Bullets over ballots: Islamist groups, the state and electoral violence in Egypt and Morocco

This article is concerned with state-sponsored electoral violence in liberalized autocracies. The first section of the paper identifies a number of variables that can help explain the decision calculus of authoritarian incumbents to deploy force against strong electoral challengers. The second section then examines these propositions with reference to Egypt and Morocco. Drawing on recent parliamentary elections in both countries the article questions why, despite facing the challenge of political Islam, the two regimes differed so markedly in their willingness to manipulate the polls by recourse to violence. Whilst the Egyptian authorities decided to abrogate all pretence of peaceful elections in favour of violent repression against the Muslim Brotherhood candidates and sympathizers, no such tactics were deployed by the ruling elite in Morocco. We suggest that three principal factors influenced the regimes' response to this electoral challenge: (1) the centrality of the elected institution to authoritarian survival; (2) the availability of alternative electioneering tools; and (3) the anticipated response of the international community. The article concludes by suggesting that in order to understand better when and how states deploy violence in elections, we need to focus on a more complex set of factors rather than simply on the electoral potency of key opposition challengers or the authoritarian nature of the state

Understanding and enhancing future infrastructure resiliency: a socio-ecological approach

The resilience of any system, human or natural, centres on its capacity to adapt its structure, but not necessarily its function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. In the long term, therefore, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving a system's ability to resist an immediate threat or to recover to a stable past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer-term system adaptation in their understanding of resilience. Instead, a short-term, stable system (STSS) perspective on resilience is prevalent. This paper seeks to identify and problematise this perspective, presenting research based on the development of a heuristic 'scenario-episode' tool to address, and challenge, it in the context of United Kingdom infrastructure resilience. The aim is to help resilience practitioners to understand better the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural, malicious threats

State Mandates, Housing Elements, and Low-income Housing Production

In order to create low-income housing opportunities and mitigate exclusionary zoning, in 1968 Congress mandated that municipalities receiving comprehensive planning funds must create a housing element. In tandem, many states mandated that municipal housing elements must accommodate low-income housing needs. After examining empirical research for California, Florida, Illinois, and Minnesota, this review found aspirational success because those states rewarded the municipal planning process. In order to increase low-income housing, this review argues for state housing policy reform. Under US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s revised fair housing rule, which requires an assessment of local data, states can no longer ignore the exclusionary behavior of municipalities