Chronic instability in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is linked to the difficulties political systems face in arbitrating conflicts and divisions within societies. Political parties and party systems play a crucial role in channeling social demands, articulating various political offers, and building compromises. Yet, there exists no comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of party politics in the MENA. The CLOSER project aims to address this gap using new empirical evidence, and to make a substantial contribution to the theory of social cleavages.

This theory was originally developed on the basis of empirical data drawn from the West European party systems. More recently, scholars have used this approach to study party politics in other global regions, contributing to the development of general theory. So far, the MENA has been left out, partly due to the strength of culturalist prejudices inherited from the colonial era and partly to the lack of democratic experience in the region.

Nevertheless, the events of recent decades have considerably enriched the empirical material available for the study of MENA party politics, and the time has come to incorporate this material into the general theory. Because social cleavages began to form during the late Ottoman Empire – and continued through the colonization and decolonization processes – we will focus on the post-Ottoman space within this region.

This project brings together historians, geographers, and political scientists. Due to its interdisciplinarity, it relies on several methods in the frame of an overarching comparative methodology: archive exploration, electoral geography, electoral manifesto analysis, field interviews, and legal analysis.

The main risks are related to access to the field and to relevant data. The potential rewards are a better understanding of the conditions for stability in the MENA and a much-needed contribution to the general literature on party politics.
 

 
The object of the CLOSER project is to study party politics in the ‘post-Ottoman space’ of the MENA region by bringing together political scientists, historians, and geographers in order to investigate the historically deep social cleavages behind the region’s political parties and party systems, together with their territorial dimensions.

The cleavage theory lies at the heart of the CLOSER project. This theory is originally based on a specific geographical and temporal context, that of Western Europe. However, the CLOSER project will avoid ‘conceptual stretching’ by applying the cleavage approach at its most general level of abstraction: societies are structurally conflictual; their conflicts crystallize (or do not crystallize) in the party systems. In no way will the research assume that the cleavages identified by Rokkan and Lipset (1967) in the specific context of Western Europe can be applied as is to the MENA region.

An interdisciplinary approach is needed to demonstrate the relevance of cleavage theory and identify the specific cleavages in the MENA region. In this project, the political scientists will analyse the positions of political parties on key issues through interviews, field observations and an analysis of party manifestos (the supply side). The geographers will study divides within MENA societies through the territorial repartition of the vote for different parties and coalitions (the demand side). And the historians will focus on the origins of both political organizations and social cleavages (both supply and demand).

By combining the three disciplines with their respective methods and theoretical traditions under an overarching comparative methodology, the CLOSER project will be able to build a comprehensive framework explaining past, current, and future relationships between the structural divides within MENA societies and their party systems.

This approach dictates the spatial and territorial scope of the CLOSER project: the Ottoman Empire propelled political and economic reforms in the part of the MENA region it was controlling during the Tanzimat period (1839-1876). Our project will study MENA countries sharing this history at a time crucial for the formation of social cleavages.

 
Following the Arab Spring, political parties from the whole political spectrum have grown in importance in the region (Cavatorta 2015). Despite the recent peak in the interest in political parties, no large comparative project has been devoted to this topic yet. Thus, the project is original in its theoretical ambition, and geographical and temporal scope.

First, by going beyond localist or culturalist approaches, the CLOSER project will systematically test the relevance of cleavage theory for the MENA region using an interdisciplinary approach. In Western Europe, social cleavages emerged when the construction of the modern state (17th century) and the capitalist economy created deep and long-lasting divisions within societies (19th century). The ‘national revolution’ pitted the state-builders against local elites (the centre/periphery cleavage) and the state against religious institutions (the secular/religious cleavage), while the ‘industrial revolution’ pitted the interests of the primary and secondary sectors of the economy against each other (the rural/urban cleavage) and triggered a class struggle between the working class and the owners of the means of production (the workers/owners cleavage) (Rokkan & Lipset 1967). In the MENA region, these two processes began during the late Ottoman Empire and were profoundly impacted by the colonial ventures of the European powers. As a case in point, the process of national state-building through struggles for independence in the 20th century deeply differs from the 18th-century ‘national revolution’ in Western Europe.

By having historians working on historical trajectories, geographers on territorial and social oppositions in electoral behaviour, and political scientists on the programmatic and ideological differences between parties, the CLOSER project will apply an approach similar to that used in the study of Western European party systems to a different reality in order to understand the specificities of MENA politics within a framework that makes sense in other parts of the world. In doing so, the CLOSER project will, in turn, contribute to this general theory and current debates in the field of party politics. Indeed, the heuristic value of such a framework will prove useful only through its ability to explain party systems and political behaviour in other contexts, including authoritarian situations. By looking at political parties and party systems, the CLOSER project will not only bring attention back to understudied political movements in the region (liberals, conservatives, agrarians, environmentalists, and the slightly less neglected nationalists and socialists), and challenge some of the common historical narratives (notably by putting the focus back on the said understudied actors), but also bring a fresh perspective to the study of political Islam by studying Islamist political actors as parts of different national systems where they have to compete with other political forces.

