Routledge Handbook on Political Parties in the Middle East and North Africa

This comprehensive Handbook analyses the political parties and party systems across the Middle East and North Africa. Providing an in-depth, empirically grounded and novel study of political parties, the volume focuses on a region where they have been traditionally and often erroneously dismissed.

The book is divided into five sections, examining:

• the trajectories of Islamist, Salafi, leftist, liberal, nationalist, and personalistic parties drawing from different countries;
• the role political parties play in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries;
• the centrality of political parties in democratic or democratising settings;
• the relationship between parties and specific social constituencies, ranging from women to youth to tribes and sects; and
• the policy positions of parties on a number of issues, including neo-liberal economics, identity, foreign policy and the role of violence.

This wide-ranging and systematic analysis is a key resource for students and scholars interested in party politics, democratization and authoritarianism, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780429269219

Francesco Cavatorta is professor of political science and director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Africa and the Middle East (CIRAM) at Laval University in Quebec, Canada. His research focuses on dynamics of democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and social movements in the Arab world.

Lise Storm is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics and Director of the new Center for Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on democratisation, political parties, and the state of democracy in the Middle East and North Africa.

Valeria Resta completed her PhD at the University of Milan and is an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and at Bocconi University. Her research focuses on the functioning of political parties in authoritarian and transitional settings of the Arab World. Her latest works have appeared in Politics and Religion and in the Italian Political Science Review.