This paper explores the question of what explains public opinion of women empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa. Muslim societies have often been accused of conservatism toward empowerment, stripping women of equal access to education and opportunities. However, many predominantly Muslim societies in the MENA region seem to be on the way to implement change to provide women…
The Mounting Wave: Protest Participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2019
This article analyzes the evolution of protest participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2018 using the data provided by the Arab Barometer Surveys. It finds that participation evolved substantially in both size and demographic determinants, reflecting the strong deterioration of the population’s socio-economic conditions over the last decade. The Arab Barometer surveys are the only cross-country source of data available…
Arab Barometer Wave V
(2)The Mounting Wave: Protest Participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2019
This article analyzes the evolution of protest participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2018 using the data provided by the Arab Barometer Surveys. It finds that participation evolved substantially in both size and demographic determinants, reflecting the strong deterioration of the population’s socio-economic conditions over the last decade. The Arab Barometer surveys are the only cross-country source of data available…
Determinants of Public Attitudes Towards Immigrants: Evidence from Arab Barometer
What factors determine public opinion towards immigrants? This inquiry is especially crucial in the context of developing countries since they hold 80 per cent of global refugee populations. Lebanon, with the burden on its shoulders due to hosting about one million Syrians, offers a unique case to study the mechanisms driving the formation of attitudes towards immigrants. In this article,…
Can Morocco Effectively Handle the COVID-19 Crisis?
In Morocco, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased public trust in government, but people still have doubts about the effectiveness of the healthcare system. According to a recent study conducted by the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis (MIPA), the majority of Moroccans surveyed are generally satisfied with the measures taken by the government to battle the coronavirus. However, the same survey…
Arab Barometer Wave IV
(5)The Mounting Wave: Protest Participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2019
This article analyzes the evolution of protest participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2018 using the data provided by the Arab Barometer Surveys. It finds that participation evolved substantially in both size and demographic determinants, reflecting the strong deterioration of the population’s socio-economic conditions over the last decade. The Arab Barometer surveys are the only cross-country source of data available…
From virtual space to public space: The role of online political activism in protest participation during the Arab Spring
This study examines the relationship between online social media use and protest participation during the Arab Spring, pro-democracy movements that swept across vast parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). What role did online communication media play in individual decisions to participate in these high-risk political activities? We address this question by drawing on microdata from the Arab…
Political Division and Social Destruction: Generalized Trust in Palestine
This article discusses the effect of the political division between Fatah and Hamas on the level of generalized trust in Palestine. It argues that the level of trust in Palestinian society has been shaped and influenced by the ongoing political division since 2007. As the level of trust has been declining since 2007, this research suggests that distrust in the…
Arab Barometer Wave III
(4)The Mounting Wave: Protest Participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2019
This article analyzes the evolution of protest participation in Sudan from 2011 to 2018 using the data provided by the Arab Barometer Surveys. It finds that participation evolved substantially in both size and demographic determinants, reflecting the strong deterioration of the population’s socio-economic conditions over the last decade. The Arab Barometer surveys are the only cross-country source of data available…
Political Division and Social Destruction: Generalized Trust in Palestine
This article discusses the effect of the political division between Fatah and Hamas on the level of generalized trust in Palestine. It argues that the level of trust in Palestinian society has been shaped and influenced by the ongoing political division since 2007. As the level of trust has been declining since 2007, this research suggests that distrust in the…
Arab Barometer Wave II
(2)Political Division and Social Destruction: Generalized Trust in Palestine
This article discusses the effect of the political division between Fatah and Hamas on the level of generalized trust in Palestine. It argues that the level of trust in Palestinian society has been shaped and influenced by the ongoing political division since 2007. As the level of trust has been declining since 2007, this research suggests that distrust in the…
Arab Barometer Wave I
(1)What We (Do Not) Know about the Diffusion of Democracy Protests