Second, by focusing on the post-Ottoman space of the MENA region, the CLOSER project has an important original feature: its study of comparative politics in the MENA region includes Israel and Turkey along with several Arab countries.

Lastly, the temporal scope includes the Ottoman and colonial legacy. The period covered by the CLOSER project starts in 1908 with the creation of the Committee of Union and Progress and extends until today.
 

 
The contribution of the project will be twofold: it will allow for a better understanding of MENA politics and society, and it will contribute to the general debate on party politics.
 
The CLOSER project will generate a framework for the study of party politics in the whole region. Not only will it bring a new perspective to the academic discussions on Islamism and other political forces, but it will also contribute to various fields, since political parties mediate between the state and numerous civil society organizations: religious institutions and grassroot movements, workers’ and professional unions, business circles, linguistic minorities’ cultural institutions, agriculture cooperatives, environmental associations, and so on. The capacity of party systems to aggregate and channel various social demands is crucial for the stability of societies and the prospects for democracy and the state of law. Most of the countries studied in this project are part of the European Southern Neighbourhood and have concluded Association Agreements with the European Union. Their stability is of uttermost importance for the EU, not only from a geopolitical point of view, but also regarding economic cooperation, migrations, and the external dimensions of the European Green Deal through the future Green Partnerships. Thus, a better understanding of the MENA party systems would collectively improve the EU’s capacity to deal with and prevent future crises in this part of the world, and better the resilience of the Euro-Mediterranean system. The corresponding Host Institution (the IIR), besides doing fundamental research, also makes policy recommendations, and the findings of the CLOSER project will impact the policy outputs of this institution.

In addition, the CLOSER project is designed to contribute to fundamental research on party politics. As mentioned below, its interdisciplinarity and its spatial and temporal dimensions are theory-driven. In return, the project’s output will contribute to current discussions in the field.

Since the early 1980s, this field has been dominated by debates surrounding the growing electoral volatility and the rise of new political parties presumably challenging the traditional framework of social cleavages. Various theories have been built concerning potential new cleavages (Martin 2018; Barbieri 2021), but the most popular remains that of the emergence of a ‘value-based’ cleavage (Inglehart 1984) that places into opposition authoritarian and libertarian tendencies (Kitschelt 1994), whose roots may be in social classes – particularly the expanding middle class (Kriesi 1993, 1998; Müller 1999), in different levels of education (Bornschier 2007), or in the processes of globalization and European integration (Kriesi et al. 2006). This cleavage is often called the GAL-TAN cleavage, referring to the opposition of a ‘green, alternative, libertarian’ and a ‘traditional, authoritarian, nationalist’ pole (Hooghe & Marks 2018). Other authors refute this neo-cleavage theory, however, pointing out the fact that volatility does not cross the left-right divide (Oshri et al. 2022).

So far, this debate has been based almost exclusively on Western experience. As it is suspected of being reductionist, the application of cleavage theory to the study of non-Western party systems (mostly in Central and Eastern Europe and South America) has remained very limited (Van Hamme et al., 2014; Beye & Van Hamme, 2019). We believe that the study of comparable phenomena (electoral volatility, the rise of new parties challenging established party systems) in the MENA region, however, can bring new facts and hypotheses to this discussion, as well as testing the relevance of the theory for explaining party systems in other contexts.

We will start this project with a couple of research questions which form two axes:

1) Cleavage structures, post-colonial divisions, polarization, and authoritarian resilience. The relative weakness of socio-economic cleavages (workers/owners and rural/urban) in the MENA region (including Israel: see Barak-Gorodetsky & Zalzberg 2023) when compared to the West, could have several different explanations in the current state of the cleavage theory. Some authors consider that to develop, functional cleavages need a certain degree of consolidation of the national territory and of external boundaries (Caramani 2003; Bartolini 2005). Others think that an early extension of suffrage, as happened in Latin America, may prevent the constitution of strong class-based parties due to the absence of a long struggle for political participation (Dix 1989). This would explain the persistence of clientelism in such systems (Bornschier 2009), which would favour the secular-religious cleavage (Fossati et al. 2020). Yet, the decolonization in the MENA was another process of a decades-long mass struggle, whose effects of cleavage formation still have to be explored in a systematic fashion. Also, it could be interesting to revisit how suffrage has been extended in the MENA, notably to women and minorities. Lastly, socio-economic cleavages could be less weak than they seem in the MENA region but could be taken charge of by parties positioning themselves on the two other cleavages. For instance, the Islamist vote could hide an opposition between the rural and the urban worlds (Gumuscu 2010; Rougier & Bayoumi 2016; Van Hamme et al. 2020; Van Hamme & Gana 2022).

