Mahmoud Farag

• Dr. phil.
• Postdoctoral Researcher at Technical University of Darmstadt

Social audit is a powerful social accountability tool. It has led to the conviction of public officials for violating the right to information law in Guatemala, a 50 per cent reduction in the costs of public construction works in Peru, and cancelling an illegal education fee in Ghana. Social audit scrutinises public officials’ decisions and/or ac...

The literature on the Arab world is full of accounts on how authoritarian regimes manipulate the secular-Islamist cleavage to remain in power. This literature, however, has two gaps. First, there is no comparative data on the regional patterns of inclusion and exclusion that characterize regime-opposition relations in the Arab world. Second, studie...

What explains the move of Jordan to a proportional representation (PR) electoral system in 2016 but not in 2012? This is puzzling given the high public pressure for electoral reform in 2011–12 in the wake of the Arab uprisings compared to 2016. Applying veto player theory to Jordan, this article argues that the non-adoption of PR in 2012 and the su...

The power-sharing literature lacks a review that synthesizes its findings, despite spanning over 50 years since Arend Lijphart published his seminal 1969 article ‘Consociational Democracy’. This review article contributes to the literature by introducing and analysing an original dataset, the Power Sharing Articles Dataset, which extracts data on 2...

Preference congruence between masses and elites lies at the heart of the study of democratic representation. In this article, substantiated by a meta-analysis of 154 studies published between 1960 and 2022, we show that the literature on mass–elite congruence has increased exponentially in the past decade. Despite the growing academic interest, the...

There is a vibrant literature on civil war onset and endurance. Previous research has demonstrated that weak states are unlikely to use diversionary measures given the greater likelihood of their defeat. I offer a theoretical contribution to the literature by disentangling why this is particularly the case. Using insights from the Houthi conflict i...

Research-based learning adopts a “learning-by-doing” approach toward teaching research. This article documents the experience of publishing a coauthored article with undergraduate students that grew out of a research-based–learning course at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. In particular, I reflect on the opportunities and challenges of enga...

This article argues for inductive exploration of mass-elite differences in new democracies. Grounded in the "delegate model" of political representation, I do this by studying issue positions and issue salience of masses before turning to elites. The article demonstrates this approach using Tunisia, the only Arab democracy, by analysing survey data...

https://ssir.org/issue/winter_2020

In this guide, we build on our collective understanding that citizen engagement matters in the fight against corruption and provide insights about how organisations might go about designing more effective, sustainable and engaging anti-corruption mechanisms. Based on research into why and how people decide to report corruption and what sustains ini...