Conventional Explanations of Egyptian Democratization

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, there had been an upsurge in scholarly interest in the processes of democratic transition. This was in large part due to the democratization of the remaining authoritarian regimes in southern Europe, in addition to the then ongoing processes of democratic transformation in Latin America , which cumulatively became known as the ‘Third Wave ’. The new scholarship also gained further momentum with the opening up of political systems in South East Asia, which was in turn followed by the political and economic transformation of former communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. Critically, most of the theoretical and comparative democratization studies that were conducted during this period overlooked the Arab world. This was evident in the exclusion of the Arab countries in the two most important research projects on democratization published in the 1980s; the first was O’Donnell, Schmitter , and Whitehead’s comparative study on Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, published in 1986, and the second was Diamond , Linz, and Lipset’s four-volume study on Democracy in Developing Countries, published in 1989. Although this period witnessed the rise of some studies devoted exclusively to the analysis of political and economic liberalization in selected Arab countries, such as the ones by the Center for Arab Unity Studies (Beirut), the Arab Thought Forum (Amman), and Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (Cairo ), the majority of these studies did not appear to have achieved significant recognition beyond the community of Arab social scientists. This scholarly neglect of the region was largely an outcome of academic bias within the democratization literature, which took political change as a criterion for case selection, thereby excluding the Arab world as a domain of analysis (Brownlee 2005: 45; Niblock 1998: 226).