Egypt’s new authoritarianism from an institutionalist perspective: formal-informal interactions before and after the Egyptian revolution

ABSTRACT

Utilizing an institutionalist approach, this paper traces the historical transitions of formal-informal interactions in the Egyptian political system before and after the 2011 Revolution. I argue that formal-informal interactions moved from Complementary during the first two decades of Mubarak’s rule, to Competing in his last decade, then back to Complementary under Sisi. Each transition was motivated by a critical juncture. The first transition was driven by Mubarak’s desire to bequeath power to his son, Gamal, while the second was motivated by the collapse of his regime in 2011. Each transition was marked by differing means. Mubarak used electoral politics to manage formal-informal relations, while the current regime under Sisi is heavily reliant on coercion.

Introduction

The authoritarian shift from pre- to post-revolutionary Egypt has lately gained a deeper understanding. However, scholars of Middle Eastern politics have disagreed about how best to capture and explain the authoritarian transition after the January 25 Revolution, which may be generally categorized in two directions. The first considers the Sisi regime as a modified version, or a restoration, of the Mubarak regime, and the second considers it as a new authoritarianism; a rupture from the pre-revolutionary authoritarian order. Egyptian political order in the first direction is trapped in a historical alliance between very well-rooted institutions, which complicates any change.¹ It would be impossible to conceive a change without dismantling ‘the deep state’,² or ‘the military empire’,³ or even without waiting for a more profound change beyond the borders of the nation-state.⁴

The second direction, in contrast, views the Egyptian political order today as an outcome of the revolution. It is, according to Stacher, not even a regime, but an unleashed wave of state violence that gives fresh state elites the chance to build a new order⁵; or, as Armbrust suggests, is an ‘intermediate stage in a transition’ to a new authoritarianism that has been structured by ‘permanentized precarity’.⁶ According to Rutherford, the regime has been forced to make a shift from a ‘provision pact, grounded in a robust and extensive patronage network, to a protection pact, in which elites back the regime because it provides protection against internal and external threats’.⁷

Nevertheless, less attention has been devoted to understanding the shift from an institutionalist perspective. This paper is a theoretical contribution to the academic debate on the nature of the authoritarian transition in post-revolutionary Egypt, from such a perspective. It examines the development of the patterns of institutional formal-informal relationships before and after the 2011 Revolution.

The paper comprises three parts. The first offers a post-Weberian theoretical framework that clarifies the importance of expanding the concept of political institution to include informal institutions. Such an analytical step allows us to view political systems as bifurcated, that is, belonging simultaneously to two structures: formal and informal. While formal structure is rigid because it is vertically handed down by legislation, informal structure is horizontally subjected to informal degrees of centralization/decentralization whereby the process of decision-making depends on cooperation, loyalty and trust among networks rather than hierarchical diktat. Hence, the bifurcated character of political systems allows us to understand why political institutions act sometimes as political organizations.

The second and third parts trace the historical transitions that formal-informal institutional interactions witnessed before and after the Egyptian Revolution. In the second part, I show that the interactions went through a transition from a Complementary type during the first two decades of the Hosni Mubarak era, then to a Competing type with the rise of Mubarak’s son, Gamal, in the 2000s. Finally, the third part explores the transition in formal-informal interactions in post-revolutionary Egypt. It argues that Egyptian post-revolutionary authoritarianism has made another shift from a Competing to a Complementary type of formal-informal interaction, and the current regime, under Sisi, is relying on coercion to consolidate it.

Framework of analysis: institutionalism and the study of formal-informal interactions

The idea that political institutions inherently tend to be independent from society, and at the same time dominate it, is a central premise of neo-institutional analysis. Political institutions determine the rules of society and organize its interactions.⁸ There is a well-established set of organized rules and practices that emanate from structures of resources and meanings, where the structure of resources constrains political agency and contributes to predicting its behaviour, while the structure of meaning provides it with legitimacy and moral purpose.⁹

There is a near scholarly consensus that the new institutional approaches are a reaction to behaviouralism, but at the same time the result of interaction with it. One of the differences between the old and new trends of institutionalism is that the second made a post-Weberian shift by expanding the concept of ‘institution’ to include informal norms and rules (that is, informal institutions), which old institutionalists ignored, being influenced by early modernist models that excluded everything that is informal to the pre-modern world.¹⁰ While old institutionalists had viewed informal institutions as a transitional phenomenon, in terms of corruption, nepotism, clientelism and neopatrimonialism, informal institutions today have been understood as structural and socially embedded, rather than transitional. They refer to horizontal loyalty networks and structures of trust on which formal institutions rest.¹¹

According to this approach, ‘institution’ is defined as the rules that structure and constrain social interactions in order to reduce the uncertainty involved in human activity. Institutions are distinguished from organizations in that the latter comprise specific groups of individuals, with consistent behaviours, who pursue a mixture of common goals. While the fulcrum of institution is the rules, organization reflects the shared beliefs of a group of individuals.¹² For this reason, institutional analyses tend, for example, not to limit analysis to government, but to extend it to include governance, on the grounds that the second concept also includes informal forms of control.¹³ Expanding the concept of institution to include informal institutions changes our view of political systems, and places the question of bifurcation at the centre of our analysis of its behaviour.¹⁴

Bifurcation in political systems means that the structure of any political system, regardless of its type, belongs to two realms simultaneously: the formal realm of authority and the informal realm of power. The interplay between both realms constitutes a mechanism of horizontal centralization/decentralization that determines the actual influence of the chiefs in political systems.¹⁵ This process is fluid and hidden and cannot be measured simply by public administration frameworks.¹⁶ Political systems, therefore, stand on two feet: a formal foot represented by the hierarchy of the state and its bureaucratic lines, and another informal foot represented by networks of power. Hierarchies are distinguished by ‘many-to-one’ relationships, while networks have an entangled web of relationships characterized by “many-to-many’ relationships.¹⁷ Unlike vertical hierarchies, which are rigid because they are handed down by legislation, horizontal links are flexible, and therefore, could be subjected to continuous reconfigurations that serve the will of dominant groups. In this sense, the overall picture of any political system is complex in which the horizontal links are ‘layered on the top of vertical hierarchies, rather than replacing them’.¹⁸ That is to say, formal-informal dualism is theoretical (or pedagogical) rather than factual. Formal and informal structures cannot realistically be isolated from each other, but assuming their existence is necessary to understand the capacity of political systems to function.¹⁹ Although they are two sides of the same system, rules and relationships that regulate formal institutions are different from those that regulate informal institutions. The first is governed by vertical relationships in which decisions often flow from top to bottom in a hierarchical fashion determined by legal and constitutional structures, while the second is governed by informal horizontal relationships based on interest, norms and loyalty.²⁰ In this sense, the efficiency of the rulers depends on their ability to manage both the formal and informal structures of the system. This distinction helps us to understand why, in times when critical junctures are imposed, institutions behave as organizations; that is, they sometimes reflect impersonal rules, and at other times express the beliefs, biases and ideologies of certain social groups.

