Democracy prevention in the Arab world: A study of democracy prevention in Egypt

This study attempts to explore the strategies that have succeeded in preventing democracy from establishing itself as a viable system of government in the Middle East. It measures authoritarian success not only by total years of non-democratic rule, but also through an assessment of its effectiveness in swaying the middle class to accept its policies. While it treats coercion as the central means of control for maintaining power, the support of the middle class is linked to how successfully rulers can manipulate the level of threat facing the nation. Authoritarians pressure economic elites and the middle classes to forego political reform in exchange for state protection, and employ coercion against opponents to consolidate their rule.; Egypt has been chosen as a case study to answer this question because, like many Arab states, its governments since 1952 have used the threats of the Islamists and Israel as justification for resisting democratic reform. The militant Islamists and the Israeli policies toward the Palestinians gave the Egyptian governments the excuse to justify authoritarianism and to use coercion against political opponents. This study theorizes that most effective among authoritarian regimes' sources to stay in power is the exaggeration of threat that serves as a justification for state sponsored repression of the political opposition. The qualitative analysis reviews the laws and regulations that served to institutionalize the authoritarian regime where the institutional basis of democracy prevention strategy emerged. The quantitative analysis tries to explore the regime's political agenda indirectly through the government controlled national newspapers coverage. Excessive coverage of the Islamic and the Israeli threats by the national newspapers supports the argument that the government is using the threat to enlist the political support of the middle class.; The empirical findings suggest that the national newspapers have excessive coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and terrorism compared to the opposition papers, and majority of middle class Egyptians get their information about the Arab-Israeli issue from the national press. The analysis suggests the success of each government in swaying the middle class opinion to support its policies and legitimize its rule. The profiles of the minority who opposed the government's policy suggest that they were ideologists who could not be swayed by the media.