Abstract: According to the roadmap for political transformation announced in July 2013, Egypt's parliamentary elections should have taken place six months after the constitutional amendments. Yet, since then, they have been postponed several times. They are now scheduled for March and April 2015. Until recently, the regime has been reluctant to hold parliamentary elections, fearing an unruly parliament not dominated by a regime party, as in the past. In June and December 2014, the government enacted a new electoral law and an electoral district law, which will reduce the chances of political parties in general -and political opposition parties in particular- from gaining a substantive number of seats in parliament. By deliberately impeding political parties from playing an important role in parliament, the regime is just adding to its own volatility. Therefore, priority should be given to pushing for the inclusion of all political forces in the electoral process and the strengthening of poli

This work explains elite behaviour in authoritarian systems and proposes why elites withdraw their support for the incumbent when faced with popular uprisings. Building upon foundations drawn from institutional authoritarianism and synthesised with local context from the substantial scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa, the book argues that the elite supporting autocrats come from three distinct cadres: the military, the single-party and the personalist. Each of these cadres possesses its own distinct institutional interests and preferences towards regime change. Drawing on these interests, the study constructs a theoretical framework that is assessed through testing it against three variables. Utilising an analytic narrative, the research finds that the withdrawal of elite support is the consequence of long-term processes that see distinct cadres marginalised. First, increased incumbent preference for personalist elements destabilises regimes as the military and single-party cadres reconsider their positions. Second, neoliberal economic policies, implemented via structural adjustment, accelerated this personalisation as the state’s withdrawal from the economy. This, in turn, affected the ability of the military and single-party elites to access patronage. Finally, the degree of military involvement in the formal political sphere contributes to shaping the nature of the system that replaced the incumbent regime under examination. Building upon a wide range of literature the book argues that interest realisation determines whether or not elite actors support regime change in authoritarian systems. The volume will be of interest to scholars researching politics, social sciences and the Middle East.

Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

In the years since the 2011 revolutions, Egypt and the Arab countries in general have moved from a profound moment of hope and democratic potential to deepened authoritarianism and outright war. Among the many political actors who have seen their political prospects rise and fall are youth activists, the revolutionary vanguard who spearheaded the transition process. This book offers a detailed analysis of Egypt’s revolutionary youth as a collective and non-institutionalized political actor since 2005, bringing forth in particular the organizational, ideational, and strategic dimensions of the social movement. It offers insights into the origins of the movement and its evolution over time, the activists’ claims and objectives, and the rationale behind their actions/interactions in the greater political arena. Proposing a theoretical framework that lies at the nexus of practice theory and social movement theory, the book demonstrates how the foundational practices of "youth" and "revolutionary" acted as the movement’s internal culture, shaping the activists’ claims and goals, their organizational structures, and their choice of strategies and repertoires of contention. In the context of a defunct Arab Spring and the region’s descent into deepened authoritarianism and ultra-violent conflict, the book sheds light on the Egyptian uprising and the reasons for its increasingly grim outcome by providing a detailed analysis of one of its key players and both the exogenous and endogenous reasons why the revolutionary youth activists failed to achieve their goals. As the first book to assess the revolutionary youth as a social movement distinct from other forms of activism and other youth groups/parties in Egypt, it will be a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in Middle East Studies, the Arab Spring, or social movements more generally.

In a detailed analysis of the continued survival of authoritarian governments in the Arab world, this book uses Egypt as a case study to address the timely and complex issue of democratization in the Middle East. The author argues that their longevity is less to do with the strength of the regime, but more closely related to the divisions and weakness of opposition groupings.

As Mubarak's regime nearing its end becomes a strong possibility, many pressures, both foreign and domestic, are coming to bear on Egypt to bring democratic reforms to this struggling country. In The Mubarak Leadership and Future of Democracy in Egypt, Alaa Al-Din Arafat studies this new era and the obstacles that must be overcome.

In this rich and thought-provoking study, Noha el-Mikawy explores the changes that have been occurring in Egypt's political system over the past thirty years--three very important decades in the country's transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. By focussing on consensus-building as analytically central to the transition process, el-Mikawy has picked up an original and very fruitful vein in the theoretical debate about the politics of transition and democracy. Her account of the inner workings and ideological divisions among the country's major political parties provides a wealth of detail for the 1980s and early 1990s nowhere else to be found. This book is likely to make a breakthrough in the conspiracy of silence hitherto affecting the inclusion of the Egyptian experience as an empirical reference point in the theoretical literature of transition.