Costly Commitments in Authoritarian Regime Formation: Evidence From Tunisia

Abstract

This article theorizes costly commitments in autocracies. Populist leaders who ascend to power through anti-establishment appeals confront a strategic dilemma between consolidating winning coalitions and maintaining the loyalty of their selectorate. Rooted in rhetoric that delegitimizes political parties, such leaders face constraints to regime institutionalization as their popular base remains resistant to formal party structures. Costly commitments occur where autocratizing leaders commit to their ideological messages to sustain popular support, which compromises the formation of ruling parties as instruments of elite cooptation. The 2021 executive takeover in Tunisia illustrates this dilemma emerging from incompatible incentives to commit to ideological narratives and forming a ruling party. We adopt a multi-method approach to discuss contemporary Tunisian politics as a theory-generating case study. To this aim, we leverage qualitative interviews with party officials, legislative election candidates, and members of Saied’s electoral campaign along with data from an original, nationally representative phone survey in Tunisia, and available public opinion data. Following Kais Saied’s move against the democratic order, elites engaged in party initiatives in support of his political project. Yet, Kais Saied rebuffed these advances, choosing to rely on the popular anti-party sentiment that had contributed to his rise to power.