Forging Democracy out of the Trauma of Repression, with Elizabeth Nugent

Scope Conditions Podcast

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Elizabeth Nugent, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about her new book, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press).
Nugent is interested in authoritarian regimes that have collapsed in the face of popular uprising -- and specifically with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorship does not necessarily lmean the start of a democracy: one autocratic regime can fall only to replaced by another dictatorship. It is in fact relatively rare that autocratic collapse results in the establishment of a stable democracy.
In her new book, Nugent is interested in figuring out what makes the difference. When a dictatorship falls, why do we sometimes get democracy and sometimes more autocracy? She focuses specifically on the aftermath of the Arab Spring: the string of popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s. In particular, the book examines the toppling of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the collapse of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia.
The Egypt-Tunisia comparison is a striking one. Before and during the Arab Spring, these two countries looked similar in many respects. Both were ruled by dictators who had been in power for decades; both regimes were unseated by weeks of sustained mass protest; and both were replaced at first by members of the democratic opposition. Moreover, the politics of both countries revolved around the divide between Islamism and secularism.
After the Arab Spring, however, the political systems’ paths diverged dramatically. After a brief flirtation with democracy, Egypt quickly descended back into strongman rule while Tunisians set up a quite vibrant multiparty democracy that still survives today.
So what was it that allowed Tunisian society -- but not Egyptian society -- to support democratic norms and institutions? Nugent argues that the answer lies in how the old regime in each country wielded repressive power and the mark that repression left on identities and organizations among the two countries’ democratic oppositions.
In this episode, we unpack Nugent’s argument about the legacies of repression and about the evidence that she brings to bear on that argument, including comparative-historical analysis, in-depth interviews with opposition members, and inventive lab experiments. We discuss elements of the research process including how she decided to bring social psychology into the study of democratization and how she engaged with her research participants about highly sensitive and traumatic experiences. We also talk about what historical analysis brings to her explanation: why understanding British and French colonialism can help make sense of regime change in the 2010s. And we touch on possible parallels between coercive institutions in autocracies and repressive state practices in democracies.
You can find references to Elizabeth Nugent's work and other relevant material on our website, here.