Such distinction has been utilized in studying the political process in post-communist countries and their sudden transformation into liberal regimes, at least at a formal level. Yet, informal institutions of the pre-transition stage remained active in the new political systems.²¹ The Russian case is exemplary. Since his succession to Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999), Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has ruled Russia from different bureaucratic positions: as the President of the Republic (1999–2008), then as a Prime Minister (2008–2012), then as President again since 2012. Indeed, as one researcher commented, if Putin were Minister of Transport, the Ministry of Transport would—most likely—rule Russia.²²

In the Egyptian case, as this paper will show, this distinction helps explain the inability of the elected President, Mohamed Morsi (2012–2013), to rule despite his assumption of the Presidency and control of his party and his allies numbering over half of the parliament seats. But he did not have the opportunity, time, or influence to dominate the other side of the political system, which is the informal institutions. Consequently, one year after his election, he was overthrown by the army. By contrast, it is not difficult, from this perspective, to understand the failure of the military coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2016, who, since taking office in 2003, has gradually replaced the old informal networks by others loyal to him.²³

Today, the study of formal-informal relations from an institutional perspective has witnessed a remarkable development in various fields of social sciences such as development, comparative politics, economics and local governance. One of the useful methodological agendas developed is Helmke and Levitsky’s typology which typifies political systems, according to the institutional relationship between their formal and informal institutions, into four types of formal-informal institutional interaction, two of which are characterized by convergence (1- Complementary and 2- Accommodating), and two by divergence (1- Competing and 2- Substitutive).²⁴

Both Complementary and Accommodating types of formal-informal interactions mark political systems with effective and powerful formal institutions. However, while informal institutions of the Complementary type are in harmony with formal institutions (as is the case in the US, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia), informal institutions of the Accommodating type behave in ways that alter the substantive outcomes of formal rules (viz. Chile, the Netherlands’ post-1917 democracy and the USSR). Both Competing and Substitutive types of formal-informal interactions, on the other hand, characterize political systems with weak formal institutions. The Competing type is often found in post-colonial contexts in which formal institutions were imposed on indigenous rules and authority structures, therefore, may contradict formal institutions’ agendas, leading to the emergence of various informal practices such as clientelism, patrimonialism, clan politics, and corruption. Contrary to this, the Substitutive type of formal-informal interaction exists in contexts where formal rules are not routinely enforced, so informal institutions achieve what formal institutions were designed, but failed, to achieve (as in the case of Mexico and rural China). However, it is important to stress that the four types suggested by Helmki and Litevsky are not exclusive to a particular system, but may coexist in one political system. Political systems may also witness a transition from one type to another, depending on political and social conditions, or transformations in the regional and international context.²⁵

Utilizing the analytical framework elaborated in this section, this paper will show that formal-informal relations in Egypt have undergone a fundamental transition from Complementary during the first two decades of Mubarak’s rule, to Competing during his last decade, before the January 2011 Revolution erupted and opened a new path that reorganized the relationship between them.

Formal-informal relationships in the pre-revolutionary Egypt

A brief history of formal-informal relations in the Pre-Mubarak era

Scholars of Egyptian politics are unanimous that Mubarak inherited from Sadat an authoritarian order; based on a Presidential office that shared little power with other state institutions. However, engineering that situation was not an easy path for Sadat to pave. He had to go through a bitter struggle with autonomous elite power centres entrenched in the state.

The emergence of power centres inside the state can be traced back to era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in July 1952 led a revolutionary movement from inside the army that overthrew the monarchy. Deriving its legitimacy from the discourse of pan-Arabism and anti-colonialism, Nasser’s new revolutionary regime implemented comprehensive modernization and reform that led to fundamental transformations in Egyptian society. Such a movement required entrusting the army with political powers as well as establishing a state-party.²⁶

While the army was the vehicle that established the new republic, the state-party, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), was intended to be an institutional frame for containing the emerging new middle-class elites in urban and rural areas and to counterbalance the new urban-based political and social movements at the time, most important of which were the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and Communists.²⁷ In the early 1960s, attempts were made to transform the ASU into a vanguard party, with a structure relatively independent of the state, to carry out the tasks of modernization and political mobilization. However, that did not happen. In practice, the party was transformed into a power-centre within the state, along with another power-centre, the army.²⁸

This was the context in which a Competing type of formal-informal relationships was born. The new political system was highly centralized at the vertical formal level, whereby the office of Presidency was unchecked by any other branch of the state. However, it was also informally decentralized at the horizontal level: the army effectively competing with the ASU, and both had a strained relationship with the Presidency. Nasser tried to use one power-centre against the other, but to no avail. By the mid-1960s, it became obvious that informal institutions (i.e. horizontal informal networks in the state) were in fierce competition with formal institutions (i.e. formal hierarchy of the state), making the process of decision-making very complex.

However, the June 1967 military defeat, of which one of the causes was the Competing type of formal-informal interaction,²⁹ represented a critical juncture that weakened the army³⁰ and paved the way for transition into a type of formal-informal relationship under the hegemony of formal institutions. The transition from Competing to Complementary started with subordinating the leadership of the defeated army to the institution of the Presidency.³¹ It was then deepened under Sadat who expanded his selectorate by augmenting the power of the Interior Ministry to counterbalance the Ministry of Defence, leading to transformation of the army from a ‘vanguard of change into a conservative guardian of order’.³² Sadat also marginalized the ASU by stripping it of its mobilizing role, entrusted to it in the socialist stage, before re-establishing the party under the name of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and subordinating it to the parliament.³³ Consequently, the ruling party was transformed into a giant head-to-toe bureaucratic clientele machine, making it at best, a ‘collaborative movement’—a large group of networks whose significance was gained through the process of influencing bureaucracy and complementing it.³⁴ In this sense, the informal horizontal relations that linked the party to the bureaucracy became more important than the formal hierarchical vertical party relations. A situation that made it easy to scapegoat the party leaders in any predicament.³⁵

In sum, the Egyptian political system under Sadat witnessed a transition from a system that lacked internal stability due to persistent competition between formal and informal institutions, to a new one, in which formal-informal institutions complemented each other under the command of the President. Unlike the case under Nasser, informal institutions by the late 1970s became subject to replacement and change without threatening the stability of the political system. The result was a new version of powerful authoritarianism led by an individual president with broad powers granted by the constitution, but at the same time supported by police power that guaranteed him the loyalty of informal institutions. However, Sadat, who led this transition, did not live long enough to reap the harvest he sowed, as he was assassinated by Islamic militants in October 1981. Mubarak, nevertheless, lived a long time, enabling him to do so.

Under Mubarak: managing informal institutions through elections

Mubarak inherited from his predecessor a political system that made the transition from a Competing to Complementary type of formal-informal relations. Nevertheless, Sadat’s legacy was not just restricted to that, it also encompassed a political-economic impasse, one of the causes of which was an over-expanded selectorate that resulted from the process of subordinating informal to formal institutions. Sadat had bet on rentier resources, as well as on economic openness to international capital. However, the collapse of oil prices in the late 1970s limited his endeavours.

