understanding how judicial institutions can be used by authoritarian regimes as a means
to collect accurate information and instill discipline within the state’s own institutions.
One of the most detailed empirical studies on the usefulness of courts as
mechanisms for monitoring the state’s own institutions in an authoritarian political
setting is found in James Rosberg’s detailed study of authoritarian politics in Egypt.
Rosberg illustrates how the regime’s authoritarian rulers facilitated the reemergence of
the administrative courts in the 1970s and 1980s in an effort to reign in their own
administrative bureaucracies. With the rapid expansion of the Egyptian state, particularly
after vast waves of nationalizations in 1958 and 1961, one of the most pressing problems
that Nasser and his successors faced was an inability to adequately monitor and discipline
bureaucrats throughout the state’s administrative hierarchy. With political parties
dissolved, judicial independence impaired, the free press suppressed, and citizens
stripped of effective civil rights, there was little transparency in the political and
economic systems and corruption began to fester. Administrators and bureaucrats abused
their power and position to prey on citizens, and public sector managers siphoned off
resources from the state.
Corruption not only affected the state’s institutional
performance, but abuse of power undermined the revolutionary legitimacy that the
regime enjoyed when it came to power in the 1950s.
Corruption was exacerbated still
44
The framework developed by McCubbins and Schwartz is inspired from an American context, but it
appears that the utility of the fire alarm model of administrative oversight is not tied exclusively to
administrative oversight in democracies. Rather, the fire alarm model of administrative oversight applies
more broadly to the degree of complexity of state institutions, regardless of whether a state is democratic or
authoritarian. “Although our model refers only to congress, we hazard to hypothesize that as most
organizations grow and mature, their top policy makers adopt methods of control that are comparatively
decentralized and incentive based. Such methods, we believe, will work more efficiently… than direct,
centralized surveillance.” McCubbins and Schwartz, 172.
45
James Rosberg’s, Roads to the Rule of Law: The Emergence of an Independent Judiciary in
Contemporary Egypt. Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995.
46
Rosberg, 76-82; Nazih Ayubi, Bureaucracy and Politics in Contemporary Egypt (Longdon: Ithaca Press,
1980).
47
This was never more clear than after Egypt’s humiliating defeat in the 1967 war. Egypt’s failure in the
war was partially the result of the state’s poor institutional performance, and it marked the most significant
blow to the credibility of the regime.
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Convention