The Arab Spring protests shook several Middle Eastern countries and authoritarian leaders of both Tunisia and Egypt were toppled as a result. Relatively competitive elections that followed in both countries were surprising given the consolidated, repressive character of these regimes. This paper will deal with the dimensions that have influenced the outcome of the post-Arab Spring elections in five countries. We developed voting advice applications (VAAs) for parliamentary elections in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey and Israel as well as for the presidential elections in Egypt to tap into voter opinions. Users of VAA’s help us to profile voters and assess the impact of the Arab Spring protests on subsequent voting behavior. Obviously, VAAs do not extract representative samples of the population, but do provide us with important clues about the level and impact of political activism within five different Middle Eastern societies, at least among the politically active, well-educated and younger sections of the society. By aligning voter opinions to deeper-lying cleavage dimensions – socially conservative versus progressive and economic left versus right – we try to explain which issues drove the protests and party/candidate choice in the post autocratic political structure. We find comparatively different cleavage patterns emerge in all five countries, which is not surprising considering the different issues that are relevant in these countries, the differences in party system composition and dissimilarities in the socio-economic context across the region. Our research design allows us to compare the Moroccan elections under a consolidated authoritarian regime, with the cases of Tunisia and Egypt that represent cases of successful weakening and replacement of ruling elites as well as the Turkish and Israeli cases which are the two most mature democratic countries in the region. In this respect, our conclusions indicate that these five Middle Eastern countries have different cleavage structures.