Therefore, the first decade of Mubarak’s rule was characterized by a set of strategies that reflected the politics of leadership succession. He began his reign by providing a limited margin for freedom of opinion and media, and allowed opposition parties to run in general elections in 1984 and 1987. He completed the institutional settlement with the army which had been initiated by Sadat, by guaranteeing the military forces loyalty in return for their structural independence and economic privileges.³⁶ But in parallel, he consolidated the role of the Interior Ministry, and opened the way for it to informally penetrate into various components of the state, so that the State Security Investigations Services (SSIS) would securitize most aspects of political life.³⁷

However, one of the dilemmas that Mubarak faced at the beginning of his reign was the strategy through which he was able to deal with informal institutions, which horizontally infiltrated the various layers of the state. Contrary to Sadat, he was unable to amend the authority structure of the political system, which was difficult to restructure, especially after the adoption of the permanent constitution in 1979. Mubarak also lacked the legitimacy that his predecessors had had, Nasser with his charismatic leadership, and Sadat who led the 1973 October War. Therefore, he had, instead, to rely on his powers as President of the Republic (i.e. the legal and constitutional tools that were available to him). During his early years, he did not hesitate to change the majority of the leaders of security apparatuses, and by 1989, he dismissed the ambitious Defence Minister Abu Ghazaleh.

Notwithstanding, his most prominent innovation at time was turning the general elections into a system of self-management of informal institutions, with the least possible intervention, that is, without the need for radical change of the kind carried out by his predecessor Sadat in his struggle with the centres of power. Under Nasser, the ASU was seen as a vehicle for modernizing Egyptian society and achieving economic growth. Therefore, it assumed superiority over the parliament. A fact that was reflected in the party secretariat’s major function of screening parliamentary candidates, all of whom had to establish positions within the ASU before they could run for election. Therefore, elections themselves had little importance.³⁸

Sadat, in contrast, advocated a market economy to achieve economic modernization instead of depending on the ruling party, which led to depriving the ASU of this role.³⁹ In practice, this entailed the shifting of power from the ruling party to the parliament and abolishing party superiority in the elected councils at all levels, including the subnational ones. Thus, while the ASU’s senior leaders constituted an apparat and a power-centre inside a regime that had constrained the President, the NDP’s senior leaders became a group of parliamentarians working under the President on assigned tasks, their main role largely restricted to guaranteeing, by any means, a super majority in the parliament.⁴⁰ Ever since, the role of the ruling party has increasingly dissolved in electoral politics and thus general elections have become central in managing and outsourcing informal institutions.

In this regard, we can chronologically divide the history of formal-informal relationships under Mubarak into two periods. The first was immediately after he rose to power in 1981, therefore, his strategies were marked and motivated by the politics of succession. In this period, Mubarak had a negative attitude towards Sadat’s selectorate. Therefore, he reengineered electoral laws in a way that served to substitute it for a new one loyal to him, namely by reducing the number of electoral constituencies and banning independent candidates from running for election. These measures empowered centralist control. It elected new networks of power loyal to the then new regime.⁴¹

In the late 1980s, for instance, new faces rose from the second row of the NDP leadership such as Youssef Wali (1930–2020), who had been an unknown employee in the Ministry of Agriculture during the Sadat era. He became the Minister of Agriculture in 1982, and Secretary-General of the NDP in 1984, a position through which he supervised the change of dozens of other leaders in the party. Similarly, Kamal El-Shazly (1934–2010), who had been a local leader in the NDP in al-Menoufia Governorate in the Sadat era, became a new cornerstone of the ruling party under Mubarak. As Springborg asserts, the process of exclusion and selection did not just include specific personalities, but also an entire generation of the NDP, to the extent that fifty per cent of the party’s candidates in the 1987 election had not served in any parliament before that.⁴²

However, Mubarak’s strategies of centralization led to shrinking the selectorate and handing power from the many to the few. It produced a situation in which formal institutions encroached on informal institutions, which consequently destroyed the bargaining power of the regime’s grassroots. The process of centralization meant giving the NDP senior leadership a formidable power even in deciding the lowest appointments such as the membership of local councils. Consequently, the power of the regime’s local leaderships largely waned compared with any previous period. The overall outcome was⁴³ serious damage to the Complementary type of formal-informal interactions that Sadat had established.

Nevertheless, Mubarak redressed the situation. Motivated by both the danger of the Islamic movement and the fiscal pressures that resulted from implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programme, in the early 1990s he again used elections to decentralize informal institutions. The number of electoral constituencies was boosted, and independent candidates were allowed to run for election under the watchful eye of the SSIS, which increasingly became involved in all aspects of political life. In this sense, elections served as a mechanism of outsourcing and updating informal networks which might be eligible for spoils in exchange for their support.⁴⁴ On the one hand, it helped the regime to reduce the costs of public expenditure, by making delivery of the public service system function selectively based on the election’s results.⁴⁵ On the other hand, it led to mobilizing and empowering informal institutions at the expense of formal ones. The new developments reflected restitution of the importance of informal institutions. At the subnational level, this led to the emergence of a generation of NDP parliamentarians that helped to mobilize local communities, especially businessmen and entrepreneurs, to fund infrastructure projects such as roads, hospitals, and schools. These parliamentarians were often referred to as ‘service deputies’ (nuwwāb al-khadamāt).⁴⁶

By the early 2000s, the regime became more experienced, confident and effective in managing informal institutions, to the extent that encouraged Mubarak to groom his son, Gamal, for power. This new development was the result of another shift in the political economy of authoritarianism, in which the decline of external rentier revenues transformed the state from a rentier state to a predatory one. According to Samer Soliman, the regime firstly imposed unconstitutional taxes on sections of the Egyptian population, and secondly pressured its ‘loyal base in the business community’ to fund many projects in the state’s welfare system.⁴⁷ Thirdly, it turned its sights to the Egyptian people, setting income generation above all other considerations ‘regardless of whether that necessitates unconstitutional means and even if it wreaks havoc on the economy’.⁴⁸ As a result, the logic of elections, which previously had been used as a hands-on approach to managing informal institutions turned to be, in the 2000s, a strategy for exploiting them. Inevitably, this required more involvement of the police in the everyday life of Egyptians.⁴⁹

This resulted in splitting the ruling class, which led to a disruption in the balance between formal and informal institutions, marking a second transition, but this time from the Complementary to the Competing type of formal-informal interactions. In the last decade of Mubarak’s rule, the NDP experienced major cleavages in all leading layers. The so-called ‘old guard’ wing of the party was subjected to a gradual process of marginalization which coincided with the incorporation of an elite bloc called ‘the new guard’ led by the President’s son, Gamal.⁵⁰ In the late 2000s, the Egyptian political system experienced an unprecedented encroachment of informal institutions, in which security intelligence officers had the upper hand, on formal institutions. The 2010 election, which was the most corrupt in Egyptian history, was evidence of that. However, it was also the last straw—for which the Egyptian regime would pay dearly in January 2011.

