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…
Published Papers
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…
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,…
Insecurity and political values in the Arab world
Within a few years of the historic Arab uprisings of 2011, popular mobilization dissipated amidst instability in many Arab countries. We trace the relationship between shifting macro-political conditions and individual-level political values in the Middle East, demonstrating that a preference for democracy and political trust are not fixed cultural features of populations but rather can shift rapidly in the face…
Hopes and disappointments: regime change and support for democracy after the Arab Uprisings
What happened to citizens’ support for democracy after the Arab Uprisings? Did the support increase, stay the same, or actually decrease after all the protests, regime changes, and reforms? Which theories of citizens’ political attitudes best explain these dynamics? Analysing two waves of the Arab Barometer surveys and employing an item-response method that offers methodological improvements compared to previous studies,…
Employment and attitudes toward women among Syrian refugees
The current study examined employment rates and predictors of employment among Syrian refugees currently living in Lebanon and Jordan. This paper argues that men and women refugees have different experiences seeking out employment after resettlement due to patriarchal structures and attitudes toward women that are present in the Arab Middle East. The goals of this paper were a) to examine…
Protests in North Africa: The Arab Spring Was Just the Beginning
2011 was not the end, but the beginning, and maybe it wasn’t even that. Perhaps the deep crisis of the traditional social contract that underpinned most of the MENA region’s ruling regimes since independence had begun even before. The first cracks could be already be heard by sensitive ears in the 2000s, when the liberal reforms introduced by several Arab…
Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes
Provides the first truly comprehensive account of regime support and its individual- and system-level sources in democracies and autocracies Uses an unprecedentedly rich data base that coves political attitudes and macro-level data for more than 100 countries across the globe Motivates theoretically as well as demonstrates empirically whether and how the effects of different individual- and system-level sources on regime…
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…
Algeria-Europe economic integration: Where are we now and where do we go?
The Hirak — Algeria’s recurring Friday protests asking for fundamental change — is now a year old. Neither meaningful change nor unabashed repression proceeds from the Algerian administration. Meanwhile, protestors struggle to find an authentic and compelling leadership. The European Union (EU), its closest territory only 150 km away, has responded in measured terms. On Nov. 28, 2019, a European Parliament resolution criticized…
Are the unhappy unemployed to blame for unrest? Scrutinising participation in the Arab Spring uprisings
Abstract Unemployment is considered a significant driver behind the so-called Arab Spring, and more generally behind protests, rebellions, and civil wars. However, the empirical evidence of this hypothesised link between unemployment and political instability is scant and contradictory. This article contributes to filling this gap. In addition, this is the first study which will concentrate on the role of unemployment…
What Has Changed in Policing since the Arab Uprisings of 2011? Surveying Policing Concepts and Modes of Contestation
… Should we address policing through a regional lens? Addressing the topic of policing within the frame of the “Arab World” is challenging for at least three major reasons. First is the question of definitions with ongoing debates about what counts as “policing” rather than “internal security” or indeed military practice.1Boundaries are blurred further in the Arab context in the…
The Long-Term Revolution: Protest Participation in the Arab World from 2011 to 2019
Over the last eight years, contentious actions such as street protests and sit-ins have been a constant presence in news reports from the MENA region. While a significant number of academic, journalistic, and think-tank articles have focused on the causes of social discontent and contentious actions in the region since 2011, few works have used a quantitative approach to investigate…
Five Lessons From the New Arab Uprisings
…The fifth and final lesson is that the call for change in the region goes beyond electoral democracy and extends to deep socioeconomic reforms. Iraq and Lebanon show this clearly: relatively free and fair elections have already been held but have served only to reinforce corrupt sectarian regimes. According to the fifth wave of the Arab Barometer, the economic situation…
A Way Forward for U.K.-Jordan Security Cooperation
Jordan and the U.K. are set to renew security cooperation with a new three-year phase of U.K. support to the Public Security Directorate (PSD) and the Gendarmerie. The support is likely to exceed £10 million. Based on prior programming and the U.K.’s priorities for the region, support areas will likely include counterterrorism, public order management, and core policing. When the…
‘Why Do You Ask?’ The Nature and Impacts of Attitudes towards Public Opinion Surveys in the Arab World
For the first time in an Arab country, this article examines attitudes toward public opinion surveys and their effects on survey-taking behavior. The study uses original survey data from Qatar, the diverse population of which permits comparisons across cultural–geographical groupings within a single, non-democratic polity. The authors find that Qatari and expatriate Arabs hold positive views of surveys, both in…
