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SUMMARY:‘The Glorious Revolution that Wasn’t: Rural Elite Conflict and
  Demand for Democratization in Khedival Egypt’  (Co-authored with Alliso
 n Spencer Hartnett) - Mohamed Saleh (London School of Economics)
DTSTART:20240521T161500Z
DTEND:20240521T174500Z
UID:TALK215368@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gareth Austin
DESCRIPTION:Social conflict theory holds that democratization is most like
 ly when an incumbent rural elite is challenged by a rising urban bourgeois
 ie. While this framework accounts for historical patterns of democratizati
 on in industrializing autocracies in the Global North\, it is less well su
 ited to explaining the emergence of democratic demands in agrarian autocra
 cies in the Global South. In this paper\, we examine demands for democrati
 zation in the Egyptian parliament before the British occupation in 1882. U
 sing a new dataset of MPs and the universe of parliamentary minutes from 1
 868 to 1882\, we use text analysis\, differences-in-differences models\, a
 nd machine learning to test whether rural intra-elite economic conflicts i
 n MP home districts can lead to meaningful calls for democratization in pa
 rliament by rural middle class MPs.  Our findings suggest that rural intra
 -elite competition over labor and land catalyzed demands for oversight (co
 nstraints) on the executive and issuance of a new constitution from rural 
 middle-class MPs. Although these demands were suppressed by the British oc
 cupation in 1882\, this study sheds light on how meaningful demands for de
 mocratization emerged in an authoritarian parliament in a non-industrializ
 ed agricultural economy that is comparable to other cases in the Global So
 uth during the first wave of democratization.
LOCATION:King's College (the Audit Room) and online (see special message a
 bove)
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