This study examines the attitudes of Morocco’s two main Islamist parties towards the modern civil state, and the extent to which members of the Justice and Charity Movement and the Justice and Development Party are willing to change their attitudes towards the notion of the civil state. The findings reveal that both movements concur in their categorical rejection of a ruler being non-Muslim and in their affirmation of the importance of political participation in the context of an Islamic system of government, which is understood as being synonymous with shura (consultation). Notable differences are detected, however, with the Justice and Development Party deemed more receptive to partial secularism and to the election of government officials. The change in attitudes for the sample as a whole reveals a rise in the number of positive attitudes towards secularism and a drop in those concerned with its twin, democracy, as well as a marginal decline in the number of positive attitudes towards party pluralism and the election of government officials.
The study of mass social movements, and their influence on legal, constitutional, and political reform, has long preoccupied legal scholars. Bottom-up social revolutions, ranging from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, are studied extensively in the literature. The traditional conceptions of social movements largely portray them as somber occasions that reflect the gravity of the moment and the seriousness of their objectives. This Article identifies and studies a novel pattern emerging from the social movements of the 21st century, providing a unique contribution to the burgeoning legal literature on the role of non-state actors in shaping legal and constitutional change.
These new social movements — including the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the mass protests that took place in Summer 2013 in Turkey and Brazil — bear a counterintuitive ingredient in their conception and design: the ubiquitous use of humor. Although humor might appear to be antithetical to the somber nature of social movements, this Article argues, drawing on behavioral research and social movement theory, that humor can be an effective strategic tool to influence legal, constitutional, and political reforms. Humor can pierce the culture of fear prevalent in tyrannical regimes, serve as an effective coping mechanism against repressive government practices, and provoke government officials into reactionary conduct that furthers the social movement’s objectives. The use of humor can reframe and supplant the negative regime narratives of the movement and build solidarity among heterogeneous members of a movement with pre-existing sociopolitical differences. Humor can also support political mobilization by providing a low cost point of entry into a social movement, obtaining domestic and global resonance for the movement, and persuading others to join the movement by depicting an alternate, more appealing, reality. Finally, humor can provide an effective avenue for expressing popular discontent and undermine traditional methods for suppression employed by repressive leaders, including laws that criminalize and censor dissent and social mobilization.
Conflict theory has downplayed the role of emotions or categorized them as individual, cultural, or irrational phenomena. This paper argues that emotions grow out of situational interactions and that accumulated levels of emotions, emotional energy (EE), fuel the agency of conflicting parties. Drawing on theory of EE and positive emotions, three emotional dynamics of conflicts are proposed: (1) positive EE, such as confidence and trust, promotes action; (2) negative EE, such as righteous anger and resentment, drives conflictual action; and (3) loss of EE dispirits actors in shame and hopelessness. Research questions exemplified by the Arab Spring are suggested relative to three themes: mobilization of collective EE, emotional dynamics influencing political elites, and violent and nonviolent conflict escalation.
Polarization – defined as the difference in policy preferences along the salient axis of political competition – among non-regime elite actors has important consequences for successful democratic consolidation during authoritarian transitions. However, existing theories fail to explain why elites emerge more or less polarized from authoritarian contexts. In this paper, I present and test an original theory of how the repression that defines authoritarian regimes affects processes of polarization in these systems. The theory builds on social psychology findings about the causes and consequences of group identification to posit that the nature of repression – whether it targets a specific group, or is more widespread – alters group members’ level of in-group identification, in turn affecting the distance between groups’ political preferences, and ultimately shaping the distribution of preferences among these groups. I first test the proposed causal relationship through lab experiments conducted with 434 adult citizens in Tunis, Tunisia in May 2016. I then present evidence supporting the theory through condensed case studies of Egypt and Tunisia. Egypt serves as a case of targeted repression against a single opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, under authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011), while Tunisia serves as a case of widespread repression against multiple opposition groups under Zine el-‘Abidine Ben ‘Ali (1987-2011). I conclude with implications for transitology theories and outline the analytic importance of considering the political psychological legacies of authoritarian repression on subsequent developments.