Is it a question of religion? : is it a real cleavage? : an analysis of voting behaviour in 2011 elections in Tunisia and Egypt

Between October 2011 and January 2012, Tunisian and Egyptian citizens experienced their first free, fair and competitive elections to form National Parliaments with constitutional prerogatives. At this occasion, the Islamic parties outperformed in both cases, leaving far behind the other competitors which were mostly the expression of a secular ideology. Such a result revealed the presence of a religious divide that was deemed to be detrimental for the constitution-making process. Yet, Tunisia managed to achieve a democratic installation while Egypt experienced a democratic breakdown following the incompatibility of political divisions between the Islamists parties and their counterparts. The investigation of the causes of this political divide has been a topic vastly discussed among student of comparative politics, democratization and Middle East studies. The present work aims to contribute this debate by testing whether such different outcomes are attributable to different patterns of voting behaviour by recurring to discrete choice modelling on the data furnished by the second Wave of the Arab Barometer project.