Routine Authoritarian Governance Before the Arab Uprisings

This chapter presents the longer-term factors that have been known to shape routine authoritarian governance prior to the Arab uprisings. The notion of routine authoritarian governance emphasizes the ideological and material patterns of interactions between government and opposition over time. Among these interactions the chapter focuses particularly on the role that legitimacy, coercion, and economic and political cooptation played in the entrenchment of specific political behaviors (e.g. authoritarian bargains). As a counter-weight to this narrative, the chapter indicates how ‘protest costs’ have been repeatedly overcome at different historical junctures, and how regimes have had to adapt in response to these (mainly unsuccessful) challenges from below and/or from counter-elites. Authoritarianism in the pre-Arab uprisings period is thus presented as an ever-changing combination of identities and practices that has been maintained at equilibrium by ruling elites for several decades.