Acceso usuarios
Marwa Shalaby, Abdullah Aydogan
To what extent, if any, do the issue priorities of elites overlap with that of the public under competitive authoritarianism? While previous studies examined the overlap of the priorities of elites and ordinary citizens in democracies, our knowledge is still limited when we move beyond these contexts. This article aims to contribute to the democratisation and legislative politics literature by testing congruence of issue priorities under competitive authoritarianism. Analysing more than 10,000 legislative texts from the 2012 Moroccan parliament, we found high levels of congruence between the issue priorities of legislators and citizens, especially in non-legislative activities (i.e. parliamentary questions). Moreover, contrary to earlier studies on clientelism and citizen-elite linkage in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, our results demonstrate a higher correlation between the priorities of the two largest political parties and the mass public, when compared with those parties’ core supporters.