Formal-informal relationships in post-revolutionary Egypt

Under the SCAF

Egypt lived, from when Mubarak stepped down from the Presidency on 11 February 2011 until elected President Mohamed Morsi assumed the position of President of the Republic, about five hundred days during which a group of unelected officers in the leadership of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) issued 492 decrees, as listed in the Official Gazette. Of these, there were 188 Presidential decrees, 114 legislations (after the dissolution of the 2010 parliament), and eight Exceptional Constitutional Declarations, all signed in the name of Field-Marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawi. In addition, 182 decrees were signed by prime ministers appointed by the SCAF. In contrast, the democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, and his government issued 341 decrees, including 87 legislations, 145 Presidential decrees, and three Exceptional Constitutional Declarations, while the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Hisham Qandil issued 120 decrees.

This survey, however, does not include thousands of other decisions issued by various state institutions, such as military orders, ministerial decisions at their various levels, decisions of governors and local government bodies, national bodies and public companies, republican orders, and rulings of the judiciary, all published in the Official Gazette. These are still awaiting, together with the decrees, scholarly analysis to realize the extent of the changes made by twenty-two officers who, by chance, found themselves in a position of decision-making, in contrast to a President who came through the ballot box after democratic election, the result of which the world did not know in advance for the first time since the establishment of the Republic in 1952.

Yet, even relying on the above enumeration can be misleading, and most likely would produce an inaccurate analysis. No matter how hard the researcher tries, it is almost impossible, based on scrutinizing the various types of decrees, to distinguish between routine decisions of an administrative and procedural nature, and those that carry political significance related to an amendment to the structure of the political system and the restructuring of the networks of centres of power within it. It is not strange, for example, that a decision issued by a minister would be more important than another decision issued by the President of the Republic or the Prime Minister.

It is worth mentioning, for instance, the decision of Interior Minister Mansour al-Issawy in the government of Issam Sharaf in June 2011, to transfer more than 750 middle leaders and members of the ranks in the Interior Ministry, which was tantamount to subordinating it to the army.⁵¹ This ministerial decision was far more important than President Morsi’s decision in January 2013 to appoint Major General Mohamed Ibrahim instead of his predecessor, Major General Ahmed Gamal El-Din. The Presidential decision was intended, as it seemed at the time, to choose an interior minister loyal to the Elected President. Ironically, Ibrahim, who was promoted from the depths of the Interior Ministry, was one of officials responsible for the horrific massacre of the Elected President’s supporters after the military coup in July 2013.

This reveals that the process of regeneration of the upper leadership of central state institutions alone is not sufficient in the context of the politics of the succession. The new senior leadership quickly realized the power and influence of informal institutions, which act as organizations in times of danger. Rather, more profound measures are required to disperse networks of informal institutions, such as those that Sadat conducted in the 1970s in his struggle with power-centres, and Mubarak in the 1980s in the context of his succession to Sadat, and later in the 2000s in preparation for the succession of his son.

From this point of view, we can understand the torrent of various decrees issued by the SCAF immediately after Mubarak stepped down. These were initially aimed at curbing the influence of the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) led by Major General Omar Suleiman (1991–2011), by targeting two generations of senior and middle leaders with a mixture of movement decisions, and pensioning off, in parallel with augmenting the role and influence of the Military Intelligence and Reconnaissance Administration (MIRA) led by Sisi.⁵² This was before the SCAF took advantage of its tacit alliance with the MB, and the resentment of the revolutionary street movement towards the police, to move to restructure the SSIS with similar kinds of decrees and decisions. The SCAF also targeted judicial institutions with the same strategy.⁵³ It suffices to note that Tantawi, on the eve of the announcement of the results of the presidential elections, which Morsi won, issued a decree in which he appointed 216 assistants in the State Administrative Prosecution, which later formed a fortress of conflict between the Elected President and the judiciary.⁵⁴

Thus, the SCAF fought in the first year after Mubarak’s resignation a battle on two fronts, one of which was no less difficult than the other. The first took an offensive form aimed at eliminating the Competing type of formal-informal interactions, a type that was apparently blamed for the collapse of the authoritarian regime in January 2011.⁵⁵ As for the second front, it took a defensive form aimed at containing the angry street, attracting organized opposition forces and pitting each against the other.

All this happened at a time when the street revolutionary movement seemed to be achieving one victory after another over the authoritarian regime. These included the overthrow of the head of state (February 2011), then dissolving the notorious SSIS albeit nominally (March 2011), and dissolving the NDP (April 2011); then enforcing the SCAF to set a date for the presidential elections after the bloody clashes and street wars between the revolutionaries and the Egyptian security services in the events of Muhammad Mahmoud (November 2011). The latter was considered the second wave of the Egyptian revolution.

The organized and street opposition, however, failed to realize that the army had fought on two fronts in the interim period. They failed to take advantage of the Competing type of formal-informal relationships that the SCAF had inherited from the late Mubarak years, which could have been exploited to strengthen the rift within authoritarianism and push it to compromise towards democracy. On the contrary, both the organized and street opposition forces called for unrealistic demands, such as ‘restructuring’ and ‘dismantling’ the Interior Ministry, instead of reforming it.⁵⁶ This prompted the terrified informal networks in the security sector, which were previously considered a burden by the army, to fall into the arms of the latter, and link their fate to it, in order to avoid dire scenarios inspired by the populist calls of the opposition forces in the context of their competition with each other.

The organized and street opposition also failed, as many have indicated, to realize the ‘divide and rule’ policy that the army used to thwart any possible consensus between them.⁵⁷ Their failure to grasp the nature of the second battle, and their preoccupation with the conflict among themselves, granted Egyptian authoritarianism the time it needed to initiate a transition from Competing to Complementary formal-informal relationships, and to export the conflict after the election of Morsi as an Islamist-secular struggle. This made it easier for the army, at a later stage, to carry out what Amy Holmes calls a ‘coup from below’.⁵⁸

Under Morsi

The rule of Morsi extended theoretically from when he was sworn in before the Constitutional Court on 30 June 2012, to the military coup against him on 3 July 2013. During this short period, the country witnessed an intense political process that began with what seemed to be a deal between the MB and the second-tier senior officers of the SCAF, led by Sisi, in August 2012.⁵⁹ A deal in which it was decided that the leaders of the first rank were to retire, and the Complementary Constitutional Declaration that had been issued by them and robbed the elected institutions of their most important powers, was cancelled. As the 2012 constitution suggests, moreover, the MB granted the army more privileges compared to those it had enjoyed in the pre-revolutionary era. These privileges included complete independence in its internal disputes (Article 196); exercising exclusive control over the defence budget (Article 197), and expanding the military’s judicial authority (Article 198). The 2012 constitution also pleased other state institutions, such as the State Litigation Authority and the Administrative Prosecution Authority.