Between inequality and sectarianism: who destroys generalised trust? The case of Lebanon
In 2015, a new wave of protests erupted in Lebanon. These protests were the result of a lengthy period of political instability in the country. The informality of the sectarian political system in Lebanon has reached the point where the country has not had a president for more than two years. The aim of this paper is to examine the…
Revisiting the Egyptian Uprising of 2011: Exploring the Role of Relational Networks within the Cairo-Based Political Opposition
Revisiting the Egyptian Uprising of 2011, I argue that strong relational networks linking actors in the broader Cairo-based political opposition—a conglomerate of prodemocracy movement organizations—should be understood as a necessary, albeit insufficient, causal condition for the diffusion of protest. These networks fulfilled two essential functions. 1) They were critical in terms of professionally socializing a new generation of activists—many of…
Explaining China’s popularity in the Middle East and Africa
China enjoys considerable popularity in the Middle East and Africa, not only among elites but also at street level. This article draws on international relations theories to explain this general pattern, as well as intra- and interregional variation. Every approach has something to contribute, but international political economy more so than realism. Constructivist theories are particularly useful in explaining China’s…
The Credibility of the Political News Issues: A Comparative Study between Egyptian and Tunisian Audience
The main topic of the study about the credibility of political news issues on the social networking sites as from the point of view of the social networking sites users in The Egyptian and Tunisian societies. The study compares each case in terms of political and social issues, especially in the period after the second intermediate period, for example, changing…
Cartelization, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosure of the Jasmine Revolution: Democracy’s Troubles in Tunisia
While frequently hailed as the sole success story of the Arab Uprisings, the consolidation of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has in fact proven deeply problematic. This paper will argue that the frailty of Tunisia’s democratic present is a direct function of liberal democratization, specifically implicating this practice of democratization in the hollowing and cartelization of the political system. In insulating policymaking…
Perceived linkages to politicians and group deprivation sentiment
The political reasons for why individuals perceive their group to be deprived are not well understood. This article proposes that individuals who perceive having linkages to political leaders are less likely to feel group deprivation. It is posited that such perception stems from politicians’ efforts to attract support through either credit-claiming or clientelism. Results from a survey in Lebanon show…
Legitimacy and “Transitional Continuity” in a Monarchical Regime: Case of Morocco
The Arab uprisings and outbreak of mass protest in many countries in the Arab world, requesting the change of regimes and political leaders, translate a deep malaise in the state-society relationship and an alarming crisis of the state legitimacy. Hence, this paper seeks to understand the intriguing nature of the Moroccan political system and its legitimacy formula as a monarchical…
Do Female Local Councilors Improve Women’s Representation?
Tunisia’s 2018 municipal elections, in which a legislated quota was implemented and women won 47 percent of seats, raises questions about whether electing female councilors improves women’s representation in clientelistic settings. Using data from the Local Governance Performance Index (LGPI), an original survey of 3,600 Tunisians conducted in 2015 by the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD), this article…
Islam, Religious Outlooks, and Support for Democracy
Despite a wealth of studies examining Muslim religiosity and democracy, uncertainty regarding Islam and attitudes toward democracy remains. Although the claims concerning the incompatibility of Islam and democracy are generally discarded, public opinion scholarship has yet to build much further from this important first step or incorporate a strong theoretical framework for analysis beyond this basic foundation. This paper seeks…
Determinants of Arab public opinion on the Caliphate: Islamist elites, religiosity and socioeconomic conditions
What are the determinants of public opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in the Arab world? My answer to this question outlines the key role played by Islamist elites, religiosity and age in influencing Arab opinion on the issue of the Caliphate in three countries during the early Age of Islamism (1980s–1990s). I do so by using Binary Logistic…
Autocratic checks and balances? Trust in courts and bureaucratic discretion
An emerging literature in political economy focuses on democratic enclaves or pockets of quasi-democratic decision-making embedded in non-democracies. This article first explores the factors that may lead to the emergence of such institutional checks and balances in autocratic politics. I use the comparative analysis of courts in Morocco and Tunisia, and argue that interest group mobilization and the centrality of…
Judges, bribes, and verdicts: How court experience reshapes attitudes about judicial corruption among Morocco’s most marginalized
When do citizens believe in corruption’s effectiveness? Using an original, nationally representative survey of 1201 Moroccan respondents, this article highlights the conditions under which citizens affirm (or deny) the importance of corruption to getting favourable decisions from public officials. Specifically, the survey centres on judicial corruption, finding that 76 per cent of citizens agree that bribing judges produces favourable verdicts….
