Socio-economic voter profile and motives for Islamist support in Morocco

Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of electoral support for the Islamist Party in Morocco in the 2002 and 2007 elections. It differentiates between the clientelistic, grievance and horizontal network type of supporters. We disentangle these profiles empirically on the basis of the role of education, wealth and exclusion for Islamist votes. We find no evidence of the clientelistic profile, but a shift from grievance in 2002 to a horizontal network profile in 2007. World Values Survey individual level data are used as a robustness check, yielding similar results. Qualitative evidence on a changing mobilization pattern of the party between 2002 and 2007 supports our conclusions

A conditional offer: The strategies employed by in the field of power in Morocco to control the press space

International audienceThis work aims to provide a sociological analysis of the ways in which control over the press has evolved in Morocco, primarily since the 1990s. It demonstrates how a twofold transformation occurred to replace the direct and repressive methods of control employed in the post-independence period (1956) and right through to the early 1990s. First there was investment by non-partisan entrepreneurs in the media sector, developing their economic control of the press. As in other countries, economic instruments have been used to restructure the press landscape. Secondly, the context evolved and there was less visible use of the legal tools available to those in power. The dominant stakeholders have adapted to the changes that have taken place in media since the early 1990s (internationalization, digitization, etc.) in order to maintain their hold over the sector, and minimize internal and external criticism