Mass-Elite Congruence in Founding Elections: Evidence from Egypt and Tunisia

Founding elections represent important milestones for shaping the emergence and salience of political dimensions dividing masses and elites (Zielinski 2002). There is an established literature on how the timing and electoral rules used in founding elections lead to the success of democratic transition (Grewal and Monroe 2019; Reich 2001; van de Walle 2003) or shape the congruence between masses and elites (Powell 2013). However, the comparative literature on policy congruence has usually focused on congruence between parties and voters to the exclusion of presidents (Shim and Gherghina, 2020). In particular, the literature on the Arab world has focused on comparing the policy positions of parties (Resta 2022) or masses (Kurzman and Naqvi 2010) with only a few studies analyzing mass-elite congruence (Wegner and Cavatorta 2019). Bridging this gap, the paper compares the issue positions and issue salience of citizens, parties, and presidential candidates in the founding elections in Egypt (2011-12) and Tunisia (2014) after the Arab Spring. Egypt and Tunisia are chosen for being significant cases (Seawright and Gerring 2008) in the regional wave of uprisings that toppled long-serving dictators. The paper gauges the policy positions of parties and presidential candidates by originally coding their party manifestos using the Comparative Manifesto Project methodology. Mass positions are estimated using survey data from the Arab Barometer. By distinguishing between parties and presidential candidates and analyzing both issue positions and issue salience, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of mass-elite congruence in the early phases of political transition. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that only after combining policy preferences of parties and presidential candidates, can we better understand key policy changes.