic institutions operate under close regime scrutiny and surveillance, and where patterns of autocratic power structures are prevalent in society and often reproduced in the classroom. While extant studies have shed important light on some of the trends and issues associated with teaching gender politics in established democracies (Bayes 2012; Han and Heldman 2019; Lyle-Gonga 2013), our knowledge remains limited when it comes to teaching gender and politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in Western institutions as well as within the MENA region. Understanding these challenges is particularly relevant given that the MENA region is diverse and has long been "othered," "racialized," and "orientalized" in Western discourse (Ahmed 1992; Said 1978), with direct implications for teaching gender and politics of the Middle East in local academic institutions as well as in the West.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the productivity of male and female academics and whether the ongoing health crisis will exacerbate further the existing gender gap in academia in both the short and long terms. We present early evidence of the pandemic's disproportionate effect on women's research productivity using online survey data supplemented by interview data with regional and international female political scientists. The interviews and survey findings reveal gender disparities in perceived research productivity and service workloads during the pandemic. The results also shed initial light on the pandemic's impact on the research productivity of academics who are parents, especially among women.

How does the gender composition of deliberative committees affect citizens' evaluations of their decision-making processes? Do citizens perceive decisions made by gender-balanced, legislative bodies as more legitimate than those made by all-male bodies? Extant work on the link between women's descriptive representation and perceptions of democratic legitimacy in advanced democracies finds the equal presence of women legitimizes decision-making. However, this relationship has not been tested in more patriarchal, less democratic settings. We employ survey experiments in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia to investigate how citizens respond to gender representation in committees. We find that women's presence promotes citizens' perceptions of the legitimacy of committee processes and outcomes and, moreover, that pro-women decisions are associated with higher levels of perceived legitimacy. Thus, this study demonstrates the robustness of findings from the West regarding gender representation and contributes to the burgeoning literature on women and politics.

« While the Arab Uprisings presented new opportunities for the empowerment of women, the sidelining of women remains a constant risk in the post-revolutionist MENA countries. Changes in the position of women are crucial to the reconfiguration of state-society relations and to the discussions between Islamist and secular trends. Theoretically framed and based on new empirical data, this edited volume explores women's activism and political representation as well as discursive changes, with a particular focus on secular and Islamic feminism, and changes in popular opinions on women's position in society. While the contributors express optimistic as well as more pessimistic views for the future, they agree that this is a period of uncertainty for women in the region, and that support by ruling elites towards women's rights remains ambiguous and double-edged. « (Verlagsbeschreibung)

« This book investigates the pervasive problem of corruption across the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on the specifics of the local context, the book explores how corruption in the region is actuated through informal practices that coexist and work in parallel to formal institutions. When informal practices become vehicles for corruption, they can have negative ripple effects across many aspects of society, but on the other hand, informal practices could also have the potential to be leveraged to reinforce formal institutions to help fight corruption. Drawing on a range of cases including Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia or Israel the book first explores the mechanisms and dynamics of corruption and informal practices in the region, before looking at the successes and failures of anti-corruption initiatives. The final section focuses on gender perspectives on corruption, which are often overlooked in corruption literature, and the role of women in the Middle East. With insights drawn from a range of disciplines, this book will be of interest to researchers and students across political science, philosophy, socio-legal studies, public administration, and Middle Eastern studies, as well as to policy makers and practitioners working in the region « (Verlagsbeschreibung)