The Art of Not Governing:

Local Politics and Democratic Decline in Lebanon

My book, The Art of Not Governing, asks how elected elites can remain firmly in power while presiding over persistently poor governance. Focusing on postwar Lebanon, I argue that ruling elites consolidated a national party cartel by extending their power through municipal governments and elections. Central elites selectively distribute resources through local institutions to reward loyalty and punish opposition, limiting the ability of municipalities to act independently and foreclosing opportunities to hold incumbents accountable at the ballot box.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, more than 140 interviews, original survey research, and cross-municipal quantitative analysis, I trace how these center-local relationships emerged from Lebanon’s civil war and shaped politics in the decades that followed. Rather than treating local governments as natural counterweights to centralized power, the book shows how they can instead be incorporated into predatory governing arrangements. In doing so, The Art of Not Governing develops a broader account of how local institutions can help political elites preserve power at relatively low cost, with implications for state-building, decentralization, and democratic decline far beyond Lebanon.

REVIEWS OF The Art of Not Governing

“Parreira offers a strikingly original account of democratic decline through the politics of local governance. Combining meticulous fieldwork with original data, she shows how Lebanon’s party cartel preserves power not simply through sectarianism or clientelism but by controlling municipal access to resources. This powerful argument has implications far beyond Lebanon.” — Melani Cammett, Harvard University, author of Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon


“This book takes a truly novel approach to the study of Lebanese politics, examining how local dynamics affect politics not just in postwar Lebanon but also in the larger postwar universe. The wealth of field interviews and extensive statistical work undertaken by the author place the book in a class of its own.” — Bassel Salloukh, Doha Institute, coauthor of The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon


"In The Art of Not Governing, Parreira provides a rich account of how Lebanon's party elites built and maintained a stable cartel that is democratic on paper but autocratic in practice. Doing so, she offers important insights beyond Lebanon on governance, service provision, and the relationship between central and local politics.” — Ellen Lust, Founder and Director of the Governance and Local Development Institute, University of Gothenburg