However, after the turmoil Morsi faced in dismissing Public Prosecutor Abdel-Majid Mahmoud (2006–2012) in December 2012, and his inability to impose a state of emergency following the events of Port Said in February 2013, it turned out that what actually happened was the army’s withdrawal from the façade. It waited for an appropriate moment to pounce on power, as the July 2013 military coup suggests.

How did the Elected President get here? Utilizing the framework of comparative transitology, Azmi Bishara argues that it is not possible for popular revolutions to lead to a democratic transition without the existence of a rift within the ruling elite that generates a process of negotiation between the moderates of the regime and the moderates of the opposition. In the Egyptian case, the revolution did indeed split the ruling elite, but it led to the handover of power to an undemocratic party within the regime (i.e. the army). Nor was the opposition democratic.⁶⁰ Similarly, Stacher argues that the SCAF used procedural democracy against democracy. During the interim period, the army ‘electionized’ the political process, i.e. distracted political forces with a series of elections and referendums. The aim was to marginalize street opposition, and lure the organized one, the most important of which was the MB, to strengthen the turbulent state after the revolution.⁶¹

It is in my contention that lack of experience made Morsi underestimate the influence of informal institutions. He most likely thought that striking a bargain with formal institutions meant automatically neutralizing informal ones, while the battle with the latter is far more difficult than the first. This is because unlike the logic of decision-making in hierarchical formal institutions, which are distinguished by ‘many-to-one’ relationships, informal institutions are entangled in a web of relationships characterized by ‘many-to-many’ relationships. Thus, neutralizing them requires the mobilization of allied forces from inside and outside the state, the complexity of which Morsi and the MB were unable to comprehend. In other words, the Elected President failed to realize the bifurcated character of the Egyptian political system, in which it vertically behaves as an institution linked by legal and constitutional regulations, but horizontally acts as an organization networked by loyalty.

On the other hand, both organized and street opposition forces, in the midst of revolutionary enthusiasm, were unaware that they were providing formal and informal institutions with all the reasons for uniting behind the army. Thus, when Morsi was elected, a unique situation emerged. He became the head of the formal institutions, but only in theory did he possess most of the powers of government. At the same time, he lacked any significant connection with informal institutions. Morsi, in this sense, was master of the vertical flow of the decision-making process, but he had no influence over its horizontal flow. It is an impossible formula, creating a President who rules and does not rule at the same time.

The President-elect could, therefore, have enticed the army leadership to negotiate when the SCAF was at its most unpopular, but the subsequent steps he took to break through the structure of informal networks were soon confronted with a ready-made charge of ‘Brotherhoodization of the state’ (ʾakhwanat ad-dawla). It was an accusation that the marginalized organized opposition helped to spread widely and was strangely echoed by some researchers as well. For example, according to Alexander Kazamias, Brotherhoodization was the process that the MB used to confront the military by ‘concentrating semi-dictatorial power around itself in order to create a party state’. The aim of this process, Kazamias says, was to establish a semi-dictatorship of the MB in which ‘the army would share power as the junior partner in the arrangement’..⁶² Patrick Haenni, on the other hand, contends that Brotherhoodization was an overused expression but ‘it does aptly describe the organization’s relationship to weak state institutions’ such as the state-owned media and the Ministry of Religious Endowment.⁶³ In my contention, Brotherhoodization of the state was nothing but a defensive rhetoric used by informal institutions, which were threatened by the President-elect’s attempt to replace, penetrate, or bargain with them. At any rate, the July 2013 military coup showed that the claimed ‘penetration’ of the state by the MB was very limited since the army did not have much difficulty in toppling the Elected President.

Under Sisi

The then Defence Minister Sisi led a coup against the Elected President with the support of state institutions and what was known as the June 30 coalition; a group of civil and Salafist forces, most of which had formed after the revolution. The June 30 coalition hoped that the coup would be a prelude to their taking power, but their hopes did not last for more than a few months, as it quickly became clear that SCAF used them as pawns to depose the Elected President, and to liquidate the MB, which was the most organized force in the political arena. Subsequently, Sisi had no qualms in sacrificing the forces of June 30, which had formed a civilian cover for him to carry out the coup. The head of the liberal-oriented al-Dostour party, Mohamed El-Baradei, resigned from the position of Vice President for Foreign Relations after the massacre at the sit-ins in Al-Nahda and Rabaa Al-Adawiya on 14 August 2013. He flew to Europe, and has not since been known to have had any political activity, except for a few occasional tweets on his personal Twitter account. The head of the socialist al-Tayyar al-Sha’bi, Hamdeen Sabahi, appeared broken in a press conference following the sham presidential elections in May 2014. He could hardly justify polling a percentage of votes less than that of the invalid votes.

SCAF preferred to nominate its candidates for election. Sisi, in turn, preferred to build a new selectorate from the remnants of the former regime who owed absolute loyalty to him rather than relying on a patchwork of scattered civilian forces thirsty for power, whose legitimacy was derived either from their proximity to the bureaucracy, or from a street that was angry, divided and with no trust in the state. What prompted the army to make a strategic choice in which it would sacrifice the majority of its allies from the forces that could have provided it with civilian cover?

For the researcher who analyzes retroactively today, SCAF’s choice to turn its back on its allies in the June 30 coalition, and to rule, seems obvious. However, it must be said that at that time this scenario was not a foregone conclusion. This at least is what can be inferred from Article 234 of the Transitional Provisions of the 2014 Constitution, which stipulated the approval of the SCAF to appoint the Defence Minister for a period of two full presidential terms, starting from the date the constitution came into effect. The article was understood at the time to be a desire to fortify Sisi’s position before the President of the Republic, which means that the scenario of a civilian President ascending to power was possible. However, this did not happen, and the constitutional article became practically meaningless after Sisi’s decision to run for election.

Conspiracy alone does not explain the army’s decision to turn its back on the June 30 coalition, but rather, as this paper argues, it may be explained by its awareness of the path of dependency. It was more likely that if an elected civilian President from the 30 June coalition were given the opportunity, no matter how weak or dependent he seemed, formal-informal relations would return to the Competing type. In fact, Egyptian political history has vivid examples in which the President of the Republic became President precisely because of his weakness compared with his peers, but he quickly made his way and re-formed the networks of power and influence, making him the most powerful man, unchallenged and undisputed. This was the case with Sadat, who in the early years of his rule liquidated power centres, which as discussed previously, led to a transition from Competing to Complementary formal-informal interactions. This was also the case with Mubarak, who used general elections to outsource and manage the networks of informal institutions to the extent that they could have led in his last years to the transfer power to his son. Both Sadat and Mubarak were chosen for the position of Vice President precisely because of what seemed to be a low level of ambition in them compared to others in the circles of power. Although both of them, furthermore, came from the heart of the existing power networks, the politics of succession prompted them to build new and exclusive selectorates to the new regime, which led to the exclusion of other networks.

