No abstract

Gender quotas are increasingly being adopted by autocrats in part to legitimize their rule. Yet, even in autocracies, these quotas increase women’s political representation. It thus stands to reason that public support for gender quotas in autocracies might be shaped by this trade-off between advancing women’s rights and granting the regime legitimacy. All else equal, regime opponents should be less supportive of gender quotas in autocracies, wary of legitimizing the regime. We uncover evidence of this proposition in an analysis of region-wide Arab Barometer surveys and a survey experiment in Algeria. We also find that evaluations of this trade-off are conditioned by other demographics, with women, gender egalitarians, and Islamists remaining more consistent in their support for/opposition to gender quotas regardless of regime gains. Overall, our findings suggest that gender quotas in autocracies are viewed through a political lens, creating a potential backlash toward women’s empowerment.

Episodes of mass political violence, such as genocide and civil war, have been thought to both encourage and discourage future political mobilization. We square these competing hypotheses by disaggregating between protest onset and resilience. We argue that exposure to mass violence decades ago should on average decrease protest onset, by heightening fears of repression and retribution. However, conditional on protesting, prior exposure to violence should increase protest longevity, by generating greater political grievances that fuel commitment to the cause. We find evidence of both effects in Algeria during the 2019–20 Hirak protests that toppled President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Pairing an original dataset on massacres during the 1990s civil war with a rolling online survey of 18,000 Algerians in 2019–20, we find that areas exposed to greater violence in the 1990s had on average fewer, but more committed, protesters in 2019–20.

The Algerian regime was contested by a democratization attempt and a civil war in the 1990s; however, it has been robust since then. Even with the challenges during the Arab Spring and the Hirak movement, the Algerian regime found ways to absorb protests and survive. How was it possible for the Algerian elites to acquire such a robust authoritarian regime after years of instability? This article examines the transformation of the authoritarian regime in Algeria by carrying out a case analysis and supports its claims with interviews conducted during fieldwork. According to that, the regime diversified its survival toolset by reconfiguring the old mechanisms and introducing some new ones during the 1990s. Along with benefitting from the natural resources rents, the regime strengthened the coercive apparatus, redefined legitimacy, started to use political liberalization effectively and introduced multiparty system to control the challenges from the opposition. Thanks to this reconfiguration, the Algerian regime transformed into a robust and modern electoral authoritarian regime in the 1990s.