This dissertation investigates the multidimensional nature of party-movement interactions in the context of the second wave of Arab Uprisings across Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Situated at the intersection of social movement studies and party politics, the thesis challenges the traditional separation between institutional and extra-institutional political action, arguing that parties and movements are best understood as actors that mutually shape each other's strategies, identities, and trajectories. Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon are selected through a comparative design that varies regime type and party-regime relations while holding constant key features of the second Arab Uprisings, addressing a significant geographical blind spot in a field dominated by Western-centric evidences.
These claims are examined across three research papers that collectively adopt a multilevel analytical framework, integrating macro-, meso-, and micro-level dimensions of the party-movement nexus. Overarching findings demonstrate that anti-system mobilizations do not produce uniform political effects. Rather, their consequences for partisan alignments, discursive strategies, and individual engagement are decisively conditioned by the structural relationship between parties and the regime within which they operate. In centralized authoritarian contexts, protest cycles can paradoxically reinforce regime-supportive realignments among segments of the public, as regime-linked parties function as perceived anchors of stability. In fragmented, patronage-based systems, the same protest dynamics tend to accelerate partisan disengagement and broader political disaffection.
Furthermore, findings highlight that parties are not passive recipients of movement pressure but strategic actors that selectively adapt to anti-system contention. In fact, entrenched sectarian parties can exploit discursive opportunities generated by protest cycles, repositioning their narratives and forging new alliances in ways that translate into concrete electoral behaviour – though the extent and selectivity of such adaptation vary considerably across parties and depend on their positioning within the government-opposition divide. This divide, rather than ideological or socio-cultural cleavages alone, also emerges as the most consequential factor at the individual level. Dual political engagement – i.e., participating in protests while identify with a political party – is driven primarily by partisan loyalty, suggesting that anti-system mobilization may functions as an additional repertoire through which existing partisan commitments are expressed rather than dissolved.
Collectively, these findings contribute to party politics and social movement scholarship by demonstrating that mechanisms widely theorized in consolidated democracies – backlash dynamics, discursive opportunities, and hybrid participation – are clearly operative in the MENA region, while their manifestations are shaped by regime-specific institutional logics. Ultimately, the dissertation shows that the relationship between movements and party politics is inherently multidimensional: protests can simultaneously challenge, reinforce, and reconfigure partisan structures, depending on the institutional and political environment in which it unfolds.
