Abstract
This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success at the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist versus secular voting. We identify two dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: socioeconomic profile and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence suggesting that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Exploiting the sequential voting setup, we show that later voting stages have not resulted in stronger support for the already winning Islamist parties (i.e., there is no bandwagon effect).
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Notes
Syria is engaged in a civil war; major protests have broken out in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman; minor protests have occurred in Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Western Sahara.
After a series of civil protests spurred by a general feeling of discontentment, President Mohamed Morsy was ousted by the military in July 2013 and the constitution was suspended. The president of the constitutional court, Adly Mansour, was appointed as interim president. Morsy’s ouster marked the beginning of a new phase in the country’s struggle for democracy. In January 2014, a new Egyptian constitution was backed by 98.1 % in a referendum that was held amid continued tension by Islamist factions.
Unfortunately, an analysis of voter turnout is not possible owing to problems with data availability.
For example, Potrafke (2012, 2013), Hanusch (2013), and Rowley and Smith (2009) analyze the effect that the population share of Muslims has on the level of democracy. Maseland and van Hoorn (2011) attempt to explain observations of little democracy in Muslim countries, but positive attitudes toward it.
This strand of the literature has had mixed success in finding support for the economic voting hypothesis. See Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier (2000) for a survey.
In the theoretical strand of the literature, there are varying results with regard to the impact of timing on voting outcomes. Dekel and Piccione (2000), for example, show that the symmetric simultaneous voting equilibria are also equilibria in any sequential voting structure, while Battaglini (2005) shows that when voters can abstain, the set of equilibria in the two mechanisms actually are disjoint. The extensive empirical literature mainly concentrates on testing the implications of the theoretical frameworks in the laboratory. For a survey, see Palfrey (2009).
Egypt has a bicameral parliament consisting of the Advisory Council and the People’s Assembly.
See Article 189 of the referendum.
Information on the electoral framework and results are from the official website of the Egyptian parliamentary elections 2011–2012 http://www.elections2011.eg/. Accessed on April 19, 2012.
See the Supreme Court’s constitutional ruling on case 22 in the 13th judicial year, published in the official gazette on July 22, 2000.
The first election stage took place November 28–29, 2011, in the governorates of Cairo, Fayoum, Port Said, Damietta, Alexandria, Kafr El-Sheikh, Assiut, Luxor, and the Red Sea. The second stage followed on December 14–15, 2011, in a further nine governorates: Giza, Beni Suef, Menoufia, Sharkia, Ismalia, Suez, Behera, Sohag, and Aswan. The third and last stage took place January 10–11, 2012, in Minia, Kalyoubia, Gharbia, Dakahlia, North Sinai, South Sinai, Marsa Matrouh, Qena, and New Valley. In each governorate, one to four constituencies were formed based on the governorate’s population. For example, Cairo was divided into four constituencies, whereas the five frontier governorates which are large in size but quite scarce in population had only one constituency each.
The amended Article 40 on party formation stipulates that a new party needs only the signatures of 5,000 citizens from 10 of Egypt’s 27 governorates to gain legitimacy.
Given the emergence of a large number of new parties in a short time span prior to the elections, a differentiation of the political parties based on party programs proved both a challenge to pundits and voters alike.
http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/category/political-parties. Accessed on May 30, 2012.
A list of all other parties, the number of constituencies in which they participated, and proportional voting results can be found in an earlier working paper version of the paper.
The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the oldest and most widespread movements of political Islam. It was founded in 1928 by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan Elbanna.
The high point of the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral participation came in 2005, when its members, running as independents, won 20 % of the People Assembly’s seats. See International Foundation for Electoral Systems’(IFES) notes on the 2005 People’s Assembly elections. http://www.ifes.org/egypt. Accessed on August 1, 2012. Strong repression by the government ensured that such success was not repeated in 2010.
Salafism has become associated with literal, strict, and puritanical approaches to Islamic theology; its followers are considered much more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood.
In one constituency, Qena, the Free Egyptians Party and the Egyptian Social Democratic Party ran independently and not as part of the Egyptian Bloc.
http://www.elections2011.eg/ Accessed on April 19, 2012.
For a survey of the economics and political science literature, see Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier (2000).
The notion that countries in transition lean more toward prospective than retrospective voting is analyzed in Fidrmuc (2000). He shows empirically that voters in transition economies, in his case Central and Eastern European countries, vote for parties based on their expected future best interests.
