The politics of consensus: al-Nahda and the stability of the Tunisian transition

McCarthy, Rory

doi:10.1080/00263206.2018.1538969

Cited by 24 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Local and international monitors describe the 2014 elections for members of parliament (October 26) and president (November 23 with a run off on December 21) as "free and fair". The secular parties won in both parliament and the presidency, and the Islamist parties conceded the election peacefully (AP, 2014;McCarthy, 2019).…”

Section: Parliamentary and Presidential Elections (2014 And 2019)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A. Kavanaugh et al / Media use, information reliability and political efficacy in Tunisia, 2011Tunisia, -2019 The moderate Islamist Ennahda party (or al-Nahda), which had previously dominated the parliament, came in second with 69 seats (AP, 2014;McCarthy, 2019). The Free Patriotic Union was a distant third with 16 seats, followed by the left wing coalition of parties known as the Popular Front (extremists assassinated two of its members in 2013).…”

Section: Parliamentary and Presidential Elections (2014 And 2019)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Media use, information reliability and political efficacy in Tunisia, 2011–2019

Kavanaugh

Sheetz

Skandrani

et al. 2021

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Information access and open communication – through in person and mediated information and communication technology – are critical to an informed citizenry in democratic societies. The 2011 Arab Spring uprising that originated in Tunisia and resulted in the overthrow of long-time Tunisian authoritarian president Ben Ali, established a new transitional government with more democratic institutions and more open press and political expression. In this paper, we explore changes over time (2011–2019) in the use by young, educated Tunisians of different political information sources, the perceived reliability of these sources, their information sharing behavior, and sense of being politically well-informed (i.e., political information efficacy). We report here results from the third of three surveys we administered of an online questionnaire to three different but comparable opportunity samples of young, educated Tunisians. The first two surveys conducted in 2012 and 2015 have been previously reported. We compare results from the most recent survey regarding 2019 elections with findings from the two prior surveys. Our findings confirm increasing perceived reliability of government information sources during the 2014 and 2019 elections, and decreasing reliability of social media. Results also confirm that higher perceptions of information reliability along with information sharing, lead to greater political information efficacy which is an important predictor of further democratic political participation.

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Section: Parliamentary and Presidential Elections (2014 And 2019)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Parliamentary and Presidential Elections (2014 And 2019)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Media use, information reliability and political efficacy in Tunisia, 2011–2019

Kavanaugh

Sheetz

Skandrani

et al. 2021

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“…The 2014 elections were the first regular presidential elections since the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 and the adoption of the new Constitution in January 2014. Both local and international monitors described the elections as"free and fair" with the secular parties winning and the Islamist parties conceding the election peacefully [4,32].…”

Section: Parliamentary and Presidential Electionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The moderate Islamist Ennahda party (also written as al-Nahda), which had previously dominated the parliament, came in second with 69 seats [4,32]. The Free Patriotic Union was a distant third with 16 seats; Slim Rihai, millionaire football club owner and political newcomer, heads the party.…”

Section: Parliamentary and Presidential Electionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communication Behavior in an Emerging Democracy

Kavanaugh

Song

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

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During elections in emerging democracies, communication behavior can indicate the relative freedom of expression perceived by individuals and organizations. Communication is critical for citizens to stay informed and make sense of competing political visions, platforms, and candidates. In Fall 2014, three years after the Arab Spring uprising that originated in Tunisia and resulted in the overthrow of long-time dictator Ben Ali, Tunisian citizens went to the voting booth to elect members of parliament and the next president. These were the first regular presidential elections since the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 and the adoption of the Constitution in January 2014, and the first free and fair presidential elections since independence from French colonialism in 1956. To explore the level of political tolerance and freedom of expression in this emerging democracy, we examined the contents and metadata of tweets during the election period. We used computational techniques (e.g., natural language processing, topic modeling, data visualization, and social graphing) as well as manual inspection of tweets to identify the main topics of political discussion and related social interaction. Our findings show a lively and open expression of political opinions, candidate positions, and policy issues appearing during the period of the 2014 elections, suggesting an increasingly democratic society in Tunisia.

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“…It has generally escaped the fate of its neighbors such as Libya, which plunged into a bloody civil war and Egypt, which after a military coup in July 2013, was thrown back into military rule. Tunisia has managed to gradually escape authoritarianism and political chaos thanks to its deeply-entrenched culture of reformism and consensus politics (Hibou, 2009;McCarthy, 2019), its strong civil society, such as the Tunisian General Union of Labor (UGTT), the Tunisian Union of Industry, Crafts and Commerce 1 (UTICA) as well as democratic institutions (e.g. Independent High Authority for Elections, ISIE).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The people want …: ’ the populist specter in the Tunisian President’s inaugural speech

Helal

2021

Critical Discourse Studies

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This paper combines insights from Deictic Space Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory to analyze the Tunisian President's inaugural speech following his victory in the October 2019 elections. Detailed critical discourse analysis of the deictic exponents and the metaphorical image schemas employed in the text showed a Manichean opposition between the pure/good people (Us) versus the corrupt/evil 'elites' (Them), nostalgia to a pristine revolutionary moment, a pan-Arab discourse which anchors the Israeli-Palestinian conflict close to the local geography and a radical form of populism, which grounds sovereignty within a transcendent theocratic cosmology. It is suggested that the upsurge of populism in Tunisian politics could be explained by the disenchantment with the deficient and rather 'fake' Islamo-nationalist consensus politics, the inappropriate neoliberal policies imposed by fund-raising bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) as well as the fragmentation, if not total erosion, of viable public spaces for rational deliberation and decision-making processes as a result of the 'digital era.' ARTICLE HISTORY

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The politics of consensus: al-Nahda and the stability of the Tunisian transition

Cited by 24 publications

References 16 publications

Media use, information reliability and political efficacy in Tunisia, 2011–2019

Media use, information reliability and political efficacy in Tunisia, 2011–2019

Communication Behavior in an Emerging Democracy

‘The people want …: ’ the populist specter in the Tunisian President’s inaugural speech

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