Convergent (il)liberalism in the Mediterranean? Some notes on Egyptian (post-)authoritarianism and Italian (post-)democracy

This paper explores the hypothesis of a convergence between ‘backsliding’ European liberal democracies and the ‘pseudo-liberalization’ of Middle Eastern authoritarian systems by considering the similarities, beyond the well-known differences, between Italy and Egypt. We suggest that standard indicators of regime type (e.g. Polity IV Authority Index) fail to capture important trends in the evolution of both political power and resistance, and therefore miss potentially important transnational characteristics in the evolution of regime types.