See also Swank and Eisinga (1999), who analyze economic voting in the context of a multi-party system and proportional representative voting. They show that voting outcomes are strongly influenced by non-economic factors.
In contrast to Erle et al. (2011) analysis, we allow for a more ceteris paribus estimation and isolation of the effects of socioeconomic profiles on voting outcome based on a multivariate regression analysis.
Note that we use the population above 10 years owing to data availability in the Egyptian census.
The data in the underlying census differentiate between four categories of sanitation access: access to public sanitation networks, access to non-public sanitation facilities, using sanitation trenches, and being offline. We use the share of a constituency’s population with no access to any sanitation network (i.e., those using sanitation trenches or being offline) as an alternative poverty proxy to check the robustness of our results.
Data on public-sector employment should be more reliable than those on private or informal employment. Schneider (2002) estimates that the informal sector in Egypt constitutes approximately 35.1 % of national GDP.
For example, to circumvent the regulation that one female must be included on each party list, female candidates were consistently put at the end of Salafi lists and, in some cases, campaign flyer photos of the female candidate were obscured by pictures of a flower or some other inanimate object.
Note that the census took place in 2006, whereas the elections took place in 2011–2012. The definition of years in each age group is restricted by the categorization in the CAPMAS data.
For example, Powell and Whitten (1993) show, in their cross-country comprehensive study of economic voting, that considerations of the ideological image of the government, its electoral base, and the clarity of its political responsibility play important roles in voting outcome.
Morton and Williams (1999) posit that later-stage voters can use early voting outcomes to infer information about the candidates (i.e., their winning probabilities) and thus make choices that better reflect their preferences.
In those cases where the governorates were not split into more than one constituency, we use the distance from the central post office to Cairo and in the cases where the governorates were split into different constituencies, we use the distance from Cairo to the most populous district or village in each constituency.
Note that our results are robust to using White (1980) robust standard errors (results available upon request).
Employing the variable on private employment instead, our results show that constituencies with a larger share of private employment are significantly negatively associated with Islamist voting (results available upon request). Possible explanations might be the fear of damage to the tourism business, which is a major player in Egypt’s private-sector economy, fear of losing foreign investments, and worry about possible major changes in the banking system under an Islamic political regime. Note that the public and private sector employment variables do not even come close to adding up to 100 %. However, including both variables simultaneously in the model is not possible due to multicollinearity.
Further analyses show that this reduction in support for Islamist parties did not benefit any particular group of parties, but meant a higher share for almost all other parties competing in the elections.
As SUR standard errors are slightly smaller, the variables that are marginally insignificant in model (1) become significant at the 10 % level using SUR (e.g., “illiteracy rate” and “3rd election stage” in the Islamist voting model). However, their statistical significance is consistent with the results of our more efficiently estimated, reduced model in Table 4.
The variables “3rd election stage” and “female participation in labor force” are now even significant at the 5 % level for Islamist voting and secular voting, respectively.
We center both variables by subtracting their means before computing the interaction term.
Instead of “illiteracy rate”, we use a variable that captures the fraction of population that has no certified education. Consequently, this variable captures a larger population share, namely, the formally uneducated.
We did not use this specification when estimating the general model in the first place due to the existence of multicollinearity when adding the distance variable to our general model. The multicollinearity is chiefly due to the strongly centrist nature of the Egyptian state, where the political periphery coincides with the social periphery.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was awarded the Ibn Khaldoun Prize 2012 by the Middle East Economic Association. The authors thank three anonymous referees, the editor of this journal, Boban Aleksandrovic, Moamen Gouda, Bernd Hayo, Michael Kirk, Kai Konrad, Tim Krieger, Florian Neumeier, Jeffrey Nugent, Niklas Potrafke, Salmai Qari, Christian Traxler, Mathias Uhl, Susanne Väth, Stefan Voigt, and participants of the International Society for New Institutional Economics Annual Conference (Florence 2013), the European Public Choice Society Meeting (Zurich 2013), the International Conference of the Middle East Economic Association (Speyer 2013), the CASAW Workshop “Islamism and Arab Revolutions” (Cairo 2013), the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Middle East Economic Association (San Diego 2013), the “Constitutional Choice in the Middle East” conference (Hamburg 2012), and research seminars in Berlin, Marburg, and Munich for helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining shortcomings are our own.
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Elsayyad, M., Hanafy, S. Voting Islamist or voting secular? An empirical analysis of voting outcomes in Egypt’s “Arab Spring”. Public Choice 160, 109–130 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0173-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0173-3