Dispensing with Political Parties in Egypt: Emergence of Disorganised Authoritarianism Under Al-Sisi

The post-Cold War era has witnessed regime transitions and transformations of a massive scale. In this regard, the “grey zone” between democracies and authoritarian regimes or “hybrid” regimes has received a lot of scholarly attention. Moreover, historical trajectories of different political systems have encouraged an “institutional turn” in the comparative study of authoritarianism, since more attention than ever before is being paid to formal institutions, such as legislatures, elections and parties. Nonetheless, some non-democratic systems have received more scholarly interest than others. For example, voluminous literature has accumulated on the roles and benefits that ruling, hegemonic and similarly-labelled parties provide for authoritarian rulers. However, systems, where autocrats do not build parties of their own, remain little discussed. Thus, contributing to the debate on authoritarian party-building and shedding a light on the issue of authoritarian regimes without regime parties such as Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, this paper asks how come some authoritarian rulers are able to do without them. Drawing onto the work of Andreas Schedler, the paper argues that in an authoritarian context incentives for institutional choice revolve around threats, factors hazard to the stability of the regime. Thus, similarly to a game of Rubik’s cube, a decision to build a regime party may be explained by different combinations of different types of threats. Followingly, the paper presents a “utility map,” which structurally follows a simple distinction of threats and explicates how the literature has dealt with regime parties in authoritarian regimes vis-à-vis key sources of threats. By confronting these theoretical propositions with Egyptian counter-empirics, the paper highlights the shortcomings of the literature, its ignorance towards the costs of regime party-building and availability of “alternative authoritarian toolkits.”