Economic self-interest, information, and trade policy preferences: evidence from an experiment in Tunisia
We address a central question about the integration of developing countries into the global economy: what factors affect public support for such globalization. Do public preferences toward trade correlate with its economic consequences or sociocultural resonances? Using a nationally representative survey experiment in Tunisia, a majority Muslim, developing country, we investigate whether providing information about trade’s distributional consequences causes respondents…
The Road Not Taken: Fostering Research on the Psychology of Religiosity and Spirituality via Underused Representative, Open-Access Datasets (ROADs)
Psychologists studying religiosity and spirituality (R/S) often face several challenges when conducting their research, such as collecting data from nationally representative samples, cross-cultural generalizability, statistical power, and integrated multilevel approaches. We examined one potential solution—the use of Representative, Open-Access Datasets (ROADs), which are currently underutilized. In this article, we define ROADs; discuss affordances, obstacles, and best practices in using them;…
Support for feminism among highly religious Muslim citizens in the Arab region
Public opinion studies argue that in Middle Eastern and North African countries, Muslims support gender equality less than non-Muslims. This overlooks the diversity in religion–feminism relations. Highly religious Muslims who support feminism are disregarded, even though in-depth studies have repeatedly pointed to their existence. Grounded in a structured anthology of qualitative studies on Muslim feminism, we provide the first ever…
Demobilising the February 20 Movement in Morocco: regime strategies during the Arab Spring
The case of the February 20 Movement (F20) during the Arab Spring in Morocco demonstrates that when social movements face an existential crisis, they focus on maintaining relevance and resonance with the public. In this stage, movements typically experiment with prognostic frames to test resonance with the public and state reactions; however, F20 was not united in how to best…
Democratic disillusionment? Desire for democracy after the Arab uprisings
Have the Arab uprisings influenced the desire for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa? This study presents a systematic explanation of the different impact the uprisings had on people’s desire for democracy across the region. It applies the relatively new consequence-based theory of democratic attitudes, and integrates the notion of deprivation into it. The expectations derived from this…
The impact of the Arab Spring on democracy and development in the MENA region
In evaluating the consequences of the Arab Spring 8 years later, this paper not only focuses on the short‐term consequences of the uprisings that swept through a number of countries in the Middle East and North African region but also analyzes the long‐term prospects for democratization and development in the MENA region. The impact of the Arab Spring, despite its…
Infrastructure Provision, Politics and Religion: Insights from Tunisia’s new democracy
This paper analyzes the relationship between access to infrastructure services and support for religious parties based on the evidence produced by a recent democratic experience in Tunisia in which a religious political party, Ennahdha, governed from 2011 to 2014. The experience points to a complex relationship. In the 2011 election, areas with higher access are associated with higher support for…
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…
Parties in an era of change: membership in the (re-)making in post-revolutionary Tunisia
In the current era of rapid and radical evolution in the institutions of partisan politics, one of the best-documented and most discussed changes in established and more recent democracies has been the decline of membership enrolment, and yet its resilience. By contrast, comparative research on Maghrebi political parties, and on this aspect in particular, has for a long time been…
Political Attitudes of Arab Citizens in North Africa
Theories of social capital, government performance, Islamic values, and globalization are among the most important tools that can be used to help explain individuals’ political attitudes. The present research attempts to address the effects of the above-mentioned factors on the political attitude of Arab citizens using the Arab Barometer Wave IV data. The results showed that only 23.2% of citizens…
Why Is There So Little Shia–Sunni Dialogue? Understanding the Deficit of Intra-Muslim Dialogue and Interreligious Peacemaking
Despite a growth in fatalities resulting from organized violence with Shia–Sunni dimensions over the last two decades, in this study, we show, using existing data-bases on interreligious dialogue and peacemaking, that only less than two percent of the interreligious peacemaking organizations in the world are specialized in dialogue between Shias and Sunnis. Why is there so little institutionalized Shia–Sunni dialogue…
Protests and the Arab Spring: An Empirical Investigation
This article discusses a variety of major explanations for the intensity of recent protests in Arab states and investigates whether there is empirical support for them. We survey various political, economic, and social factors and develop a comprehensive empirical model to estimate the structural determinants of protests in 19 Arab League states between 1990 and 2011, measured using events data….
Divergent opposition to sub-Saharan African and Arab migrants in Morocco’s Casablanca Region: prejudice from the pocketbook?
Since the early 2010s, the global migrant crisis has led to the mass inflow of foreign migrants, refugees, and other displaced persons into numerous countries. Whereas some native citizens have welcomed these migrants, a large number have expressed opposition. Most theories explaining why citizens express opposition to migrants emerged from evidence collected in developed, European countries. Yet, developing, non-Western countries…
Social Trust in the Middle East and North Africa: The Context-Dependent Impact of Citizens’ Socio-Economic and Religious Characteristics
Our knowledge of social and political trust’s drivers in the MENA region is limited and there are good reasons to expect that Western-based theories cannot be copied to the MENA one-to-one. Arguing for a broader and at the same time context-sensitive comparative approach, I translate the ‘societal winners’, social capital, and religious beliefs mechanisms explaining trust to the MENA context….
