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About the Project

The MENA-PERC project is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant and based at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. The project has launched in January 2023 and will run through 2027. It investigates the individual-level determinants of elite conflict focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, and in particular on Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Project abstract

Whether political elites accommodate or exclude their rivals during regime crises can be a matter of life and death. Following the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), elite compromise sustained a fragile democratic transition in Tunisia, while elite conflict triggered a coup in Egypt. Tunisia has since seen three democratic elections, but has experienced democraric breakdown in 2021. Why do elites in some cases pursue accommodation while they push for excluding their rivals in others?

MENA-PERC proposes an answer to this puzzle: the degrees of asymmetry and polarization between regime coalitions and their challengers shape elite preferences for accommodation or exclusion. These preferences, in turn, determine the type of regime emerging from crisis. Regime coalitions comprise elites who provide crucial links to social constituencies and whose collective support stabilizes the regime. The project theorizes the role of these actors, linking macrolevel outcomes in terms of regime types to evidence on the microlevel of individual elites.

The project draws on evidence from 13 regime spells in three MENA countries across more than a century. Regime coalitions are identified by focusing on members of parliament in Egypt (1882-present), Tunisia (1907-present), and Turkey (1908-present), observing processes of elite change empirically based on individual-level data on these elite members and leveraging these data in a mixed-methods design. Second, the project traces causal mechanism through elite surveys and in-depth fieldwork examining authoritarian consolidation in contemporary Egypt, democratization and democratic breakdown in Tunisia, and democratic backsliding in Turkey. The project makes three contributions. It theorizes why elites accommodate or exclude during regime crises; it pioneers an innovative way of testing this model by observing elite change over time; and it traces the model’s causal mechanisms in ongoing processes of regime change.

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Vacancies

Postdoctoral Researcher

We are recruiting a postdoctoral researcher (2 years with the possibility of extension for a further 3 years) for the ERC-funded project Political Elites and Regime Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Accommodation or Exclusion (MENA-PERC), located at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy.

• Call (in Italian)
• UNOFFICIAL English translation

You have...

• ...a PhD in Political Science and a promising early publication record;
• ...excellent command of spoken and written English and working knowledge of Arabic, Turkish, or French; even better if you also speak Italian;
• ...an interest in mixed-methods research on political elites combining fieldwork in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey with quantitative data analysis including survey and experimental research;
• ...advanced knowledge of qualitative and/or quantitative social science research methods and the motivation to deepen your knowledge of the type of methods you are less familiar with;
• ...fieldwork experience in the MENA and/or knowledge of statistical programming in R.

You will...

• ...contribute to the further development of the project and support the design of its individual components;
• ...collect data, including through fieldwork missions to Egypt, Tunisia, and/or Turkey;
• ...manage and analyze bot qualitative and quantitative data and co-author scientific publications with other members of the research team;
• ...support the PhD students who will be part of the team as they develop their independent projects.

We offer...

• ...a competitive salary of up to EUR 26,500 p/a net, in addition to funding for research related travel;
• ...the opportunity to shape the direction of the project and to further develop your research agenda and publication record as part of the project and individually;
• ... dynamic intellectual environment in the project team as well as Scuola Sant’Anna more generally.

DEADLINE: 28 February 2023, online interviews in mid-March

Apply

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Project Manager (tecnologo)

We are recruiting a project manager (2 years with possibility of extension) for the ERC-funded project Political Elites and Regime Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Accommodation or Exclusion (MENA-PERC), located at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy.

• Call (in Italian)

You have...

• ...a PhD in Political Science;
• ...excellent command of spoken and written English and Italian, and working knowledge of Arabic, Turkish, or French;
• ...advanced knowledge of quantitative social science research methods and R programming skills;
• ...experience in social science research, ideally concerning the Middle East and North Africa.

You will...

• ...contribute to the further development of the project and support the design of its individual components;
• ...support the PI in managing project activities and interface with the administration at Sant'Anna;
• ...collect, manage, and analyze quantitative data and co-author scientific publications with other members of the research team;
• ...support the PhD students which are part of the team as they develop their independent projects.

We offer...

• ...a competitive salary on the D5 level, in addition to funding for research related travel;
• ...the opportunity to shape the direction of the project and to further develop your research agenda and publication record as part of the project and individually;
• ... dynamic intellectual environment in the project team as well as Scuola Sant’Anna more generally.

DEADLINE: 2 February 2023

Apply