The Egyptian political establishment’s self-awareness, namely the historical path taken by the Presidents of the Republic in empowering themselves through reconfiguring formal-informal interactions, might be one of the important factors that led to the July 2013 coup. It is likely that the various networks of informal institutions collectively realized that even Presidents from the heart of the state historically tended to use their broad authority at the top of bureaucracy to cultivate horizontal centralization strategies, at the expense of the old established networks. In the case of Morsi, who originally lacked any significant relationship with the informal institutions, the path of dependency would eventually have prompted him to create his own networks, which in practice meant integrating his group (i.e. the MB) and its allies into the state. This scenario was not inevitable, but it was more likely according to the historical experience and understanding of the political establishment, and it was the worse for it.

This may also explain excluding the possibility of a candidate from the June 30 coalition, despite all the guarantees provided to the various state institutions in the 2014 constitution, the most important of which were the army and security services. There was a general realization that no matter how constitutionally fortified state institutions are, any future President would not fail to devise strategies through which he would reshape the networks of informal institutions and make his own selectorate. In fact, Mubarak did so throughout his reign without the need to make any amendment to the 1979 Constitution, as discussed previously. Thus, the establishment’s best strategic option, or the least-worse one, was to sacrifice the June 30 alliance, which could have been a civilian backer of the new regime, in favour of a President from the state, who could restore the Complementary type of formal-informal interactions.

This may explain the torrent of presidential decrees under the interim President Adly Mansour (2013–2014) and later under Sisi. During this period, dozens of decrees strengthened the economic and institutional privileges of the army, security and judiciary. These decrees reshaped the map of power networks to serve the hegemony of formal institutions over informal institutions. For example, Sisi issued many decrees in which he continued to curb the GID by referring its leaders to retirement or transferring them to ‘other agencies’.⁶⁴ As for the judiciary, the number of presidential decrees that affected it until late February 2020 numbered 330, including 104 individual and collective appointments, 20 decisions for promotion, 25 decisions for assignment, 11 decisions for dismissal, 36 decisions for transfer or termination of service, and 13 decisions for referral to pension.⁶⁵

Juniorizing the ruling party

Of equal importance was Sisi’s approach towards the idea of the ruling party. From the beginning, the post-military coup constitution in 2014 prohibited the President of the Republic from leading a particular political party, which reflected a desire to reconsider the idea of the ruling party. Furthermore, Sisi officially refrained from supporting any party before or after the 2015 parliamentary election. The policy of integrating independent MPs into any loyal party, which had marked the pre-revolutionary period, was abandoned. Consequently, independent MPs made up 80% of the post-coup parliament, whom the ‘For the Love of Egypt’ list did not seek to attract. A list was drawn up that comprised a coalition of newly formed parties loyal to the regime that the MIRA supervised and formed, and won all the parliamentary seats in the proportional list.

This negative attitude towards the idea of the ruling party prompted Rutherford to consider the transition from Mubarak to Sisi as ‘an attempt to shift from a provision pact, grounded in a robust and extensive patronage network, to a protection pact, in which elites back the regime because it provides protection against internal and external threats’.⁶⁶ The first pact entails an authoritarian regime gaining the support of elites through patronage politics, whereas a robust ruling party is essential to develop a durable relationship with elites. The second pact is a type of governing that is founded on a single consideration: a shared sense of threat posed by political Islam.⁶⁷

However, a comparative analysis of the results of two rounds of general elections (2015 and 2020), may indicate that the relationship between Sisi’s regime and the ruling party resembles in some way the relationship between the Mubarak regime and the NDP during his succession to Sadat. It reflects reconfiguring institutional formal-informal relationships, where the latter would comply with the agendas of the first. As previously discussed, Mubarak reengineered electoral laws in a way that served to centralize the NDP, namely by reducing the number of electoral constituencies and banning independent candidates from running for election. The reason, as suggested previously in this paper, was pursuing the transition that had been initiated by Sadat from Competing to Complementary type formal-informal interactions. Similarly, Sisi reengineered electoral laws prior to the 2015 election, allocating 20% of parliament seats to the proportional list, in which the MIRA directly supervised the selection of its twelve parties, the most prominent of which was the Nation’s Future Party (NFP) and the Republican People’s Party (RPP). The first was formed in November 2014 as an alliance between security officers and businessmen in a form similar to Gamal Mubarak’s version of the NDP. The second was formed in September 2012 from a group of former ministers and officials. The 12-party list also included a group of smaller parties, independent personalities, and Salafist forces from the June 30 Coalition. Overall, Sisi sought, by drafting the new electoral system, to ensure the dominance of independent candidates at the expense of party lists, to form a less politicized parliament than the post-revolutionary parliament.

However, this did not bring the desired result. In televised statements on 26 December 2019, Sisi expressed his resentment with the large number of parties that exceeded one hundred, and urged them to join ‘entities’ that facilitate what he called ‘political reform’. The reason, as Hossam Bahgat concludes, was the contradiction of the agendas of the various security agencies that oversaw the electoral process. As a result, the media was filled with news that displayed the failure to control hundreds of MPs who were carefully selected on the sole basis of loyalty to the current regime, without any sense of ideological connection, partisan commitment, or even common interest.⁶⁸

Consequently, in the 2020 parliamentary election, electoral legislation was fundamentally changed. Firstly, the number of electoral constituencies was significantly reduced from 205 to 143, therefore, the number of seats designated for individual candidates dropped from 448 to 284. Secondly, the party lists’ share was increased from 120 in the 2015 parliament to 284 seats. The result was that over 4000 candidates ran as individuals competing for 50% of the seats. The other 50% was reserved for over 1100 candidates running on four party lists, while the President could appoint some members, but no more than five per cent of the total.⁶⁹ Candidates who wanted to join the pre-selected list had literally to purchase a guaranteed seat from the NFP. Alternatively, they had the choice of purchasing the official party nomination for the individual seat, which was cheaper but not guaranteed. According to press reports, the price of a seat ranged from LE 10–25 million ($600,000–1,500,000) for a party-list seat and started from LE 2,000,000 for an individual one.⁷⁰ The NFP’s pre-selected lists, consequently, won all 284 seats allocated to the 596-seat chamber through a winner-takes-all system. Its candidates also secured a majority in seats contested by individual candidates.

