Iwasaki Erina

Since January 25th Revolution, political arena in Egypt is getting more and more chaotic, from which emerged the two opposing political tendencies: street politics and electoral politics. This article focuses on the interaction between these two opponents, and analyzes their political behaviors. The data used is obtained by four opinion surveys conveyed by the authors in 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012 during the Revolution, especially the fourth opinion survey in 2012. Using this data, this article clarified the appearance of 'new electoral participants' mainly in urban areas through the democratization process since 2011, and argued that their highly fluid electoral behavior contributed in the electoral winning of Islamic parties.<br>This article also argued that the fluidity of new urban electoral participants is in relation with the vulnerability of Egyptian urban society that is reflected in the nature of poverty. In effect, Egypt has two types of poverty, permanent poverty prevailing in rural areas, especially Upper Egypt, and temporal poverty in urban areas. These two types of poverty have led the urban and rural citizens to take different political behavior, although they both face globalization.

This paper provides a quantitative explanation about the voices of socioeconomic discontents among the Egyptian public, focusing on the relation between the political attitude and the various kinds of social, economic, and cultural factors, using the data collected by the Opinion Survey in Egypt 2008. The survey is conducted by ERTC (Economic Research and Training Center) within the framework of the Need-Based Program "Middle East within Asia" (at Hitotsubashi University). It covers 1,000 Egyptians aged 18 and above. The originality of this survey is that it enables to investigate the Egyptian public's political attitude at a regional level. The regional level, here, means the Urban Governorates (Cairo and Port Said), Lower Egypt Governorates, and Upper Egypt Governorates. Using the data obtained from this survey and analyzing at regional level, this paper clarifies the characteristics of the Egyptian public's political attitude and its relationship with socioeconomic background at the regional level.

Rural migration to Greater Cairo is a phenomenon that indicates the dynamics of rural-urban linkage. The paper aims, as part of a study on the urban-rural relationship in Egypt, to offer basic information on village associations in Cairo. A village association refers to an association organized by Cairo residents who originally come from the same village. The paper is composed of five chapters including the introduction in Chapter I. Chapter II explains the spatial differences in socioeconomic aspects in Greater Cairo by conducting a cluster analysis and displaying its results on a digital map. Chapter III presents the overall situation of village associations in Cairo by examining their location, memberships and activities, based primarily on the list of 576 village associations in Cairo governorate. Chapter IV is a case study of the association of a village named Abu Senita that uses the association's member list. Finally, Chapter V concludes with certain implications concerning the characteristics of the urban-rural relationship between villages and Greater Cairo deduced from our analysis will be deduced from the analysis of village associations. Our conclusions are as follows. Recently, some associations have become more active and are diversifying their activities, which play an important role for the migrants as a means of coping with the socioeconomic difficulties in daily life in Cairo. Village associations of migrants from Lower and Upper Egypt are the same in this regard. However, socioeconomic backgrounds appear to differ between migrant village associations from Lower and Upper Egypt. For Lower Egypt, the essential factors influencing the foundation of village associations appear to be their proximity to Greater Cairo, and the lack of job opportunities in the nonagricultural sector. Conversely, for Upper Egypt, while migration is essentially a socioeconomic phenomenon caused by low income and unemployment, the establishment of an association seems to be a rather matter of social network or culture, and an issue requiring further examination through a case study.