Community Settlements are small-scale nonagricultural villages consisting of a limited number of families and with a relatively homogenous character. They were first established by Israeli planning agencies during the 1970s as a tool to strengthen the state’s territorial and demographic control over predominantly Arab areas like the Galilee and the Green Line. Unlike earlier settlement methods that, as part of the nation-building years, relied on ideological values such as labor, agriculture, redemption, identity, and integration, Community Settlements promoted a more individual and neo-rural lifestyle. This chapter shows how Community Settlements became the new leading tool for a national agenda, corresponding with changing ideas in Israeli culture, which was moving from a quasi-socialist society to a market-driven neoliberal one, later turning the neo-rural phenomenon into a suburban one. The chapter examines six different settlements initiated along the Green-Line between 1977 and 1981 – Sal’it, Reihan, Hinanit, Shaked, Nirit, and Ya’arit. Analyzing the development of these six case studies, and how their built environment changed over the years, this chapter shows how the demand for better living standards in small communities situated away from city centres became the leading force behind the national mission of territorial control in the early 1980s.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth exploration of the more open state opposition structure of the Hosni Mubarak regime – which groups were co-opted, which were included and allowed to participate, and which were excluded from formal political participation – and traces the impact of these different types of opportunity structures on the political and outreach activities that different groups undertook. We see that opposition groups that were excluded from the formal political system, such as Islamist groups and pro-reform umbrella groups, adjusted their strategies in response to exclusion and were alternately tolerated and repressed by the regime. During periods of toleration, these groups – especially Islamist groups – were able to establish an extensive grassroots presence through charities, community self-help organizations, private mosques, and individual religious outreach activities. These activities at the grassroots level, while not always directly confronting the state, constituted the construction of a “parallel society” that quietly contested the regime’s legitimacy. During periods of repression, members of these groups retreated underground and into informal networks until they found new venues through which to engage with their communities.

Chapter 4 begins with an in-depth process tracing of the decisions around political party formation in Egypt after Mubarak’s ouster. We revisit the puzzling variation in party formation across the Egyptian political opposition landscape, particularly examining the decision on the part of Egyptian organized labor and pro-reform activist groups not to form political parties, tracing the link between the structure of the opposition under the Mubarak regime to the strategic incentives and organizational constraints faced by groups at this juncture. We then conduct an in-depth within-case comparison of the mobilization prior to Egypt’s 2011 elections, utilizing granular data on political parties’ specific campaign strategies and methods to trace the link between the adaptations that various groups made during the Mubarak era to the relative organizational and persuasive resources political groups had, and the mobilization tactics and strategies they were then able to use. We also specifically examine compelling evidence for common alternatives or contributing explanations for the Muslim Brotherhood’s success, and show that while these explanations certainly fill in part of the picture, they are incomplete without an understanding of mechanisms linking authoritarian legacies to the 2011 elections.

The events in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 present a series of empirical puzzles unanswered in the comparative political scholarship: We see puzzling variation with respect to the particular processes of party formation, political mobilization, and opposition group survival or dissolution in the context of regime transitions. These puzzles are particularly evident in Egypt, where a repressed opposition group (the Muslim Brotherhood) won the 2011 founding elections only to be forced from office eighteen months later, while other opposition groups that were active in protesting the Egyptian regime did not even form a political party to run in the 2011 elections. Common explanations for events in Egypt focus on idiosyncratic features of the Egyptian political landscape and fail to explain similar events in other cases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. An approach that takes into account the mechanisms linking the authoritarian past to the events surrounding founding elections offers not only an explanation for events in Egypt but also illuminates comparative cases of founding elections more generally. The book uses comparative process tracing to excavate the mechanisms at play in Egypt and then test them in five comparative cases, linking the authoritarian political ecosystem to the outcome of founding elections.

Authoritarian regimes vary with respect to regime–opposition relations, along a continuum of more open to more closed, focusing on the degree of competition the regime permits during elections. The particular political opportunity structure facing any individual opposition group varies according to the strategies that the regime uses in dealing with that particular group: inclusion, co-optation, or exclusion. The microfoundations of both party formation and political mobilization do not operate in isolation or in the same way as they do in established democracies, but in fact interact with the effects of the political opportunity structure that existed during the prior authoritarian era. An examination of the common competing explanations for party formation and political mobilization show that, while each explanation arguably does play a role in shaping these outcomes, they are limited in their comparative utility and frequently fail to explain the actual variation observed in these cases. Instead, mechanisms link the structure of state–opposition relations and the political opportunity structure facing different groups to their relative decisions around party formation as well as to the tactics and effectiveness of political mobilization in founding elections. Finally, the common causes of opposition group dissolution interact with the opportunity structure of the authoritarian era.

Chapter 5 expands the tracing of the theorized causal mechanisms beyond Egypt to see how far these mechanisms travel and if they operate in the same way across other cases of founding elections. Each case comparison begins with an analysis of the processes of party formation, linking the political opportunity structure of the authoritarian era to the contours of the ideological landscape and the strategic incentives facing different groups at this juncture. Each case then examines the evidence for the mechanisms linking the authoritarian era political opportunity structure to the organizational and persuasive resources available to each political group and their ability to use different mobilization tactics. As in Egypt, opposition groups that were excluded from electoral participation possess similar organizational and symbolic resources and thus are able to use more effective voter mobilization tactics than other political groups, resulting in their electoral success. The accounts find evidence for this causal chain in Tunisia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Zambia, but the mechanism operates differently in the case of Brazil, offering useful insight into the scope conditions under which the mechanisms theorized in the Egypt case operate elsewhere.

In Chapter 6, we find evidence that opposition successor parties from more closed opportunity structures experience centrifugal strains caused by the amalgamation of ideological orientations and perspectives that they represent. These strains lead to elite polarization that cause movement fracture and collapse. Conversely, opposition successor parties from more open opportunity structures are ideologically more coherent and thus do not suffer the same centrifugal tensions. Second, we see that nearly all opposition successor parties experience a dramatic decline in popularity after founding elections, due the ephemerality of symbolic resources in general (oppositional credibility, in this context). The positive reputations that helped opposition groups persuade citizens to vote for them in founding elections break down under economic strain and political disfunction that so frequently plague new democracies. Finally, we see that in contexts in which authoritarian state institutions persist beyond the transition, the resurgence of state repression against opposition successor parties becomes more likely, while authoritarian successor parties, in contrast, can integrate former regime members into the new democratic political system.

Chapter 7 concludes the book by revisiting key claims and discussing the implications of the research for broader debates in the fields of comparative politics, social movements, and democracy-promotion activities. Here we see that much of the focus of democracy promotion institutions and programs may be misplaced. Rather than focusing on existing political parties in hybrid regimes, as many democracy-promotion programs do, it is repressed societal actors that are more likely to mobilize supporters, win elections, and form the first government after an authoritarian ouster. These are the individuals and groups most in need of skills-building and governance training. Furthermore, much of the programmatic emphasis of democracy-promotion work falls on enhancing the “liberal” qualities of democracy: freedom of speech, human rights, inclusion of women and minorities, and the protection of civil liberties. However, what the cases here show is that democratic consolidation is most threatened by unmet benchmarks in economic and physical security after the fall of an authoritarian regime. When these benchmarks are not met, the support for democracy declines and a wedge is opened for the return of authoritarian actors. The chapter offers suggestions for future research based upon the findings.