Recent events in the Arab world have demonstrated the importance of cross-ideological mobilization for determining whether authoritarian regimes persist or democratize. Only when both Islamists and non-Islamists joined forces against Arab autocrats have autocrats been removed from power, and only where such coalitions did not disintegrate after the regime’s breakdown did we witness democratization. Matt Buehler’s book provides a much-needed contribution to our understanding of how cross-ideological alliances shape Arab politics. Focusing on party alliances between leftists and Islamists in the Maghreb, his book provides valuable insights into opposition politics and autocratic survival.
The book compares seven cases of alliances between Islamist and leftist parties that formed during the 2000s in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania. Buehler finds that among these seven alliances, only five survived longer than 12 months, while the remaining two collapsed soon after their creation. The central puzzle this book addresses is therefore: Why did some cross-ideological alliances survive, whereas others did not?
Although existing scholarship often focuses on the ideological disagreements and doctrinal differences between Islamists and leftists, this book highlights the role of pro-regime forces in breaking up opposition alliances. Buehler argues that every time cross-ideological coalitions began to form between Islamists and leftists, the authoritarian regime moved aggressively to shatter them. Whether the alliance ultimately survived depended on whether it could resist the regime’s onslaught. Cases where alliances did not endure are those where the regime was able to co-opt politicians from one of the parties in the newborn coalition. For example, in Morocco in 2009, the regime co-opted elite and rank-and-file politicians from the Socialist Union of Popular Forces after it formed an alliance with the Islamist Justice and Development party, and the coalition disintegrated. In Mauritania, the regime co-opted members of the Islamist Tawassoul Party and forced it to retract an alliance with the leftist Union of Forces of Progress formed in 2008. In the five other cases that the book examines, which include the 2005–14 coalition between Tunisian leftist parties and the Islamist Ennahda Party, regimes were unable to co-opt any member of the cross-ideological alliance and the coalition endured. What Buehler shows us is that a cross-ideological alliance is only as strong as its weakest member.
What makes some parties more vulnerable to co-optation than others? Based on in-depth studies of these seven cases, Buehler argues that parties that establish a foothold in rural areas tend to be more vulnerable to co-optation, whereas those that maintain an urban social base are better able to resist an authoritarian regime’s pressures. This is because politicians in rural areas need access to state resources to maintain clientelist ties with voters and advance their careers. Loyalist (pro-regime) forces can easily co-opt such politicians by offering direct access to state resources and attractive opportunities for career advancement. Rural and mostly illiterate voters will not punish opposition politicians who switch to pro-regime parties because such voters are motivated not by ideology but by material concerns. In contrast, parties that operate in urban areas cultivate electoral constituencies that care more about programmatic issues and are thus harder to co-opt.
The book’s evidence includes an impressive array of interviews with leftist, Islamist, and pro-regime politicians, which provide granular detail on how co-optation works. Another notable empirical contribution is a dataset of 440 leftist politicians in Morocco who won office during the communal elections of 2003 and 2009 (p. 101). The author finds that leftist politicians in small communes with mostly illiterate and unemployed constituencies have a higher probability of switching to loyalist parties than those in larger and wealthier communes. Such patterns suggest that the regime tended to co-opt politicians in impoverished areas where clientelism is rampant. Although, as the author acknowledges, the data’s coverage of politicians is severely limited due to restrictions imposed by the Moroccan Interior Ministry. Buehler’s effort to collect such data in a difficult authoritarian context is laudable. The inclusion of Mauritania as a case study should also be applauded, because it brings attention to an understudied case among scholars of autocratic regimes and comparative politics.
Why Alliances Fail does not stop at explaining why co-optation succeeds in some cases and fails in others, but further seeks to understand why some opposition parties make themselves vulnerable to co-optation by seeking support in rural areas in the first place. To address this question, Buehler examines the period that followed decolonization in the Maghreb and argues that the ways that regimes consolidated power shortly after independence played a key role in structuring political competition. The Bourguiba regime in post-independence Tunisia built an urban support base, whereas regimes in Morocco and Mauritania built rural bases of support. Buehler argues that these early regime-building strategies in Morocco and Mauritania portended future weakness for opposition forces who ended up competing on the regime’s turf in rural areas and became more liable to co-optation. In Tunisia by contrast, the Bourguiba regime had so alienated and politically weakened its rural regions that political parties had little to gain by moving to these areas. The opposition parties in Tunisia retained an urban base and thus were protected from co-optation later.
Although Buehler’s argument that regime-consolidation strategies after independence shape opposition politics is intriguing, it could have been made more compelling by fleshing out the motivations of opposition parties and their reasons for acting. It remains unclear why leftists in Morocco and Islamists in Mauritania would choose to move to rural regions, given the fierce competition they were likely to expect in those places. The reader is left wondering why these parties did not choose to safely remain in urban areas where, according to the author’s argument, they would be shielded from aggressive regime co-optation and why other parties (Islamists in Morocco and leftists in Mauritania) avoided making the same mistakes. The importance of historical precedents could have been more persuasively conveyed by laying out why opposition actors acted the way they did and how these early choices constrained later options.
Overall, this book is a strong addition to the literature on coalition politics and authoritarianism and will spark many debates. It illustrates the intricacies of co-optation under authoritarian regimes in ways that promise to enrich future studies on autocratic survival. This book also sheds new light on patterns of regime transitions during the Arab Spring, which is especially valuable to scholars of the Middle East and North Africa. The explanation for why the Moroccan regime survived the Arab Spring, for example, challenges existing arguments that emphasize elite cohesion and the inherent robustness of Arab monarchies. Instead, Buehler draws attention to how the previous co-optation of leftists made the opposition incapable of mounting a serious cross-ideological challenge to the regime in 2011. This work thus demonstrates the importance of autocratic strategies of co-optation in influencing whether opposition mobilization arises and succeeds.
