The study of governance in North Africa often overlooks the profound influence of deep-seated historical structures, focusing instead on proximate political events. This creates a significant gap in understanding the persistent institutional challenges faced in the region, particularly regarding leadership paradigms. This survey research aims to systematically analyse how specific historical legacies, formed over distinct political eras, continue to structurally condition contemporary governance practices and leadership accessibility in Egypt. It seeks to identify which legacies are perceived as most salient by experts and to map their perceived mechanisms of influence. A structured expert survey was deployed, targeting a purposive sample of scholars, policy analysts, and senior civil servants specialising in Egyptian and African political systems. The instrument employed Likert-scale and ranking questions to quantify perceptions of legacy influence and open-ended items for thematic elaboration. Data analysis combined descriptive statistics with thematic coding. A dominant theme identified was the enduring influence of centralised bureaucratic control, with 78% of respondents ranking it as the most impactful legacy constraining inclusive governance. This was consistently linked to perceptions of limited agency for diverse leadership models beyond state-centric frameworks. The research concludes that contemporary governance challenges are not merely products of recent instability but are fundamentally shaped by resilient historical-institutional structures. These structures act as filters, mediating and often constraining the adoption of new governance paradigms. Future governance reform initiatives must explicitly incorporate structural historical analysis into their design. Capacity-building programmes should target the specific institutional norms inherited from past bureaucratic systems to foster more transformative change. historical institutionalism, governance structures, expert survey, political legacy, North Africa, leadership access This article provides a novel, structured dataset quantifying expert perceptions on the causal weight of different historical legacies, moving beyond descriptive historical analysis to a testable ranking of their contemporary salience.