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Elections and Territorial Inequalities in Post-Revolutionnary Tunisia
By giving a comfortable advance to the Islamist party of Ennahdha (around 37% of the votes), the first free elections of independent Tunisia on the October 23, 2011 have taken by surprise most observers. In this paper, we identify the social and socio-territorial bases of major Tunisian parties through combining quantitative analyses at different scales and field surveys in specific localities.
Although most interpretations have focused on the cultural modernist vs. conservative cleavage, hence obscuring the class cleavage, our analyses highlight very differentiated socio-territorial electoral bases for the main parties and indicate deep social differences in voting behavior between peripheral and core areas, as well as within cities. While allowing for a better interpretation of electoral results, our analyses also provide tools to understand possible evolutions within the Tunisian political space.
Key Words: election, democracy, Tunisia, socioeconomic inequalities