Autocratic Tutelage and Democratic Institution Building: What Egyptian Elites Learned About the Value of Building Strong Courts in a Democracy

Abstract

Most autocracies today have parties, multi-party elections and directly elected legislatures. Thus, when such countries democratize, their political system includes parties and people with considerable experience with these institutions that must now be built and used in the context of a democracy. However, the knowledge and experience these parties and elites have regarding these institutions comes from their operation by dictators interested in using them to consolidate and maintain power. This raises important questions about the institution-building process in new democracies: How does the autocratic legacy of such highly institutionalized autocracies subsequently influence the support these leaders extend to building strong institutions in the context of a democracy? How does experience under autocracy shape how elites learn and respond to new information about the structure of political power in their environment?In this paper, I focus on elite support for building a key democratic institution -- independent courts. Specifically, I focus on studying how experience under dictatorship influences elite political support for granting the judiciary independence from parliament and from executive. I exploit a natural experiment embedded in the design of the Egyptian elections to collect a novel dataset – a survey of candidates for parliament during the maiden Egyptian democratic parliamentary elections (2011-12) to explore these questions. These data allow me to test (a) whether parties and elites with political experience under dictatorship express more, less or similar levels of support for judicial independence compared to new parties and inexperienced elites and, (ii) whether experienced elites and parties respond differently than novices to politically significant information about who holds power in the incoming parliament and, (iii) whether support for independent judiciary is higher, similar or lower among party leaders and lower ranking party activists in legacy and new parties. The results show that autocratic experience has very significant and complex effects on political support for the judiciary. Experienced parties are more supportive and party experience influences how elites respond to relevant political information. However, experienced individuals and ambitious individuals are significantly less supportive of an independent judiciary than novices. Thus, party leaders and lower ranked individuals have very different ideas about the desirability of independent courts.