Why are some political alliances stable, while others collapse? Matt Buehler takes this common political science question and explores it in rich detail using less common cases: Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania. In Why Alliances Fail, Buehler presents us with a seemingly unlikely duo of coalition partners: Islamists and Leftists.
As scholars such as Eva Wegner and Francesco Cavatorta have argued, the seeming deep ideological cleavage between left parties and Islamist parties obscures broad agreement on economics, antiauthoritarianism, and sometimes, as Buehler demonstrates, structural elements of their voting blocs. Buehler contributes to this literature by arguing that the real causes of alliance collapse are not ideological, but tied to the ability of regimes to control bases of support for parties.
Buehler's book demonstrates careful case selection. First, Buehler brings in Mauritania, an understudied country for scholars of North Africa (and one that the Middle East Studies Association currently only lists 8 members with expertise in). The comparison is productive, allowing Buehler to leverage differing contexts to tease out related dynamics. Second, the analysis spans levels of analysis, looking at national, labor, and urban alliances across the countries. Buehler describes the case selection as counterfactual analysis, but might instead better be described as constituting “hard cases” for alliance formation. Regardless of the nomenclature, Buehler carefully describes both the actual cases and the null cases for causal clues. Due to the national and subnational variation, the book is particularly useful for scholars of the Middle East who often focus on national level comparisons in a small set of countries.
As promised by the title, Buehler's argument is strongest on the explanation of mechanisms of alliance failure in Mauritania and Morocco. He argues persuasively that co-optation by the government is at the heart of many instances of alliance failure. The co-optation is achieved through shifts in the electoral base of the party. An increase in rural support, which comes with growing inclusion of traditional patronage networks, leaves parties open to co-optation by authoritarian elements.
In Buehler's argument, the rural social base of both the regime and the potential alliance partners (be they leftist or Islamist) is a vital precondition to later co-optation. He codes both Morocco and Mauritania as regimes that developed rural bases for their dominant parties and the postcolonial regime in general. Each of these countries also saw opposition parties develop a rural base, much to their detriment, during periods of contestation with the state. In each case, Buehler traces the process of decisions made by the emerging regimes to either incorporate or sideline traditional rural power structures at the time of regime emergence.
The arguments put forward on Morocco and Mauritania are particularly convincing, richly detailed with interviews from local activists and politicians. The arguments are rationalist, explicating why defection or cooperation made sense for each player in each setting. While the findings may seem daunting for those who have normative preferences for the growth of democracy, they constitute an important contribution to our understanding of the topic.
By shifting the focus to regime co-optation and urban–rural divides, Buehler provides more credence to those who would question the utility of the partisan terminology. What utility is there in identifying these groups as “left” or “Islamist” in the proposed contexts? Beuhler's interlocutors recognize the useful fiction of these labels, and he quotes a conversation with a Tunisian politician, Samir Ben Amor, who said “parties are not divided by ideologies.” Similarly, the scholars Buehler frequently cites, notably Jillian Schwedler, have also questioned the logic of our labels, with Schwedler writing that the “centrality of discussions of faith and religious obligations wax and wane in public discourses.” Buehler's study gives evidence to the idea that ideological differences, in the form of “radicalization” or “moderation” may not be at the core of alliances. Future work should continue to chip away at the hegemonic narrative of “secular vs. Islamist” cleavages.
In addition to the detailed case studies based on historical sources and interviews, the book also offers a statistical analysis of defection among leftist politicians, showing that those most likely to defect operated in places that have received development aid and where the population was in need of government services. The materialist incentives are well documented and convincing. Similarly, Islamist mayors in rural areas fell prey to regime co-optation, providing further evidence of the nonideological nature of the process.
Buehler's book constitutes a strong contribution to the scholarly literature on North African politics. The decision to include Mauritania and non-national level analyses are important additions. The book's strong mixed methodological approach should make it appealing to those interested in both the macrohistorical components of party formation and quantitative analyses of political behavior. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates and required reading for graduate seminars on the Maghreb, Why Alliances Fail is written accessibly and directly, and will hopefully inspire more colleagues to expand our expectations of North African research.
