United They Stand? A Study of Authoritarian Responses during the Arab Spring
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to analyse why mass protests during the Arab Spring of 2010 did not always result in the toppling of authoritarian leaders and why in some cases it actually led to the reinforcement of certain authoritarian regimes. In attempting to understand this puzzle, most scholars have concentrated on the impact of populist movements but have overlooked the importance of the incumbent regime’s divisions and the character of its relationship with opposition forces. Drawing on O’Donnell and Schmitter’s theory on transitions “from above”, this research demonstrates that authoritarian responses to mass protests were conditioned by the existence of divisions within the ruling circle itself. We argue that the only transitions to culminate in the establishment of an electoral democracy were those in which mass protests succeeded in provoking rifts between softliners and hardliners within the authoritarian elites and in which pro-reform forces subsequently negotiated new rules of governance with opposition forces. We also distinguish between latent crisis, when tensions within the regime exist but are contained, and overt crisis, when the unity of the ruling bloc is broken. We demonstrate our hypothesis by comparing events in Bahrain and in Egypt, two cases that led to very different political patterns and outcomes following the emergence of popular protest movements. In the case of Egypt, softliners managed to get the upper hand and Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was toppled, while in Bahrain the monarchy could count on the support of a majority of the ruling class that was largely opposed to political liberalization and ready to quell the opposition coalition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".