Ordinary people’s regime preferences in the MENA: the case of Tunisia during the democratic transition

This article problematizes regime preferences of ordinary people in MENA, typically framed as a choice between democracy or authoritarianism. We offer an empirically grounded political regime preferences ordinary people hold. In particular, we propose a two-dimensional approach to studying regime choices, focusing on attitudes towards religion in politics and the competitiveness of the political system. Using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) on a novel nationwide survey conducted in Tunisia, we identify five types of regime preferences. In addition to the four regime types already identified by the literature, secular democracy, Islamic democracy, secular authoritarianism, and religious authoritarianism, we identified a new preference: competitive authoritarianism. Overall, our findings suggest that most citizens prefer secular, religious or competitive authoritarian regimes over secular democracy or Islamic democracy in the then transitioning Tunisia where economic and political instability engulfed the country. We compare our results with our measure based on a direct regime preference in a closed-ended question. Additionally, we test several hypotheses derived from the literature on the effect of religiosity on our new political regime preferences: Praying increases support for Islamic democracy and competitive authoritarianism, while decreasing support for secular authoritarianism. Quran reading has no statistically significant effect.