The Arab democracy deficit: the case of Egypt.

• Author: Perry, Glenn E.

THE BLEAK 2002 ARAB HUMAN Development Report (AHDR 2002) noted "a substantial lag between Arab countries and other regions in terms of participatory government." (1) Recognizing the "intractable" nature of attempts to quantify such matters, the authors--not surprisingly--present rough measures showing "freedom scores" drastically lower for the Arab world than even for sub-Saharan Africa or South and East Asia. The report concludes that this "freedom deficit"--coming first among deficits that include those relating to "women's empowerment" and "human capabilities/knowledge" (p. 27)--"undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development" (p.2) A follow-up report the next year (AHDR 2003) rightly put the freedom deficit at the heart of the overall problem by pointing out that the absence of democracy "shackles active minds, extinguishes the flame of learning and kills the drive for innovation" (p. 11).

If we accept Samuel P. Huntington's designation of the period starting in 1974 as the "Third Wave" of democratization, (2) the Arab world has found itself high and dry. Few if any other parts of the globe have remained so far above the rising waters. Contrary to the widespread expectations of some who failed to see the special barrier shielding them--that is, as I show below, an external power committed to maintaining authoritarian client regimes even while it uses the rhetoric of support for democracy and indeed engages in "democracy promotion"--Arab regimes remained impervious to the "wave" whose effect at first hit southern Europe and then Latin America. This remained true when, by the 1990s, the "wave" began at least superficially to transform many regimes in other parts of Africa and Asia. A recognition of the reality of the special protection Arab regimes have against the "Third Wave" prevents us from being sanguine about the future.

THE CASE OF EGYPT

The "freedom deficit" characterizes one of the biggest Arab countries, Egypt, about as much as it does the region in general. The AHDR puts it in the second lowest rank, along with such countries as Oman and Algeria (above Saudi Arabia, Iraq, etc.) and below the third category (i.e., Morocco and Kuwait). Only Jordan--self essentially an autocratic state, its considerable degree of liberalization notwithstanding--is put in the highest rank within the Arab world. (3)

Such frankness about Egypt contrasts with a widespread tendency (4) in the past in the U.S. press and among establishment-oriented writers to whitewash Western client regimes. This has been done by obscuring the distinction between democracy on the one hand and slight degrees of democratization or liberalization that leave the authoritarian structure intact (and, as I show below, even augment it) on the other hand. Recent careful studies of Egyptian politics by such scholars as May Kassem and Eberhard Kienle (5) capture the superficial nature of liberalization under Mubarak, which as Kienle shows, defies the usual description of even "gradually returning to a liberal tradition" or of a "transition to democracy" (or even a "blocked transition") (6) as the mixed picture of the 1980s actually has been followed by deliberalization since the early 1990s.

THE DIMENSIONS OF DEMOCRACY OR POLYARCHY

My focus already has shifted from "freedom" to "democracy." The two words are not entirely synonymous, as the first refers variously to the absence of foreign domination or--in the sense used in the AHDR (and here)--to the existence of individual liberties. By contrast, democracy relates to the right of the people as a whole to rule themselves or, in the minimalist sense in which it is used today, periodically to control their government by choosing their rulers through electoral procedures that include the "majority-rule" and "one-person-one-vote" principles. As the terms "illiberal democracy" (7) and "despotism of the majority" imply, majority rule does not necessarily spell a high degree of individual freedom (but neither does rule by a few, however much one might try to constrain the rulers with constitutions), although it gives groups with significant numbers of votes an important means to protect their freedom. However, the term "democracy" not only singles out an important freedom for the majority collectively to choose their rulers, but it has to include pretty much the full range of individual freedoms, notably freedom of expression, especially the right to criticize the government and for opposition parties to function. (8)

Although I later will revert to the more conventional word, I propose now to shift from "democracy" to another term, "polyarchy," coined by Robert A. Dahl in a classic work by that title. (9) I use this term mainly in order to avoid misquoting Dahl, who, at least in this one book, rejects the application of the word "democracy" to the type of governmental system it usually describes. For him, democracy is only a "hypothetical system whose realization would involve much that no country ever has adopted.

