The Local Governance Mechanisms in Emerging Democracies: A Case Study of Tunisia

• In Event: Politics Goes Local in the Middle East

Abstract

Despite implementing comprehensive decentralization laws, emerging democracies often achieve limited success in making local governance more inclusive for citizens and elected stakeholders. In emerging democracies do the partisanship ties between the elected mayors and appointed bureaucrats and the network ties developed under the prior regime influence the patterns of cooperative governance and participatory decision-making at local councils? I answer this question through conducting a case study within Tunisia. MENA region is often neglected among the comparative studies focusing on decentralization, which limits the ability of scholars to understand whether decentralization reforms lead to changes in the mechanisms of local governance and citizen engagement (Clark, 2018).

The mechanisms of cooperation between the local and central governments in emerging democracies often carry high levels of transaction costs due to the “legacies” of the former regime based on hierarchical governance (Illner, 2003). The opening up of the political space creates mutually advantageous relations among the bureaucratic and political networks to profit from such situations through voluntary networks that internalize the externality (Buchanan and Tullock, 1990, p: 90). The social capital accumulated between these distinct entities enable them to establish these networks. Following Putnam (1993, p:167)’s framework, I define social capital as the features of relationships, including trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of interactions. The sources of social capital can be divided in two categories: at the level of central government, such as bureaucrats and MPs, and at the local level, including civil society, council members and local administrative units. Following their political interests mayors may constitute these two forms as substitutable goods and prefer referring to the central level, as they tend to increase the scope of their own authority over resources instead of establishing transparent and participatory mechanisms, utilizing “sneaky” methods of redistribution such as building airports, stadiums or malls that benefit certain interest groups rather than transparent and efficient methods that benefit the society at large (Alston et al, 2018; Coate and Morris, 1995, McGinnis and V. Ostrom, 1999). The employment of such methods can provide the mayors with a comparative advantage in service delivery (Hicken, 2011; Matsumoto, 2009; p:303). However, they may exclude other stakeholders from the decision-making process.
Despite implementing the Municipal Law in 2018, the local governance in Tunisia is struggling with mass resignations of local council members, many of whom cite the non-cooperative structure of the local councils. Clientelism continues to be a dominant feature of the local governance structure, limiting the ability of disadvantaged communities from accessing the services, and socio-economic problems erode the trust among Tunisians in democracy (Benstead, 2019;GLD, 2016; Meddeb, 2018). I evaluate on the mechanisms that produce divergent inclinations to cooperate among mayors and their implications for citizen/civil society engagement on local governance based on a set of qualitative data collected between May and August 2019 among 39 randomly and purposefully sampled municipalities within the governorate of El Kef, Kairouan, Sfax, Gabes, Tunis and Monastir producing 64 interviews with mayors, city council members, civil society and a governor. The findings suggest that partisanship and ideological ties constitute the most substantive factor perpetuating hierarchical relations among the elected officials and political as well as administrative divisions of the central government, as they can enable mayors to engage in “elite capture” through benefiting on large scale projects at the expense of cooperative modes of governance requiring a consensus. I argue that despite the volatile electoral environment in Tunisia partisan and ideological bondages provide the voluntary networks that internalize the externality deriving from the transaction costs through exchange of favors or the pursuit of political advantage (Buchanan and Tullock, 1990, p: 90; Shleifer and Vishny, 1993). However, such network relations can be detrimental for the participatory democracy and the meaning of democratic citizenship (V. Ostrom, 1997).
The ties of mayors to the First Republic Regime do not generate much exclusion, as they do not generate the political capital sufficient enough for mayors to close down upon the vertical relations. The political capital derived from the prior regime is built upon weak foundations based on a coercive rather than a voluntary framework. I supplement the findings through examining the instances of resignations from the local councils and applications to the Administrative Court based on partisanship affiliations, which I will undertake as a part of my fieldwork in Summer 2020.

Author

• Salih Yasun, Indiana University