Do democratic revolutions ‘activate’ participants? The case of Tunisia
The democratic transition in Tunisia and free and fair elections that followed offer a unique opportunity to assess whether the experience of participating in successful political efforts translates into subsequent political participation. We consider whether participation in a democratic revolution is associated with greater rates of participation in nascent ‘normal’ democratic processes. Leveraging data from two surveys fielded in the…
Regionalism in New Democracies: The Authoritarian Origins of Voter-Party Linkages
We investigate the path-dependent effects of sub-national variation in authoritarian state-building policies on voter-party linkages after regime change. We argue that long-term patterns of regional favoritism and marginalization produce patterned regional heterogeneity in the attitudes and preferences linking voters with parties. Post-colonial state-building policies create “winners” and “losers” from particular interventions, in turn shaping local citizens’ preferences over these policy…
Never out of Now: Preference Falsification, Social Capital and the Arab Spring
Could the Arab Spring have led to a rise in support for authoritarian governments in some states? Discussions of revolutionary diffusion during the Arab Spring focused on whether expressions of discontent spread to different states. Such discussions, however, neglect the potential for there to be a decrease in expressions of discontent in the wake of spreading revolutionary sentiment in certain…
The Syrian conflict and public opinion among Syrians in Lebanon
Whom do ordinary Syrians support in their civil war? After decades of repression, the Syrian uprising unleashed an outpouring of political expression. Yet the study of Syrian public opinion is in its infancy. This article presents survey evidence from a large, diverse sample of Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon, one of the first of its kind, and examines their support…
Implicit Attitudes toward an Authoritarian Regime
Existing research on public opinion under authoritarianism focuses on the deliberative half of cognition. Yet in psychology, implicit attitudes and subconscious associations are often viewed as foundational, the basis for explicit attitudes and behavior. This article adapts the well-known Implicit Association Test to study Egyptian citizens’ attitudes toward President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Roughly 58% of respondents hold positive implicit attitudes…
Down and Out: Founding Elections and Disillusionment with Democracy in Egypt and Tunisia
Which electoral losers become the most disillusioned with democracy following the first free and fair elections? Exploiting surveys before and after founding elections in post-Arab Spring Egypt and Tunisia, we find that the most disillusioned losers were those residing in areas where the losing parties were strongest. We argue that expectations matter. Losers whose parties are strong locally tend to…
Between organization and spontaneity of protests: the 2010–2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings
This paper investigates the role of social groups in mobilizing resources for protests in repressive contexts. In particular, it examines the impact of organizations and informal groups on individual engagement in the protests developed in 2010 in Tunisia and in 2011 in Egypt. The empirical analysis draws on the following data sources: the second wave of the Arab Barometer (2010–2011),…
Poverty and Divine Rewards: The Electoral Advantage of Islamist Political Parties
Political life in many Muslim‐majority countries has been marked by the electoral dominance of Islamist parties. Recent attempts to explain why have highlighted their material and organizational factors, such as the provision of social services. In this article, we revive an older literature that emphasizes the appeal of these parties’ religious nature to voters experiencing economic hardship. Individuals suffering economic…
The myth of stability in Algeria
The image of Algeria as an island of stability in an otherwise turbulent region was shattered, once and for all, when mass protests erupted in mid-February this year, after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced that he would run for a fifth presidential term, despite having been seriously disabled ever since he suffered a stroke in April 2013 and rarely appearing in…
Disentangling an Elusive Relationship: How Democratic Value Orientations Affect Political Trust in Different Regimes
The question whether democratic values are on the rise or in decline has received much attention in political-culture research. Yet, few scholars have studied the consequences either of these trends has for political trust. Although political trust has long been attributed a central role for the functioning and stability of any political system, we still know little about the relationship…
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…
Religiosity and Perception About Compatibility of Democracy With Islam: Evidence From the Arab World
Using the data from Arab countries, this article shows that the odds of considering democracy to be consistent with Islam are higher for more religious respondents than that for less religious respondents. This article also shows that this result may be driven by two characteristics of religiosity: frequently reading the Holy Quran (the source of religion) and regularly praying. Our…
Party competition in the Middle East: spatial competition in the post-Arab Spring era
This paper charts the nature of political cleavage between major parties in post-Arab Spring elections in five Mediterranean region countries, with data from online opt-in surveys. We compare the Moroccan elections, held under a consolidated authoritarian regime, with the transitional cases of Tunisia and Egypt as well as the more mature democracies of Turkey and Israel. Voter opinions are obtained…
