Closing the Arab Democratic Gap: A Re-Assessment of the Tunisian Democratic Transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tunisia is often described as the outlier of the Arab Spring, the one case in which a form of political transition decidedly happened. The fact that this transition first led to the rule of the Islamist party Ennahda has reignited long-standing debates on the role of Islam in politics, the relationship between religion and democracy, and the consequences of their potential incompatibility for the future of Tunisian democracy. A sizeable literature has attempted to address these topics over the years, but it is of little help when trying to understand the events of the Arab Spring and the Tunisian transition, especially when it comes to their impact on the Islamist parties themselves. Borrowing from Villalón’s study of Islam and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper argues that, instead of considering whether Tunisian actors fit within a preconceived notion of democracy, we should consider the process of political bargaining itself as democratic; focusing on the substance of democracy rather than its form sheds new light on the Tunisian case and helps explain various outcomes including the progressive liberalization of Islamist parties and the gradual but distinctive flourishing of democracy in the Tunisian context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".