During a televised interview with the London-based Middle East Broadcast Corporation, Yemeni president Ali Abd Allah Salih rationalized his plans for his son Ahmad’s succession by claiming that another republic, the United States, had provided the example: George W. had inherited his position from his father, former president George Bush. President Salih was then asked whether he was aware of the U.S. electoral process by which President Bill Clinton had succeeded the elder Bush and then won a second four-year term. Salih laughed and said that Clinton was a muhallil, or legal facilitator. According to Islamic law, or sharı‘a, for a divorced woman to remarry her ex-husband, she must first marry a muhallil, an interim husband who makes possible the return of the actual one. In this view, the Clinton presidency amounted to a mere formality, enabling junior’s succession and putting the Bush family back in the White House (MBC interview, February 2001 [facsimile transcript]; Ali Muhsin Hamid, private communication). As analogies go, the comment was rather weak, casting Clinton as the stooge or dupe, a political facilitator whose own role amounted to getting screwed in the process of the Bush family’s reascension to power. Yet to Yemenis, Salih’s impertinence concealed a more serious matter. As one Yemeni diplomat complained, “We fought hard to overthrow the monarchy. And now the republics are becoming monarchies. Worse, some of the monarchies are better than our republics!â€? The easy transition from father to son in Syria, from Hafiz al-Asad to his son Bashshar, established the precedent, signaling to other aging fathers in the region that their sons too could assume power and “screw the people.â€?¹

Salih’s sarcastic comment may have sparked ire or disapproval among some Yemenis, but it also cast aspersions on American democracy, reversing the conventional assumption whereby a country such as the United States is unquestionably democratic while a country such as Yemen is at best arguably so. The statement thus invites questioning anew what democracy means and how scholars recognize it in particular countries.

This essay centers on three principle concerns. First, it shows how a minimalist, procedural definition of democracy as contested elections, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter (1976 [1942]) and now taken for granted in many areas of political science and in policy-making circles, is deeply problematic and in need of revision. My claim here is that the stripped-down notion of democracy as contested elections — represented by influential scholars such as Adam Przeworski (1991) — deflects attention from important forms of democratic practice that take place in authoritarian circumstances. Second, I enlist Habermasian “public sphereâ€? theory as a way of analyzing the substance of such democratic practices, the ways in which public sphere activities work politically. By taking a close look at Yemeni qãt chews, I show that such lively public sphere activities are analogous to Habermas’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European salons and coffeehouses in the sense that they work to produce important forms of political engagement and critical debate.² Third, this essay demonstrates how everyday practices of political contestation outside of electoral channels confound aspects of both the minimalist and the Habermasian frameworks. I argue here that the formation of democratic persons occurs through the very activity of deliberating in public, but in conditions fundamentally different from the ones Habermas identified as seminal in Western Europe. Qãt chews are nevertheless public spheres. And they occasion the performance of specifically democratic subjectivities — presentations of self as deliberative persons — in the absence of electoral institutions. Or, to put it differently, I show how thinking about democratic practices in the absence of a democratic regime enriches our empirical and theoretical understandings of politics more generally.