Demonstrating remarkable ability to reduce highly complicated ideas to two simple factors, Dahl clarifies that polyarchy represents two dimensions: inclusiveness and contestation. A polyarchical regime is fully inclusive, meaning that every adult has the right to vote in elections (this assumes that each vote counts equally, that is, the "'one-person-one-vote" principle). A regime can be fully inclusive even if voters have no real choice (as in the standard Leninist single-party pattern or in the election of Egyptian presidents). We can quickly dispose of the inclusiveness test in the case of Egypt, as no large groups are excluded from the suffrage. (10) There is the matter--official claims much to the contrary--of an extremely low voting rate (11) in Egyptian elections, which might be mistaken for something less than full inclusiveness (and does exemplify that to the extent that it involves people being prevented from voting, as in the case of those who are detained immediately before elections). But the low voting rate seems to result primarily from a realization that elections do not offer a real choice, which brings us to the second dimension of polyarchy.

Dahl's second dimension is contestation, that is, the unhampered right to oppose the government by choosing leaders through fully contested elections. While some writers in the past (12) argued that uncontested elections can constitute meaningful popular participation in politics, such a lack of contestation obviously does not add up to freedom or to a meaningful degree of democracy. A polyarchy, in Dahl's terms, is both fully inclusive and fully contested. A main issue in Egypt if we want to measure its degree of polyarchy is the level of contestation.

Dahl should have added what I propose to label the "Third Dimension" of polyarchy, that is, the extent to which those who are chosen in inclusive, contested elections are the real rulers. (13)

High levels of inclusiveness and contestation may add up to very little if those who are elected in such a manner are not the ones who have effective power. Based on Dahl's two dimensions, Turkey qualifies as a polyarchy, but the fact that the army has set limits on what the popularly elected government does (and recurrently has taken power when it was dissatisfied) belies this designation to a considerable degree. Similarly, a major degree of contestation (if within limits set by the Council of Guardians) has emerged in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the minimal extent of the elected parliament's real power and the central role of institutions such as the Council of Guardians and the Faqih (Jurist)/Leader disqualifies Iran from being designated as essentially polyarchical, although it arguably comes closer to being a polyarchy than does any Arab state. Similarly, in Jordan and Morocco, where fairly high levels of contestation have sometimes been demonstrated in parliamentary elections, the extent to which real power is centered in the palace belies any designation as polyarchies. In Egypt, as I show below, the existing levels of inclusiveness and contestation for parliamentary seats are negated by the concentration of real power in the hands of a president who recurrently gets nearly unanimous approval in uncontested plebiscites, that is, the absence of the Third Dimension.

FROM NONCONTESTATION TO FAKE CONTESTATION

Beginning with President Anwar al-Sadat's agreement in 1974 to allow three minbars (pulpits), later transformed into political parties, to compete with one another, the Egyptian regime has been able to present itself as at least moving significantly away from the authoritarianism (what Dahl calls "inclusive hegemony") of the 1960s in the direction of polyarchy. Although Sadat's crackdown on his critics shortly before his death belied this, there was optimism at first among those who failed to understand the dictates of the client relationship with Washington that his successor, President Husni Mubarak, would resume the democratization process, as he promised to do. But to what extent has politics become authentically contested?

The number of legalized political parties has grown to sixteen during the Mubarak era, including the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), although others have failed to get official approval. Major "opposition" organizations include the New Ward Party, the leftist Tagammu (Progressive) Party, the Labor Party (which took on an Islamist ideology and has been suspended since 2000), the Nasirite Party, and the rightist Liberal Party. (14) Each party not only can nominate candidates for parliamentary seats but can publish newspapers and magazines that present its criticisms of the government, clearly a major departure from the earlier patterns, although extensive censorship and other limits on press freedom continue to exist. (15)

The NDP recurrently gets the lion share of parliamentary...