Minorities in the Middle East

Abstract

Under what conditions do minorities in the Middle East participate in authoritarian coalitions? Research on authoritarian resilience in the Middle East has been largely silent on linguistic and religious minorities’ preferences over regime types. Here, we examine whether minorities differ in their support for authoritarianism from the majority groups in four Middle Eastern states. We argue that minorities whose status is threatened by a transition to majoritarian decision-making institutions are less likely to be supportive of democratization. We examine how different cleavages affect the preferences of minorities over regime type and identify three historical legacies in the Middle East that have shaped these cleavages: the Ottoman-Islamic legacy of minority accommodation, the ethnic class structure that emerged as a result of the region’s integration to world markets in the nineteenth century, and a post-independence pattern of authoritarian secularism. Based on survey research and a comparison of minorities in Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan, we find that linguistic minorities tend to be less supportive of authoritarianism while religious minorities tend to be more supportive of authoritarianism.