Political elites and non-party ministers

During political transitions, elite struggles over who is included in the emerging architecture of power are critical to determining the (in-)stability of political regimes (Skocpol 1985; Tilly 1993). The existing literature has extensively discussed the problem of how it is possible to mitigate the damaging effects of elite struggles – including the use of violence by political elites – on social and economic development (North et al. 2013;

Bueno De Mesquita et al. 2003). Incumbents engaging in co-option will resort to providing financial and political incentives that benefit restive rent-seeking elites (Goldsmith 2001; Arriola 2009). As long as the rents extracted from a peaceful setting exceed those extracted from a conflict situation, those elites will find it more convenient to cooperate with the incumbents than to defect (North et al. 2013: 6-7).

Among the incentives that incumbents use to secure the loyalty of elites are inclusion in state positions within the government, the bureaucracy or the military (De Waal 2015).

Outsourcing of state-like functions to para-state groups, creation of informal institutions operating in parallel with formal state bodies and appropriation of economic resources belonging to the state, are also common. The expansion of the role of government into society since World War II has resulted in a dramatic increase in ministerial posts throughout the world (Blondel 1985: 2). By constituting an easily accessible resource, ministerial positions allow politicians to redistribute material and symbolic rents from the centre to the periphery, strengthening the ties with their regional and political constituencies. Providing broad government representation to multiple elite groups may ultimately increase the size of the cabinet through the creation new ministerial portfolios, but is also found to negatively affect government performance (Haass and Ottmann 2017).

Because of their importance, ministerial positions are not allocated randomly, but according to criteria that typically respond to specific party affiliations, ethnopolitical attributes, regional origin and gender (Altman 2000; Arriola 2009). The importance of each criterion varies depending on the political environment in which they are embedded:

in a government dominated by a single party, ethnopolitical or regional identities may determine the different allocation of ministerial positions. In other contexts, political parties encapsulate multiple interests and ethnoregional identities, and inter-party dynamics are therefore often used as a criterion to explain cabinet formation and composition in both parliamentary and presidential regimes (Amorim Neto 2006;

Cheibub 2007).

Yet not all ministers are selected based on these criteria. Non-party ministers are increasingly influential actors in a variety of political systems across the world (Amorim Neto 2006; Lee 2018; McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2015; Schleiter 2015). In Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, non-affiliated technocrats have taken office as heads of government, while others occupy cabinet portfolios without being members of a political party. Likewise, technocratic governments consisting entirely of independent ministers have been appointed in the wake of acute political or economic crises. Their selection is said to reflect a weakening democratic process, which fails to enjoy electoral legitimacy and where their appointment alienates voters from democratic institutions (Runciman 2018).

Non-party ministers are described as “cabinet members who do not act on behalf of a party in government” (Schleiter 2013: 35). Unlike technocrats who are defined by the lack of political experience and by the technical expertise they bring to the government (McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2015: 657), non-party ministers include all cabinet members without a recognised party affiliation, such as figures hailing from social organisations like trade unions or human rights groups or having held public office under the banner of a political party before their current appointment. Despite not having technocratic competence, these ministers selected from outside the political parties may be acting in a personal capacity, responding directly to the head of state or the head of government.

When referring to ministers, the terms ‘non-party’ and ‘independent’ will be used as synonyms in this study.

These figures have typically attracted little scholarly interest compared to other political actors. Academic literature has long focused on party governments, producing limited theoretical work on the subject of non-party ministers and non-party governments (Rose 1969; Blondel 1985; Blondel and Cotta 2000). Non-party members of the cabinet are therefore treated as a residual category, whose profile is often associated with technocrats, with the latter term typically highlighting the technical competencies that justify the appointment of a minister or of an entire government from outside the parties (Cotta and Verzichelli 2002: 145). The use of the term ‘technocrat’, however, has been conflated to describe all ministers appointed according to their technical competencies, creating some theoretical confusion over the exact definition of this concept (Camau and Geisser 2003).

Over the past decade, however, academic research has increasingly addressed the figure of the non-party ministers, with a strong focus on European, Latin American and Asian cabinets (Amorim Neto 2006; Schleiter 2013; Lee 2018). Incumbents are typically believed to appoint independents in contexts where the executive enjoys a strong negotiating power compared to the legislative assembly (Bermeo, 2003; Amorim Neto, 2006). These include an under-institutionalised party system (a common element in countries undergoing democratic transitions), complex technical policy challenges requiring specific expertise, or incumbents capable of imposing their rule over the parliamentary assembly (Schleiter 2013: 35). Despite the increasingly technocratic nature of several governments across the region (Kenner 2010), academic studies have typically overlooked the role of non-party ministers in Africa and the Middle East or explained it as a result of exogenous or contingent circumstances. The involvement of technocratic

elites in politics was often related to changing authoritarian techniques (Heydemann 2007), the implementation of neoliberal economic policies (Bogaert 2013) and political scapegoating by shrewd politicians (Thurston 2018). At the same time, inter-elite struggles over access to power have gone hand in hand with an increase in the number of non-party ministers appointed in cabinet. How can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory trends in political systems where cabinet formation is typically understood in terms of patronage and clientelism?

To address these puzzles, this study situates the rise in the appointment of non-party ministers in Tunisia within changing logics of polarisation and consensus. In Tunisia, ministerial positions allocated to independents began to increase in the early 2000s, although they became leading political actors only after Ben Ali’s demise and the emergence of the democratic institutions. Today, they continue to account for a large share of total cabinet appointments. However, despite an abundance of studies that explore the nature of political elites in Tunisia (Buehler and Ayari 2018; Camau and Geisser 2003; Charfi 1989; Erdle 2010; Erdle, in Perthes 2004; Heurtaux 2014; Kchouk 2017; Latif-Béatrix 1988), non-affiliated cabinet members have largely remained at the margins of scholarly analysis. Rather, attention has more often focused on Tunisia’s democratising trajectory, the role of Islam in Tunisian politics, and the country’s electoral performance (see, among others, Cavatorta and Merone 2013; Gana, Van Hamme and Ben Rabah 2012, 2016; Stepan 2012).

In the following section, I examine the profile of all members of the cabinet appointed between 1987 and 2017, before discussing the incentives informing the selection of non-party ministers under Ben Ali and under the new democratic regime. The data, collected using local media sources, archival resources and other publicly available documentation, provide a monthly breakdown of all 404 Tunisian cabinet ministers and secretaries of state since 1987. It should be noted, however, that cabinet ministers constitute only a subset of a country’s political elites, and that socio-political affiliations and characteristics also influence appointments in other sectors, including the local administration, national authorities and public companies. While these data do not allow determining whether the same considerations also applied to other domains, the selection of ministerial elites is typically viewed as replicating the dynamics regulating how key political groups are included or excluded from ruling coalitions (Bratton and Van De Walle 1994; Bueno De Mesquita et al. 2003).