The logic of the 2020 election tells us that Sisi may also have been motivated by politics of succession, which made him preoccupied with implementing strategies of centralization in order to create new loyal informal networks, even if this was at the expense of other pro-regime parties and political groups. For example, a report revealed that the RPP—the main partner of the NFP on the electoral list—which is made up of a group of former government ministers, proposed a preliminary list featuring its suggested 46 candidates for election. However, the RPP leadership was shocked to find that only eight names on the list were active members of their party. All the other names came from the NFP. The result was mass resignation from the RPP, one of whose leaders describing what had happened as the ‘nationalisation of his party’.⁷¹

Eventually, the NFP won all the proportional lists’ seats in the new parliament, as well as a large share of the seats allocated to individual lists, therefore becoming the new and unofficial version of the dissolved NDP. Although the party denied on more than one occasion that it is the ‘party of the President’, and despite the fact that the 2014 Constitution prohibits the President of the Republic from being the head of any political party, the NFP performance during and after the elections confirmed this conclusion. Numerous press reports quoted that the party played a role resembling the one that had been played by the dissolved NDP. For instance, after hundreds took to the streets in many Egyptian towns in response to Sisi’s televised threats to deploy the army in villages to demolish illegal houses in September-October 2020,⁷² the NFP organized campaigns to collect donations for families unable to pay compensation to settle their cases. The NFP, furthermore, organized large-scale campaigns to mobilize local businessmen and entrepreneurs to pay for the ‘Long Live Egypt’ fund, which was established in mid-2014 to support infrastructure projects announced by Sisi (which basically resembled those that had been organized by the NDP’s ‘service deputies’ in the 1990s). Those who refused to contribute were targeted by the newly formed version of the SSIS, the National Security Agency al-‘amn al-watany. They were accused of being supporters of the MB. This fact made Mohammad Yaghi conclude that Sisi’s neoliberal reforms transformed the nature of patron-client relations, from volitional in the pre-revolutionary era, into forceful. The regime’s grassroots, therefore, were subjected to a set of forceful relationships based on dependency.⁷³

Evidence suggests that Sisi’s politics of succession is pushing the new Egyptian authoritarianism to consolidate the transition from a Competing to a Complementary type of formal-informal interaction. The Sisi regime’s attitude towards loyal grassroots organizations shows that the regime is employing its security agencies to supervise the process of reconfiguring formal-informal relationships, through directly being involved in electing loyal informal networks. The outcome of this process is ‘juniorizing’ the leaders of the ruling party. The basic difference between Mubarak’s NDP and Sisi’s NFP, as Figure 1 shows, is the absence of a party’s upper leadership class as was the case during the Mubarak era. The NFP, in contrast, can be considered a large group of middle-leaders who coordinate with the various security services. Upper leadership has simply been replaced by security officers who directly supervise the selection and filtering of local party networks at all national and subnational levels.

Figure 1. Comparison between the NDP under Mubarak and the NFP under Sisi.

Conclusion

By utilizing an institutionalist approach, this paper has traced the historical metamorphosis of formal-informal relationships in the Egyptian political system before and after the 2011 Revolution. As shown in Figure 2, formal-informal relationships show a transition from Complementary during the late Sadat era and first two decades of the Mubarak era, to Competing with the rise of Gamal Mubarak in the 2000s. Each transition was motivated by a critical juncture. The first transition was mainly motivated by the 1967 defeat. The second transition was motivated by Mubarak’s desire to bequeath power to his son, which led to a split in the ruling class.

Figure 2. Transitions of formal-informal interactions in Egypt.

The 2011 Revolution marked the beginning of the third transition, which as this paper has argued has made another shift in formal-informal interactions from Competing in the pre-revolutionary era to Complementary under Sisi. Each transition was also made through different tools. The 1973 War provided Sadat with enough legitimacy to restructure the entire political system. Mubarak in contrast lacked this legitimacy so used electoral politics to manage formal-informal relations. Relying on coercion, evidence suggests that Sisi’s authoritarianism is making its own transition. However, it is not clear yet if it is able to sustain it.

Acknowledgment

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Hazem Kandil, The Power Triangle: Military, Security, and Politics in Regime Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

² Robert Springborg, Egypt (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 13–19.

³ Zeinab Abul-Magd, Militarizing the Nation: The army, business, and revolution in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

⁴ Jamie Allinson, ‘Counter-revolution as international phenomenon: the case of Egypt,’ Review of International Studies 45, no. 2 (2019): 320–344; and Adam Hanieh, ‘Re-scaling Egypt’s political economy,’ in Revolutionary Egypt: Connecting Domestic and International Struggles, ed. Reem Abou-El-Fadl (London: Routledge, 2015), 156–176, 171.

⁵ Joshua Stacher, Watermelon Democracy: Egypt’s Turbulent Transition (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2020).

⁶ Walter Armbrust, ‘Trickster defeats the revolution: Egypt as the vanguard of the new authoritarianism,’ Middle East Critique 26, no. 3 (2017): 221–239.

⁷ Bruce K. Rutherford, ‘Egypt’s New Authoritarianism under Sisi,’ The Middle East Journal 72, no. 2 (2018): 185–208, 185.

⁸ Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4–5.

⁹ James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, ‘Elaborating the ‘new institutionalism’ in The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions ed. R. A. Rhodes, S. A. Binder, and A. B. Rockman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–20.

¹⁰ Paul D. Hutchcroft, ‘Centralization and decentralization in administration and politics: assessing territorial dimensions of authority and power,’ Governance 14, no. 1 (2001): 23–53.

¹¹ Huseyn Aliyev, When informal institutions change: Institutional reforms and informal practices in the former Soviet Union (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 41.

¹² Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15–16.

¹³ Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, ‘Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A research agenda,’ Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (2004): 725–740.

¹⁴ Hutchcroft, ‘Centralization and decentralization in administration and politics’.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Christopher Ansell, ‘Network Institutionalism,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, 75–89, 78.

¹⁸ Christopher Pollitt, ‘Decentralization: A Central Concept in Contemporary Public Management,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Public Management, eds Ewan Ferlie, Laurence E. Lynn Jr and Christopher Pollitt (USA, Oxford University Press, 2005), 371–97, 389.

¹⁹ Hutchcroft, ‘Centralization and decentralization in administration and politics’.

²⁰ Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy,’ World Politics 31, no. 2 (1979): 195–227, 198.

²¹ Aliyev, When informal institutions change. Alena Ledeneva, ‘Informality and informal politics,’ in Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society, ed. Graeme Gill and James Young (London: Routledge, 2013), 383–393; József Böröcz, ‘Informality Rules,’ East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 02 (2000): 348–380; and Alena Ledeneva and Alena V. Ledeneva. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, networking and informal exchange. Vol. 102. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

²² M. Steven Fish, ‘The Kremlin Emboldened: What Is Putinism?’ Journal of Democracy 28, no. 4 (2017): 61–75, 70. Cited in: Ludger Helms, ‘Leadership succession in politics: The democracy/autocracy divide revisited,’ The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22, no. 2 (2020): 328–346, 334.

²³ Suat Cubukcu, ‘The Rise of Paramilitary Groups in Turkey’, Small Wars Foundation, September 3, 2018, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/rise-paramilitary-groups-turkey, (accessed in September 11, 2020). Mehtap Söyler, ‘Informal institutions, forms of state and democracy: the Turkish deep state.’ Democratization 20, no. 2 (2013): 310–334.

²⁴ Helmke & Levitsky, Informal institutions and comparative politics.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ P. J. Vatikiotis, The Egyptian Army in Politics (Bloomington, In: University of Indiana Press, 1961); and Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

²⁷ John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 311; Leonard Binder, In a Moment of Enthusiasm: Political Power and the Second Stratum in Egypt)Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 327; and Ninette S. Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt: state-society relationship (London: Routledge, 2012), 186.

²⁸ Amos Perlmutter, Egypt: The Praetorian State (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1974), 167–75. Ninette S. Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt, 61–2.

