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Morocco's Elections: The Limits of Limited Reforms
- Journal of Democracy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 19, Number 1, January 2008
- pp. 19-33
- 10.1353/jod.2008.0016
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Morocco’s experience suggests that expanded political liberty, especially freedom of association, can facilitate the emergence of multiple versions of political Islam, reducing the salience of a large, undifferentiated Islamist movement as an umbrella for oppositionist sentiment. The best means for containing potentially destabilizing discontent and promoting moderation among potentially antidemocratic forces are a pluralized political space and iterative free elections. The dilemmas that the king must now resolve in the face of citizen alienation reveal the limits of a strategy of gradual liberalization stage-managed from on high by a pro-Western autocrat.