This article is part of the Special Issue “Parliaments in the Middle East and North Africa: A Struggle for Relevance.” While legislators in democratic settings have the electorate as their main principal, mps in semi- and nondemocratic settings need to serve two principals to remain in office: the regime and the active segment of the electorate. This dichotymy sometimes requires particular skills in parliamentary behavior. For the case of Egypt, we investigate how mps strike a balance between regime support and representing their constituents up to an extent that does not endanger their chances for re-election. A content analysis of session scripts of the Egyptian parliament in 2016 was conducted to examine how mps walk this – traditionally understudied – thin line. Our findings indicate that representation gets reduced to “descriptive representation,” i.e. a representation that puts more emphasis on representing local constituents and demographic segments, like Copts and women, that mps are presumably elected to represent. We therefore show that mps fulfill the important tasks of citizens representation even in semi- and nondemocratic settings.

中文翻译：

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走代表的一条细线：分析埃及国会议员的行为

本文是特刊“中东和北非的议会：相关性斗争”的一部分。虽然民主环境中的立法者以选民为主要原则，议员在半民主和非民主的环境中，s 需要服务于两个主体才能继续执政：政权和选民的活跃部分。这种二分法有时需要议会行为方面的特殊技能。对于埃及的案例，我们调查如何议员在不危及他们连任的机会的范围内，他们在政权支持和代表选民之间取得平衡。对 2016 年埃及议会的会议脚本进行了内容分析，以检验如何议员让我们走这条——传统上未被充分研究的——细线。我们的研究结果表明，代表被简化为“描述性代表”，即更加强调代表当地选民和人口群体的代表，如科普特人和女性，议员s 大概被选为代表。因此，我们表明议员即使在半民主和非民主的环境中，它也能完成公民代表的重要任务。