Here's a warning that despite the early success of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the hard part will be surviving the initial elections. Whoever designs the elections can control the outcome:
it serves us well to recall two instances when Arab regimes under duress used the guise of electoral reform to maintain control.
As Christopher Alexander briefly described, Tunisia's autocracy faced its most serious challenge at the end of the 1980s but survived, in part, through electoral manipulation. After taking power in the wake of a political crisis, Ben Ali rewrote the electoral code in advance of legislative elections in 1989. The new system split the Islamist opposition over whether to participate and enticed elements of the secular opposition to compete in single party lists that were built around the ruling party's patronage networks. These so-called reforms helped Ben Ali to control the parliament over the next two decades.
In the case of Jordan, the monarchy regrouped after a series of economic crises in the late 1980s and neutered an assertive parliament by instituting the single non-transferable vote system before elections in 1993. The new law, which was issued by royal decree outside of the political process, dramatically curtailed the ability of Islamists and opposition parties to garner votes in a society dominated by kinship and personal relationships. The "one vote" provision has helped ensure pliant parliaments ever since, most notably after last November's elections when a new "sub-district" system was introduced.
