Dissertation

My dissertation asks why revolutions that promise a more egalitarian allocation of national wealth so often end in restored hierarchy, and it treats the persistence of old-regime elites as the reason the promise goes unmet. Taking Tunisia's 2011 revolution, which brought down Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and set off the Arab Spring, as its main case, the project advances a theory of elite survival to revolution that speaks to the burgeoning literature on revolutionary outcomes and to the revived interest in elite persistence. I then trace how the revolution reshaped inequality, and how inequality aversion made citizens willing to accept a militarized correction of the country's trajectory well before the rise of Kais Saied.

The first part of the project rests on data I built. I assembled a dataset on Ben Ali's last political cohort, covering the ruling party's central committee and both chambers of parliament, and traced each member's activity across sectors before and after 2011. I mapped Tunisia's elite networks at the top 0.1 percent between 2010 and 2021 from relational data in government and corporate sources, which lets me test how those networks hold up under attack. I turned the appendix of a fact-finding commission's report into an incident-level dataset and applied a regression discontinuity in time to measure how members of the security apparatus behaved after the decapitation of the regime, reading them as non-diversifiers who stood to lose everything if revolutionary mobilization escalated further, and I used archival material from an investigation hearing to interpret the findings. During field research I obtained an internal dataset of the authoritarian successor party, Nidaa Tounes, which shows how power diversification shaped candidate sorting and helped make the party one of the most central nodes in the elite network.

The second part turns to inequality and to what citizens made of it. I use census data to follow spatial inequality across the transition, and because figures from the authoritarian period are unreliable, I apply a synthetic control strategy to longitudinal satellite imagery running from the mid-1990s to 2022 in order to recover the causal effect of the revolution. I then document persistent and rising dissatisfaction with government performance on inequality reduction, show with 2014 voting data how elites from the historically privileged coast resisted redistribution, and draw on the World Values Survey fielded in mid-2019, before Saied's election, to show that inequality aversion drove popular acceptance of a militarized coup.