Egyptian Parliamentary Speeches, 1924-1952

Abstract

This research program aims at developing a new historical political economy of the Middle East that explains the economic roots of authoritarianism in the region. It theoretically and empirically investigates how demands for democratization could emerge from intra-elite conflicts in an agrarian economy, despite the lack of an industrial bourgeoisie, and how elite politics shift with colonialism and postcolonial regimes. While elite conflicts can lead to democratization, they can alternatively result in autocracy. Furthermore, colonialism and postcolonial military coups could curtail these developments leading to episodes of democratic opening and authoritarian backsliding. The research program tests this by examining elite politics in Egypt, using a novel database on parliament members from 1824 to 2020, and parliamentary speeches in 1866–1882 and 1924–1952. This dataset covers the universe of speeches made in the Egyptian House of Representatives (Majlis al-Nuwwab) in 1924-1952. The dataset was constructed by the data creators from high-quality images of the Arabic-language minutes of the daily meetings of parliament created and made available online by the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, Japan. The data construction consisted of three stages: (1) image segmentation into text block images, (2) implementing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the corpus of text block images using Google Document AI, and (3) extraction of speeches and speaker names using OpenAI. The dataset is at the speech level. It provides the following information for each speech: text body of the speech, speaker's full name, politician ID (including whether speaker is member of parliament or minister), date of meeting, parliamentary session, and parliamentary cycle. While most of these speeches are made by members of parliament and ministers, other speakers include high-level bureaucrats and members of the public who presented petitions to the parliament