In “Why Democracy Protests Do Not Diffuse,” we examine whether or not countries are significantly more likely to experience democracy protests when one or more of their neighbors recently experienced a similar protest. Our goal in so doing was not to attack the existing literature or to present sensational results, but to evaluate the extent to which the existing literature…
How Polities Shape Support for Gender Equality and Religiosity’s Impact in Arab Countries
Previous public opinion studies argued that in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Muslim citizens support gender equality less than non-Muslims, due to Islamic-patriarchal socialization. Deviating from this Orientalist narrative, we formulate a context-dependent agentic-socialization framework, which acknowledges religiosity’s and gender equality’s multidimensionality along with the MENA’s political-institutional diversity. We expect that religious service attendance and devotion decrease…
The participative role of social media for the disadvantaged young generation in the Arab Spring
The progressing digitalization of society has led scholars to hope that socially disadvantaged groups of the population may gain increased access to political participation. Using the example of the young Arab population who protested in the Arab Spring, this article investigates whether the use of social media has supported their political engagement. It analyzes the extent to which social media…
Religion and Tolerance of Minority Sects in the Arab World
Does religious behavior always promote hostility toward members of other faiths? This article suggests that the relationship between personal religious behavior and religious tolerance is not so simple. Even in the Arab World, frequently cited as a center of religious piety and intolerance, different forms of religious behavior have markedly different effects on attitudes toward minority sects. Using both observational…
The Online Caliphate: Internet Usage and ISIS Support in the Arab World
Experts argue that the internet has provided expanded opportunities for violent extremist groups to propagandize and recruit. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is an exemplar in that it has heavily invested in an online presence and uses online communities and social media to attract and retain supporters. Does ISIS’s online presence translate into a higher probability…
An Empirical Analysis of the Women and Peace Hypothesis
For decades, social scientists have questioned whether women are more politically tolerant, peaceful, and less likely to prefer war to solve international conflict compared to men. Empirical analyses have been limited to a few geographic regions: North America (the United States); the Middle East (Israel and the core Arab World); and Africa (Rwanda). Furthermore, the measurement of the dependent variable,…
Social Signals and Participation in the Tunisian Revolution
Revolutionary protests can spread surprisingly rapidly. Social contagion may play a key role in this process: people who observe others participating may be more likely to do so themselves, thus reinforcing the proparticipation signal. We leverage data from two surveys to assess the relationship between exposure to proparticipatory social signals and individual-level participation in the Tunisian revolution. We benchmark these…
A Youth-Driven Virtual Civic Public Sphere for the Arab World
The past three decades have been highly climactic for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The advent of satellite television and the Web, coupled with emerging democratic orientations, marked the region’s first political engagement with digital communications at a global scale. The failure of the digital public sphere, however, to deliver on democratisation promises during the so-called Arab Spring…
Democratic skepticism and support for terrorism in the Palestinian Territories
Research has found that, among other factors, skepticism about democracy and its suitability as a form of government helps to drive public support for violent extremism in the Muslim World. According to scholars, Muslim skeptics of democracy resent it as the product of Western political and cultural intrusion and reflexively support violent extremism as an expression of cultural resistance. Using…
Women, information ecology, and political protest in the Middle East
Does internet usage increase the likelihood of political protest, and is the effect larger among women than men? Using data from three waves of the Arab Barometer Survey, historical research and interviews with women activists, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on information ecology and contentious politics in the Middle East. We hypothesized that the internet increases…
Unhappy Development: Dissatisfaction With Life on the Eve of the Arab Spring
Despite progress with economic and social development over several decades, life satisfaction was relatively low and declining in many developing Arab countries in the second half of the 2000s—a situation described in this paper as the “unhappy development” paradox. The paper empirically tests the direction and strength of association of a range of objective and subjective factors with subjective well‐being…
The end of pan-Arab media? National, transnational media and identity in Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan after 2011
The article explores the relation between identity definition and trust in different information sources in Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia following the 2011 Uprisings. While prior to 2011 literature mostly highlighted the role of pan-Arab news channels in consolidating a transnational Arab public sphere, recent studies argued that there has been a reinforcement of national media and identities in the Middle…