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Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt. By Lisa Blaydes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 288p. $81.45.

Even in retrospect, the tenure of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was remarkable. He was 82 years old and had ruled for nearly 30 years before a popular uprising and military coup deposed him on February 11, 2011. In his wake, Mubarak leaves a legacy of repression. The institutions that sustained his writ may continue to bedevil Egyptians. For these reasons, Lisa Blaydes’s Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt remains as topical today as when it appeared in fall 2010. The book addresses the growing scholarship on whether elections strengthen dictatorships. Through 10 empirical chapters that draw upon interviews, Egyptian newspapers, government data, and an extensive secondary literature, Blaydes contends that Mubarak’s elections indeed bolstered his regime. Moreover, they were the site of generally unrecognized intraelite competition. The book covers other ancillary topics, including splits in the opposition and US foreign policy toward Egypt, but its focus, and hence the focus of this review, is electoral clientelism. And because the author discusses the Mubarak regime in the present tense, in my discussion of her book I will do the same. Blaydes’s thesis is that clientelism during elections strengthens the Egyptian regime by shifting costs normally borne by the state to would-be parliamentarians. Legislative office seekers parcel out resources to needy constituents in exchange for their support, thus alleviating the distributive burden of a fiscally constrained regime. “Highly contested elections,” she writes “are a decentralized distribution mechanism that aids authoritarian survival by regulating intra-elite competition, while at the same time outsourcing the cost of political mobilization and redistribution” (pp. 8–9). Competitive elections keep elites invested in the system, extending their time horizons beyond a single defeat (pp. 49, 57, 63): “[A]bsent these elections, the regime would not be so durable” (p. 237). These are novel claims. Earlier studies of Egyptian clientelism, such as Diane Singerman’s groundbreaking Avenues of Participation (published in 1995) and Maye Kassem’s exposé In the Guise of Democracy (1999), did not find that Mubarak’s elections were significantly competitive or redistributive. Recent theories about authoritarian durability focus on core organizations, the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), and the security apparatus, rather than on elections. Analysts of Egyptian politics have also tended to argue that patrimonialism extends down from the president through loyal subordinates to ordinary Egyptian citizens. By contrast, Blaydes sees nepotism at the peak of the regime but not in its lower tiers: “This book will show that promotion decisions within the party and state structure are made on the basis of performance and revealed competence” (p. 6). Politicians show their competence, she explains, by collecting votes. Comparativists never classified Mubarak’s regime as “competitive authoritarian” (Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, 2010). After all, the NDP controlled 70% or more of the Egyptian parliament, a typical sign of electoral hegemony. Blaydes maintains, however, that the party’s dominance belies vigorous competition: “Electoral manipulation takes place in a limited number of cases (usually aimed at the opposition Muslim Brotherhood), and, as such, the majority of the 444 electoral contests are genuinely competitive” (p. 53). She also contradicts reports of rampant election rigging: “For the majority of districts . . . contests between NDP and NDP independent and, very often, NDP-affiliated and independent or opposition candidates are conducted without regime-orchestrated fraud” (p. 165). Rather than being dictated from above, elections are governed internally by “a kind of market mechanism helping to resolve disputes between various groups and individuals operating within Egypt’s broad class of political elite” (p. 63). The main mechanism is cash, which candidates allegedly pour into their districts to reap votes. Individual self-promotion then brings material advancement for the populace: “Mass mobilization of voters at the local level thus leads to considerable economic redistribution during election years as a result of transfers from the political elite to the masses via vote-buying schemes” (p. 58). In these electoral bidding wars, the candidate who pays off the most voters walks away with a seat in parliament. Such revisionist claims call for sturdy evidence, which Blaydes does not always present. Seeking to show electoral competitiveness, she reports that reelection rates in parliament were between 19% and 42% during the previous five elections (p. 57). This is an interesting aggregate finding—over half the faces in parliament were not in the prior session—but it does not reveal what happened to individual members. What portion of those not “reelected” had retired or chosen to back a successor in their stead? Among the remainder, how many lost to rival regime loyalists? Finally, and most importantly for the thesis, did their opponents actually outspend them? These links are missing, denying readers a tight causal chain. The book’s treatment of redistribution raises similar questions. Blaydes notes that the price of campaigning has | |