“Egyptian Revolution”

A Revolution in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

Since January 25th Revolution, political arena in Egypt is getting more and more chaotic, from which emerged the two opposing political tendencies: street politics and electoral politics. This article focuses on the interaction between these two opponents, and analyzes their political behaviors. The data used is obtained by four opinion surveys conveyed by the authors in 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012 during the Revolution, especially the fourth opinion survey in 2012. Using this data, this article clarified the appearance of ‘new electoral participants’ mainly in urban areas through the democratization process since 2011, and argued that their highly fluid electoral behavior contributed in the electoral winning of Islamic parties.
This article also argued that the fluidity of new urban electoral participants is in relation with the vulnerability of Egyptian urban society that is reflected in the nature of poverty. In effect, Egypt has two types of poverty, permanent poverty prevailing in rural areas, especially Upper Egypt, and temporal poverty in urban areas. These two types of poverty have led the urban and rural citizens to take different political behavior, although they both face globalization.