The regime concept has featured prominently in Comparative Politics in the last three decades. In the comparative democratization literature, the notion of regime transition and consolidation has provided the direction of much research across regions of the world. It has generated interest in measuring the progress countries make in becoming democratic systems. The indicators provided by Freedom House and the more recently established Varieties of Democracy Institute constitute valuable data for these global comparisons. The merit of relying primarily on such indicators, however, has increasingly come into question as political developments around the world challenge the notion that democracy is the only type of regime that matters. The significant backsliding in recent years confirms the rise of new challenges to democracy (Bermeo 2016; Waldner and Lust 2018). In parallel with this reversal, countries around the world are developing their own regimes reflecting the social and economic conditions on the ground. These structural factors explain, among other things, the rise of populist leaders who may allow electoral competition but put restrictions on other democratic rights (Levitsky and Way 2010). These leaders are a product of changes in society, not just examples of deviant political behavior.

Chapter 6 dissects the drivers of Tunisian immigration politics before, during and after the 2011 regime change, focusing on the reasons behind restrictive policy continuity in the face of international and civil society efforts to initiate a liberal reform. I show that while foreign policy interests, the role of national identity narratives, and the imperative to secure state power over immigration have remained constants in Tunisian immigration policymaking, the role and weight of domestic factors such as public opinion and civil society activism in public policymaking has fundamentally changed after 2011. Yet, instead of triggering liberal reform in line with the revolutionary spirit, democratization has compelled political elites to put ‘Tunisians first’ and to sideline issues of racism and immigration. Ultimately, the bottom-up and external pressures that emerged after 2011 only led to minor, mostly informal policy changes that have not affected the restrictive core of Tunisia’s immigration regime in the first decade of democratization.