Proposed Social Network Analysis of Nida Tounes

Prepared by Alysha Bedig, who will be participating in D217

Overview

This project will analyze the foreign ties and demographic characteristics of the Nida Tounes (Call for Tunisia) political party. Since the Islamist Ennahda (Renaissance) party dominated the country’s first post-revolution elections in November 2011, Tunisia’s political opposition has been characterized by disorganization, infighting, and a lack of broad political support. At the same time, popular sentiment in the ruling party is waning after numerous vigilante attacks by extremist groups, stalling economic performance, and the failure of the post-revolutionary legislature to produce a new constitution.

In May 2012, Beji Caid Essebsi, a career politician who served in both the Bourguiba and Ben Ali administrations and as Interim Prime Minister between January-November 2011, created Nida Tounes as an umbrella movement to unite the secular opposition. Nida continues to build support and could serve as a credible rival to Ennahda in the next elections, recently pushed back to June 2013. Unlike any of the parties who participated in the November 2011 election, Essebsi explicitly called on elements of the former ruling party (RCD) to join his movement. This generated significant alarm within Ennahda, whose spiritual leader branded the group a danger to the revolution on national radio. On October 18th, 2012, the local Nida coordinator in Tatouine was attacked by a mob of Ennahda supporters, resulting in his death. Despite video footage showing the coordinator being beaten to death, the government denies responsibility, alleging he died from a heart attack. On Monday, October 22^nd, 2012, 5000 marched on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in protest over what is being deemed a political assassination.

The growth of Nida Tounes is making a significant impact on the Tunisian political scene, yet the movement has largely gone unnoticed by Western commentators. This project seeks to learn more about the membership of the movement by analyzing its online presence. After spending six months in Tunisia this past spring, I am interested in the topic due to its intersection with my thesis, which compares treatment of the old regime in Tunisia and Libya and its impact on early democratic consolidation.

Questions & Methodology

What are the dominant trends within the Nida Tounes party in terms of age distribution, gender, education level and institution, marital status, profession, and membership in other Tunisian parties? Do they openly state a religious preference?

Separately, to what extent are members of this party connected to people abroad? If so, in what countries are these individuals located? Do these connections appear to be familial, part of the Tunisian diaspora, or ties with non-Tunisians?

I will analyze this by gathering data on the members of Nida Tounes Facebook group chapters. Ideally, I’ll do one chapter located in a neighborhood of Tunis, and one located in a more rural area of the country. I’ve already begun extracting data from the Tunis chapter into an Excel spreadsheet, and I hope to gather enough data to choose a representative sample and visualize it in UCINET.

It would be very interesting to compare this data with that of an Ennahda chapter, but I suspect these will be harder to access because Ennahda relies less on social media outreach and organization than do its secular counterparts. I intend to try, though.

The only way I can think of assessing ties between members (ie, frequency of communication between nodes, Eigenvector) is to try and assess how many friends each member has within the local chapter group and/or to monitor the top posters on the Facebook group forum. I’m not sure if this would tell us anything clearly determinative, however. For example, a senior representative in the Constituent Assembly from the Congress for the Republic party is a member of the Tunis chapter. He certainly has a high Eigenvector (in real life), but if he chooses not to communicate actively via this particular Facebook group, or on social media in general, that data will not be reflected in the analysis.

I chose Facebook as my data source because it is widely used both geographically and across all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum in Tunisia. This stands in contrast to Twitter, the usage of which remains quite limited. Neither Ennahda, Nida Tounes, nor Beji Caid Essebsi currently has a Twitter account. However, #nidatounes yields a moderate amount of search results, so I could try to analyze the social network of those talking about the movement.

I am very interested in your feedback on how to improve this methodology.

Hypothesis

I hypothesize that the majority of Nida Tounes members are engaged in white collar professions, have significant linkages with family members, friends, and other contacts throughout Europe, and that women constitute a significant proportion (perhaps a majority) of the group membership. I don't have a strong prediction of the age distribution, or for the results of any of the other questions listed above. Since the party did not exist at the time of the last elections, it would be interesting to note if a significant proportion of the members appear to have no connection to any other political party, indicating increased engagement in electoral politics in the citizenry at large, or demonstrate links to Ennahda-related groups, suggesting a shift in party preference based on government performance.