Autocrats and Agitators: Rethinking the Iron Law of Oligarchy in the Tunisian Labor Movement

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: The Politics of Authoritarianism 2

Abstract

In this paper, I critique the iron law of oligarchy’s argument about the structural bias of formal leadership against their members. I do so through a negative case analysis of the General Union of Tunisian Labor (UGTT). For its entire existence until 2011, the UGTT faced not just the usual danger from employers, but employers backed up by a police state. Further, it was an affiliate of the ruling party, if ever a set of union leaders would be incentivized to sell out their members, it would surely be those that served only at the pleasure of dictatorship. However, while the ruling party might have wanted the UGTT to police and control its members it was consistently unable to do so. By showing that union leaders under such circumstances (1) were still subject to some level of rank and file pressure, and (2) welcomed said pressure at least some of the time, rather than consistently trying to demobilize members as the iron law predicts, then it would no longer be possible to sustain the argument that bureaucratic leaderships are systematically biased against their members interests. I argue that UGTT leadership’s saw their long run interest was to balance the pressures they faced from above and below, and that this is exactly what they did.

Author

• Keenan Wilder, Brown University