²⁹ Roland Popp, ‘Stumbling decidedly into the six-day war.’ The Middle East Journal 60, no. 2 (2006): 281–309; and Ersun N. Kurtulus, ‘The Notion of a “pre-emptive War: the Six Day War Revisited.’ The Middle East Journal 61, no. 2 (2007): 220–238.

³⁰ Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Towards a Historical Sociology of the Arab Uprising: Beyond Democratization and Post-Democratization,’ in Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring, ed. Larbi Sadiki (London: Routledge, 2014), 45–6.

³¹ Raymond A. Hinnebusch, ‘Egypt under Sadat: elites, power structure, and political change in a post-populist state.’ Social problems 28, no. 4 (1981): 442–464.

³² Ibid.

³³ Nadia Ramsis Farah, Egypt’s Political Economy: Power Relations in Development (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 113; and Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (Verso Trade, 2014), 297–8.

³⁴ Iliya Harik, ‘The Single Party as a Subordinate Movement: The Case of Egypt,’ World Politics 26, no. 1 (1973): 80–105; Iliya Harik, ‘Mobilization Policy and Political Change in Rural Egypt,’ in Rural Politics and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Richard Antoun and Iliya Harik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 287–314, 290.

³⁵ Ayubi, Bureaucracy and Politics in Contemporary Egypt, 441.

³⁶ Abul-Magd, Militarizing the Nation, 86.

³⁷ Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen, 298; and Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order (London & Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 155.

³⁸ Hisham Aidi, Redeploying the state: Corporatism, Neoliberalism, and Coalition Politics (London, Springer, 2008), 78; and Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt, 61–2.

³⁹ Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt, 62.

⁴⁰ Lisa Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

⁴¹ Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt, 44.

⁴² Ibid., 39.

⁴³ Springborg, Patrimonialism and Policy Making in Egypt, 160; and Hani Awad, The Dilemma of Authoritarian Local Governance in Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

⁴⁴ Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid. 56, 76.

⁴⁷ Samer Soliman, The Autumn of Dictatorship: Fiscal crisis and political change in Egypt under Mubarak (California: Stanford University Press, 2011), 127.

⁴⁸ Ibid. 97.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Joshua Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria (California: Stanford University Press, 2012), 99–100.

⁵¹ ‘The largest movement in the history of the Ministry of the Interior: the termination of the service of 750 brigades and police brigades’, Al-Masry Al-Youm, July 11, 2011, https://www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/143430, accessed August 20, 2021. Compare with the comprehensive movement conducted by the Minister of Interior, Major General Mohamed Ibrahim in the government of Hisham Qandil under Morsi in July 2012, which took place without any interference from the elected president or his prime minister. Morsi gave an unjustified blind trust to the Minister of the Interior, and later to his Defence Minister Abdel Fattah Sisi. ‘Egyptian Interior Minister: Morsi approved police movement without change’, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, July 29, 2012, https://bit.ly/3uaf1Df (accessed August 15, 2021).

⁵² Ahmed Maulana, ‘Political Security Services after the January 2011 Revolution,’ Al-Bousala, June 8, 2020, https://bit.ly/2XPMzdL (accessed: September 25, 2021).

⁵³ Official Gazette 16, April 21, 2011; 25, June 23, 2011; 25, June 23, 2011 36, September 8, 2011; 46, November 17, 2011; 45, November 10, 2011; January 19, 2012; 12, March 22, 2012; 19, May 10, 2012.

⁵⁴ Official Gazette, 24, 14 June 2012.

⁵⁵ Amy Austin Holmes and Kevin Koehler, ‘Myths of military defection in Egypt and Tunisia,’ Mediterranean Politics 25, no. 1 (2020): 45–70.

⁵⁶ Omar Ashour, From Bad Cop to Good Cop: The Challenge of Security Sector Reform in Egypt. Brookings Institution, 2012, https://www.brookings.edu/research/from-bad-cop-to-good-cop-the-challenge-of-security-sector-reform-in-egypt/, (accessed on August 19, 2021). Yezid Sayigh, ‘Missed Opportunity: The Politics of Police Reform in Egypt and Tunisia,’ Carnegie Middle East Center, March 2015, https://carnegie-mec.org/2015/03/17/missed-opportunity-politics-of-police-reform-in-egypt-and-tunisia-pub-59391, (accessed: August 21, 2021).

⁵⁷ Stephan Roll, ‘Managing change: how Egypt’s military leadership shaped the transformation,’ Mediterranean Politics 21, no. 1 (2016): 23–43.

⁵⁸ Amy Holmes, Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford: Oxford: Oxford University Press), 144.

⁵⁹ Khalil Al-Anani, ‘Upended path: The rise and fall of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.’ The Middle East Journal 69, no. 4 (2015): 527–543, 535.

⁶⁰ Azmi Bishara, Egypt Revolution, Failed Transition and Counter-Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).

⁶¹ Stacher, Waterlemon Democracy, 56–57.

⁶² Alexander Kazamias, ‘From Popular Revolution to Semi-Democracy’ in Revolutionary Egypt, op.cit., 112–133, 127.

⁶³ Bernard Rougier and Stéphane Lacroix, Egypt’s Revolutions: Politics, Religion, and Social Movements (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 19–40, 29.

⁶⁴ Official Gazette, 4, 26 January 2017.

⁶⁵ The data are from the Official Gazette during the rule of Abdel Fattah Sisi, from 3 June 2014 to 28 February 2020. All decisions of a routine nature have been excluded. These data are also limited to presidential decisions and do not include law decrees, cabinet decisions and ministerial decisions Governor’s decisions, all of which are important.

⁶⁶ Rutherford, Egypt’s New Authoritarianism under Sisi. 185.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ Hossam Bahgat, ‘Anatomy of an election,’ Mada Masr, 14 March 2016, available online at: https://www.madamasr.com/en/2016/03/14/feature/politics/anatomy-of-an-election/

⁶⁹ ‘Giza House race sheds light on Egypt’s shifting political machinery,’ Mada Masr, 26 October 2020.

⁷⁰ ‘Another sham election highlights Egypt’s problems The country’s rulers are making a mess of politics and business,’, The Economist, 22 October 2020.

⁷¹ ‘The cost of playing monopoly: How the Nation’s Future Party has caused rifts among parties in House elections’, Mada Masr, October 1, 2020, https://madamasr.com/en/2020/10/01/feature/politics/the-cost-of-playing-monopoly-how-the-nations-future-party-has-caused-rifts-among-parties-in-house-elections/

⁷² ‘Egypt: Rare protests met with unlawful force and mass arrests’, Amnesty International, 2 October 2020, available online at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/10/egypt-rare-protests-met-with-unlawful-force-and-mass-arrests/

⁷³ Mohammad Yaghi, ‘Neoliberal reforms, protests, and enforced patron–client relations in Tunisia and Egypt,’ in Networks of Dependency: Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. L. R. de Elvira, & C. H. Schwarz (London: Routledge, 2018), 118–142.