Although by some accounts trade liberalization threatened to bankrupt one-third to one-half of all local industrial firms, Tunisian industrialists did not formulate coherent interests and mobilize politically to confront this threat; relations between industrialists and the state did not change noticeably with trade reform. The progressive institutionalization of a single-party, authoritarian state has undoubtedly enabled it to retain control over potential sources of disruption and challenges from social groups. But a purely state-centric explanation for the relative absence of business mobilization in Tunisia begs the question of how the state was able to control and manipulate the private sector and dominate economic policymaking so thoroughly. Literature on the Tunisian political economy tends to treat business and labor as undifferentiated wholes, yielding only partial accounts of how groups respond to economic change. By downplaying important variables such as the relatively fragmented structure of social groups and the nature of exchanges between the state and business, analysts give too much credit to state repression and, more broadly, regime type in explaining societal quiescence.

PREFERENCES AND LOBBYING: INTENTIONS VERSUS ACTION

The political behavior of Tunisian manufacturers revealed a disjuncture between their policy preferences, articulated in interviews, and their interests, defined as politically expressed goals. This section compares the preferences and actual behavior of Tunisian textile and apparel industrialists, demonstrating that manufacturers took little, if any, concrete action to pursue their declared policy preferences.