Shadi Hamid and Meredith Wheeler assess empirically whether Morsi was a democrat or an autocrat. Morsi was no Mandela, but he was no autocrat, either. The Polity index is scored from -10 to 10, with negative values representing more autocratic regimes and positive values representing more democratic regimes. The most charitable reading of Morsi’s tenure—the upper bound of our score—was a 4. However, we think the most accurate score—drawing not just on the letter of Polity’s coding guidance, but also the spirit—is a 2. In real terms, this means that Morsi’s year in office was anocratic—that is, it was democratic in some ways and autocratic in others. Morsi was democratically elected and subject to meaningful institutional and popular constraints. When he edged toward autocracy in November 2012 and made his decrees exempt from review, widespread protests forced him to backtrack. The Morsi government and the Muslim Brotherhood showed favoritism toward Islamist-aligned groups, harassed or threatened prominent opposition voices, and detained secular activists such as Ahmed Maher. However, unlike the current military-backed government, it did not systematically repress and imprison opponents. Moreover, Morsi’s winner-takes-all majoritarianism was counterbalanced by what Nathan Brown calls the “wide state,” including the military and security establishments, a powerful judiciary, and business elites. So how did Morsi stack up against the competition? The average score for countries in the midst of a “positive regime change” or “democratic transition” is a 2.18. More relevant here are regimes in “societal transition,” which scored, on average, three points lower than Morsi did, with a mean value of -0.97. Societal transitions encompass some of the most volatile moments in a country’s history, during which not only elites but ordinary citizens are caught up in political and social turmoil. Our sample can be divided into four quartiles: democracies, democratic-leaning anocracies, autocratic-leaning anocracies, and autocracies. Democratic-leaning anocracies, the category into which Morsi’s year in office falls, are a common form of governance during societal transitions. When Secretary of State John Kerry argued in August 2013 that the Egyptian military coup was “restoring democracy” to the country, he ignored the fact that Egypt under Morsi was undergoing a remarkably ordinary transition, neither wholly autocratic nor wholly democratic, falling almost exactly at the mean value of political transitions globally. What kind of democracy did Egypt’s military-appointed government restore? The new regime, in the months after the coup, would have scored a -4, a six-point slide toward autocracy. Unlike Morsi or even former strongmen Hosni Mubarak and Anwar Sadat, the military government has presided over mass arrests of political opponents as well as mass killings, including the August 14, 2013 crackdown on Morsi supporters that left hundreds dead. A law effectively banning opposition protests is also worth noting here, as is security forces’ consistent use of lethal force against demonstrators. On the “competitiveness of participation” variable, Egypt under the military government would be coded as “suppressed,” which means that the regime “systematically and sharply limits [the] form, extent, or both [of competition] in ways that exclude substantial groups from participation…. As an operational rule, the banning of a political party which received more than 10 percent of the vote in a recent national election is sufficient evidence that competition is ‘suppressed.’” In today’s Egypt, there is competition within the regime’s own political coalition, but anything beyond that is simply not permitted. In fact, the six-point drop in Egypt’s Polity score is likely an underestimation of the real magnitude of difference between the two governments. Because Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the military chief who just declared his candidacy for the presidency, has not yet formally consolidated power through regularized elections or a closed selection process among Egyptian elite, his “executive recruitment” sub-score is slightly inflated. If this type of consolidation occurs—as is widely expected—we can expect Egypt’s Polity score to drop to a -6 or -7, which would reflect an 8-point drop from Morsi’s tenure in power. theatlantic/international/archive/2014/03/scoring-egypts-return-to-autocracy/359797/
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:18:01 +0000
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