Voting Islamist or voting secular? An empirical analysis of voting outcomes in Egypt’s “Arab Spring”

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success at the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist versus secular voting. We identify two dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: socioeconomic profile and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence suggesting that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Exploiting the sequential voting setup, we show that later voting stages have not resulted in stronger support for the already winning Islamist parties (i.e., there is no bandwagon effect). Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014