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Rallying around the “regime’s” flag? Exploring attitudinal backlashes in post-mobilizations Algeria and Iraq
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DOI：10.1080/13510347.2026.2655211.png)
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Abstract
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When anti-system protests denounce political parties as complicit in perpetuating corruption and authoritarian rule, citizens’ identification with traditional parties typically collapses. Yet, following the second wave of the Arab Uprisings (2019–2021), Algeria and Iraq exhibited sharply divergent trajectories. While Iraq experienced a decline in party identification, Algeria registered a sharp increase, including among parties that had been targeted by the protests. Drawing on data from the Arab Barometer, this article examines how large-scale mobilizations impact political attitudes across two distinct regime contexts. Results show that in Algeria, the mobilizations triggered an attitudinal backlash, reinforcing regime-supportive attitudes among previously party-unaffiliated citizens and those with limited civil-society embeddedness. In Iraq, by contrast, protest participation fostered political detachment and eroded partisan identification. This pattern points to a process of reactive politicization, whereby segments of the population aligned with traditional parties not out of ideological affinity but as a conservative mechanism to preserve the status quo in the face of anti-system contention. Conversely, in Iraq party identification declined uniformly, reflecting the fragmented nature of its political system. The findings shed light on how regime structure may shape the attitudinal consequences of protests.
Keywords:
Party identification
social movement outcome
attitudinal backlash
authoritarianism
hybrid regime
Iraq
Algeria
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