The Egyptian Political Party System

What was the role of socio-economic factors in the change of the political party system and what was the impact of the change on these factors? This paper will tackle the impacts of the Egyptian revolution of 25th January 2011, specifically the socio-economic impact that the change in the party system brought. According to Huckshorn, a political party is “autonomous group of citizens having the purpose of making nominations and contesting elections in the hope of gaining control over governmental power through the capture of public offices and the organization of government.” there are several forms of party systems. Before the revolution, Egypt was practicing a “single-party” system; it had placed bans on opposition groups such as religious

If we consider revolution as defined by Jeff Goodwin “revolutions entail not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic and/or cultural change”, we can consider revolutions as a form of modernisation.

In Seymour Martin Lipset’s book “Political Man”, he argues that “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy”, he believed that as the economy developed, social changes occurred, driving the political system towards a democracy. However, this was written and argued in 1959, hence it is considered outdated as we now have several “well-to-do” nations that do not sustain democracy, such as

In societies where there is a rapid social transformation, the revolution tends to be unstable and often violent, and this means it is more likely to have negative outcomes. He further argued that positive outcomes are only likely if the change is gradual. This can be applied to the Egyptian situation, the change in the party system was very rapid, two weeks and three days cannot be considered a gradual change, therefore it can be argued that Egypt’s negative outcomes is due to it’s rapid development and change.

Dietrich Ruechemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens argue that economic inequality and the social stratification of a society is what influences the country’s regime and it’s drive to modernisation and political development. However, it can be argued they have an western-oriented point of view, as one can argue that with strong social stratification, there is no political opportunity to influence a country’s regime. On the other hand, this study will provide evidence that suggest that inequality was indeed present before the change in economic