In this regard, it has been argued that the existence of deep social cleavages favours the transformation of dominant parties into tools of authoritarianism (Lancaster 2017). Moreover, authoritarian parties born from violent struggles are the most cohesive and the regimes they support are the most sustainable (Friesen 2022; Levitsky & Way 2012). Social cleavages can play a major role in authoritarian regressions (Ayan Musil 2015) because they allow a mobilization of a part of the electorate against another (Tudor & Ziegfeld 2019), which is depicted as a threat to national unity (Cinar 2016). If this theory works well to explain the recent developments in Turkey and Egypt, it can be challenged by the Tunisian case, where the consensus built in 2014 – rather than polarization – eroded the fragile democratic institutions.

2) Agrarian issues, peasant mobilization and environmentalism. The rural/urban cleavage is the least known of the four cleavages described by Rokkan & Lipset (1967). Yet, it is at the heart of the discussions surrounding the neo-cleavage theory, with some authors considering that even where it does not crystallize directly into party politics, it has been taken charge of by an urban new left (GAL) and a rural authoritarian right (TAN) (Faguet 2019; Mettler & Brown 2022; Valero 2022). The study of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has already allowed for a better understanding of this cleavage due to the presence of strong peasant parties in this part of the world during the interwar period, especially by pointing out its potential to be ‘value-based’ (De Waele 2009). In the MENA region, there are no stable political organizations specifically defending the rural world or agricultural interests, despite its many historical similarities with CEE in terms of the structure of property, the weight of peasant masses, and the importance of agrarian issues when the right to vote became universal (Abbas & El-Dessouky 2011).
 
The rise and electoral success of the environmentalist parties, starting in the late 1970s, have constituted one of the major challenges to the cleavage theory and have prompted the contemporary debates. Environmental issues are important for our project because they have interfered with the historical formation of social cleavages, especially the rural/urban one (Gratien 2022; Davis 2004). In fact, environmental issues in the MENA region are linked to the colonial past since the colonizer brought with him capitalist exploitation of nature (Davis 2007). More recently, environmental mobilizations played a role in creating the conditions for the Arab Spring (Steuer 2014) and grew further in its aftermaths (Çakır 2021; Lioschi 2019; Pepicelli 2021; Robert 2021). Small farmers and poor urban citizens are the first victims of environmental degradation and express their concerns through local politics and collective actions (Carpentier 2021; Robert 2021) rather than political parties. The MENA region could challenge the assumption that environmental conflicts are ‘value-based,’ and emphasize their economic and material aspects.
 

 
Due to its interdisciplinary dimension, the CLOSER project relies on the complementarity of the three different disciplines involved: while the historians will study the genealogy of party systems since the late Ottoman Empire through archival research, the political scientists will focus on the study of party systems through an electoral manifesto analysis, in-field interviews and a legal analysis, and the geographers will highlight the diversity of political and electoral behaviour in the MENA countries mainly through methods of electoral geography. Our aim is not only to use these different tools to study party politics in the post-Ottoman space, but also to develop the capacities of all the individual researchers involved in the project by creating interdisciplinary teams and transferring skills from one discipline to another through training and collaborative work (Nicolescu 2014).

Building a most-different systems design based on a series of five variables to whose influence party systems are susceptible (see the table below), we selected six case studies (one of them including three very different current political systems) illustrating the diversity of our Ottoman space: Tunisia, Egypt, the former British mandate (today comprising Israel, Palestine and Jordan), Lebanon, Turkey, and Kuwait. Thus, we will proceed with a small-N cross-national comparison (Seawright & Gerring 2008) designed to identify and unpack causal mechanisms linking the structures of social cleavages with party systems.

Six subregional interdisciplinary teams will carry out the work of studying the six selected case studies. During the first three years we will compare our six cases studies in order to contribute to the debate in the field of area studies; the work of the second phase is intended to bring theoretical contributions to the general literature on party politics by comparing our post-Ottoman space with other global regions previously studied by scholars of social cleavages and party politics: Western Europe, CEE and South America.

Our PIs and core researchers have extensive experience in collecting relevant material in MENA countries. In particular, they have access to archives in Turkey, that is to say the primary successor state of the Ottoman Empire, but also in Israel and several Arab countries. The electoral data and party manifestos have already been collected in some of the countries under study, notably by the ERC TARICA, in which 2 of our 3 PIs have been involved.

Year 1: Recruiting PhD candidates and post-doc researchers; creating interdisciplinary teams; preparing the ethical guidelines; reviewing the literature for each subregion; training the teams.

Year 2: Fieldwork.

Year 3: A comparative analysis through workshops; feedback on the ethical guidelines; diffusion of the intermediary results (at area studies conferences: DAVO, WOCMES); sending articles to WoS area studies journals; the first international symposium; generation of new hypotheses.

Year 4: Recruiting new PhD candidates and post-doc researchers; reviewing theoretical literature; creating new interdisciplinary teams; training the new teams.

Year 5: New fieldwork carried out in order to test the hypotheses generated in year 3.

Year 6: Engaging in a dialogue with the general literature and political sociology (through workshops; participation in discipline conferences: ECPR, EUGEO); dissemination of the final results (publication in WoS general journals; the final symposium).

 
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