The Expression of Political Dissent in the Middle East: Turkish Democratization and Authoritarian Continuity in Tunisia

Abstract

Beginning in the early 1970s, a large number of countries initiated transitions from forms of authoritarian rule to democracy.The research for this essay was made possible by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as well as support from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute for Turkish Studies, and Princeton University's Center for International Studies and Council on Regional Studies. The author wishes to thank John Waterbury, Atul Kohli, Jeffrey Herbst, Anna Seleny, and two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting thoughtfully on earlier versions of this essay. This democratizing trend, dubbed “The Third Wave,” began in Southern Europe and continued in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Similar transitions were also begun in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East, by contrast, has remained untouched. Some instances of political liberalization (i.e., enlargement of the freedoms of speech and movement, and the freedom from arbitrary state action) have taken place in the region. But no country held democratic elections that contained the possibility of real change in the locus of political power.