Tunisian Elections regulation has experienced a deep modification. Between the Electoral regulation before the regime change of January 2011 and after: the difference is huge. And between the elections regulation of 2011 and of 2014 the difference is important too. The institutions involved in rule making and/or regulation have been always in a daily interaction with all their institutional environment components. These components managed to make a huge difference and mark a fingerprint in the shaping of electoral regulation outcome. This interaction is very obvious and clear at a first glance. During all the years ranging from the first elections of 1956 until the elections of 2009, the competent regulatory authority of elections was the Ministry of interior, while the parliament was the law maker with one super party majority. Civil society was repressed and associations and political parties were harassed during their creation and function. This opened the gate for easy manipulation, fraud and a biased treatment among voters and candidates. However, during the transition (2011-2014), there was a sudden shift and elections became regulated through an independent regulatory agency called the ISIE (instance superieure independente des elections), and we witnessed an active role of a variety of participants in the regulation of this matter: civil society, courts, government, national constituent assembly, National dialogue, army, international institutions… During the same period civil society was free to establish and function; media became liberalized and no more pressure on speech and press. The “New” Tunisia promised legitimacy by promoting what was labeled “Goals of the Revolution”, as an example just in the first piece of electoral legislation during the transition and the subsequent ones, elections became not just a mere procedure of pooling, but many values were added besides of the procedures, mainly: transparency, honesty, accuracy, democracy. So how were electoral rules and principles been adopted in Tunisia? We will try to find the answer beyond the mere apparent ordinary interaction between deputies and political parties inside the parliament, assemblies and other official bodies. To answer this question, we thought about dividing our paper into two parts, where a general part deals with mapping the electoral scene, identifying the major rule, procedures, and innovations and also identifying the most important players and the roles of each one of them, and the possible points of interaction. And then in a second part we will deal with concrete examples of interactions like the adoption of “Principe de Parité” and the schedule of elections among other points.

This paper is an attempt to determine democratic transition success predictors. We adopted the self-organizing map (SOM) as an alternative approach, mapping thus 121 countries on the bases of 33 indicators of various nature over 4 years (1984, 1991, 2002 and 2013). We have included economic, social, demographic and political, as well as institutional variables. Population age structure, globalization, health indicators, education and women participation in the society were found to have the most important clustering potentials, whereas according to a subsequent SVM procedure unemployment, corruption, democratic accountability, and law and order were found to be particularly strong democratic transition success predictors.

The Arab Spring and Jasmine Revolutions in the Middle East and Northern Africa led to considerable hope for some people that China would experience a similar political uprising and considerable anxiety for the ruling regime. While there are a number of significant differences between China and MENA countries, there are all also enough commonalities to justify concerns about political instability. Whether China will ultimately be able to avoid the fate of authoritarian regimes in MENA countries will turn on its ability to overcome a series of structural challenges. This article examines the conflict between the rising pressure for social justice and the ability of China’s legal institutions to satisfy them.