Articles

Holger Albrecht, Dina Bishara, Kevin Koehler (2026). Costly Commitments in Authoritarian Regime Formation: Evidence from Tunisia. Political Research Quarterly (forthcoming). Abstract: This article theorizes costly commitments in autocracies. Populist leaders who ascend to power through anti-establishment appeals confront a strategic dilemma between consolidating winning coalitions and maintaining the loyalty of their selectorate. Rooted in rhetoric that delegitimizes political parties, such leaders face constraints to regime institutionalization as their popular base remains resistant to formal party structures. Costly commitments occur where autocratizing leaders commit to their ideological messages to sustain popular support, which compromises the formation of ruling parties as instruments of elite cooptation. The 2021 executive takeover in Tunisia illustrates this dilemma emerging from incompatible incentives to commit to ideological narratives and forming a ruling party. We adopt a multi-method approach to discuss contemporary Tunisian politics as a theory-generating case study. To this aim, we leverage qualitative interviews with party officials, legislative election candidates, and members of Saied’s electoral campaign along with data from an original, nationally representative phone survey in Tunisia, and available public opinion data. Following Kais Saied’s move against the democratic order, elites engaged in party initiatives in support of his political project. Yet, Kais Saied rebuffed these advances, choosing to rely on the popular anti-party sentiment that had contributed to his rise to power.
Berker Kavasoglu and Kevin Koehler (2026). Social Polarization and Electoral Incentives for Islamist De-moderation: Evidence from Turkish Parliamentary Debates. Democratization (online first). Abstract: The prospect of religious parties capturing power raises fundamental questions about the fate of secular state institutions. A prominent argument holds that participation in competitive elections incentivizes religious parties to moderate and set aside anti-systemic goals in order to maximize votes. We argue that deep-seated social polarization along the religious–secular cleavage fundamentally alters electoral incentives: when polarization is high, intensifying competition shifts the vote-maximizing strategy from centrist, broad appeals to religion-based appeals. Using a unique corpus of legislative interventions from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), we scale legislators’ positions on the religious–secular dimension. Exploiting cross-district variation in polarization and legislator-level differences in electoral vulnerability, we demonstrate that increasing exposure to electoral competition prompts representatives from polarized districts to adopt stronger Islamist appeals. Thus, the link between competitive elections and the incentives of religious party elites to accommodate secular institutional constraints is contingent upon societal polarization along the religious–secular divide.
Kevin Koehler (2023). Breakdown by Disengagement: Tunisia’s Transition from Representative Democracy. Political Research Exchange 5(1). Abstract: On 25 July 2021, Tunisian president Kais Saied suspended parliament, lifted the immunity of its members, and dismissed the prime minister and the government. Tunisia’s post-revolutionary democracy had thus succumbed to a populist president within two years from his electoral victory in the context of widespread popular disillusionment with the entire political class. This article draws on the work of Peter Mair, in particular his analysis in Ruling the Void (2013), to understand democratic breakdown in Tunisia. I argue that political dynamics in Tunisia diverge significantly from the standard model of democratic backsliding. Instead, I conceptualize the Tunisian case as breakdown by disengagement. The relative success of Tunisian democratization after the 2014 elite compromise paradoxically fuelled a crisis of representation: The main political camps lost popular support, populist challengers were strengthened, and citizens disengaged from conventional politics in ever greater numbers. Popular disengagement and elite withdrawal into a sphere of competition protected by the elite pact gave rise to a void at the heart of Tunisian democracy. While Kais Saied’s anti-party project proposed to fill this void with an alternative political system built from the bottom up, there is growing evidence of authoritarian retrenchment instead of democratic renewal.

Working Papers

Kevin Koehler, Camille Abescat, Théo Blanc (2026). After Democracy: Autocratization and the Revaluation of Political Capital.

Abstract: How are authoritarian regime coalitions constituted after democratic breakdown? Research on autocratization has focused on how elected leaders erode institutional constraints, but has paid less attention to how new authoritarian orders generate and stabilize elite support once power-sharing arrangements collapse. This article advances a theory of political-capital revaluation to explain how autocratizing incumbents renew regime coalitions under conditions of narrowing inclusion. Rather than merely reallocating positions within a shrinking elite, autocratization transforms the opportunity structures through which political influence is attained. Because political capital is accumulated through long-term specialization, elites enter authoritarian transitions with unequal portfolios and unequal capacities to adapt. Revaluation therefore shifts relative advantage within the elite field, disproportionately benefiting actors whose resources align with the new rules. We test this argument in post-2021 Tunisia, a critical case combining a decade of competitive party-based democracy with rapid executive consolidation. Drawing on 87 elite interviews, original data on more than 900 candidate profiles, and district-level returns from the 2022 legislative elections, we show that electoral reforms elevated individualized, locally embedded capital while reducing the relative returns to party-mediated careers, generating geographically uneven advantages and a cohort of elites structurally aligned with the emerging authoritarian order.

Kevin Koehler, Dina Bishara, Holger Albrecht (2026). Authoritarian Legacies and Autocratic Consolidation in Tunisia, presented at SPSA 2026.

Abstract: Do authoritarian legacies shape authoritarian consolidation? Prevailing accounts of autocratization emphasize the role of party-based state capture and polarization as mechanisms for sustaining electoral support, while research on authoritarian legacies focuses primarily on their effects on democratic development. We argue that in unconsolidated democracies with shallow party systems, democratic breakdown can trigger a realignment rooted in demobilization and the reemergence of autocratic legacies. Tunisia offers unique leverage for this argument. While Tunisia’s Kais Saied rose to power as a populist outsider in democratic elections in 2019, he staged a self-coup in 2021 and proceeded to dismantle Tunisia’s fragile post-2011 democracy. In 2024, he was reelected in blatantly uncompetitive elections. Building on the literature on authoritarian legacies, we argue that Saied’s support base has shifted from a populist to an authoritarian coalition rooted in legacy networks rather than mass mobilization. Leveraging original district-level data from the 2019 and 2024 presidential elections, we trace how Saied’s support evolved under conditions of widespread demobilization and increasing autocratic restrictions on competition. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that districts with stronger authoritarian legacies responded differently to the shock of democratic breakdown in 2021, exhibiting significantly less electoral demobilization and disproportionate increases in support for the incumbent between 2019 and 2024. These findings demonstrate that, in the absence of hegemonic party-building, authoritarian consolidation can draw on residual autocratic infrastructures to generate electoral support. More broadly, the article highlights how authoritarian legacies not only constrain democratic development but can also provide the organizational foundations for its reversal.