Survey Research in the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities
Survey research has expanded in the Arab world since the 1980s. The Arab Spring marked a watershed when surveying became possible in Tunisia and Libya, and researchers added additional questions needed to answer theoretical and policy questions. Almost every Arab country now is included in the Arab Barometer or World Values Survey. Yet, some scholars express the view that the…
The tide that failed to rise: Young people’s politics and social values in and after the Arab uprisings
The story of the ‘Arab Spring’ as a revolt of young people against autocracy does not stand up to survey analysis at country level. Data from the Arab Transformations Survey show that young people were over-represented as participants, but it is necessary to stretch the concept of ‘youth’ into middle age in some countries to say this, there were plenty…
Kinship, partisanship, and patronage in Arab elections
This article examines the connection between kinship, partisanship, and patronage voting in Arab world elections. It argues that tribes and extended families enjoy structural advantages that reduce transaction costs in patron–client exchanges, making kinship voting a pragmatic strategy in clientelistic vote markets with weak parties. Using data from seven Arab countries, it demonstrates that patronage oriented voters place greater weight on candidates’ kinship affiliations and deemphasize other…
Sharīʻa, Islamism and Arab support for democracy
The Arab Spring and its aftermath reignited the debate over the relationship between Islamism and democracy. This analysis improves upon previous research by demonstrating the crucial contribution which a more precise understanding of the multiple meanings of the concept of Sharīʻa can have on our assessment of the future of democracy in the Arab world. While support for the Sharīʻa-conformity…
Beyond elections: perceptions of democracy in four Arab countries
This article draws on public opinion survey data from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan to investigate first, whether a “demand for democracy” in the region exists; second, how to measure it; and third, how respondents understand it. The picture emerging from this analysis is complex, eluding the simple dichotomy between prima facie support and second order incongruence with democracy, which characterises current…
Revisiting the Islamist–Secular divide: Parties and voters in the Arab world
Electoral politics in the Arab world are either portrayed as clientelistic affairs void of content or as highly ideological clashes between Islamist and Secular Left forces. Although both arguments are intuitively appealing, the empirical evidence to date is limited. This article seeks to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent of programmatic voter support for Islamist and Secular Left…
No Arab Bourgeoisie, No Democracy? The Entrepreneurial Middle Class and Democratic Attitudes since the Arab Spring
This study examines support for democracy among a key subgroup of the Arab middle class—the small business community—before and after the start of the Arab Spring. Although historically cast as anti-democratic, we provide evidence that small business owners became more pro-democratic after the start of the Arab Spring. Yet their support for democracy varies according to the presence and type…
Differentiation and diffusion: shifting public opinion attitudes toward foreign policy in North Africa
Drawing on Arab Barometer data, this article provides the backdrop for understanding continuity and change since the Arab Spring in national-level public opinion attitudes toward economic and political foreign policy issues in North Africa, inclusive of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. The article leverages the concepts of differentiation and diffusion to understand how international affairs shape public opinion in…
THE STATE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE ARAB WORLD-The Arab Uprisings of 2011 and Beyond
ABSTRACT. The Arab uprisings were sometimes seen as calls for democracy, but we argue that in fact they were more accurately calls for social justice. Citizens across the region took to the streets to demand better economic, political and social outcomes including reducing levels of inequality, eliminating corruption and increasing respect for human dignity. These protests yielded significant changes across…
Islam, Religious Outlooks, and Support for Democracy
Despite a wealth of studies examining Muslim religiosity and democracy, uncertainty regarding Islam and attitudes toward democracy remains. Although the claims concerning the incompatibility of Islam and democracy are generally discarded, public opinion scholarship has yet to build much further from this important first step or incorporate a strong theoretical framework for analysis beyond this basic foundation. This paper seeks…
Police Legitimacy and Homicide: A Macro-Comparative Analysis
“This study tests the claim that police legitimacy affects the prevalence of homicide. Using a cross-national time-series dataset of 100 countries, I conduct a statistical analysis of the association between the extent to which the public perceives the police as legitimate and the homicide rate. The analysis suggests that police legitimacy has a substantial, negative association with homicide rates, consistent…
Review: Le dinar algérien, passé et présent: aspects de la politique monétaire et financière de l’Algérie
“Bader Eddine Nouioua, who served as governor of the Central Bank of Algeria from 1985 to 1989, has written a primer to explain Algerian money and banking to the public. And there is much to explain, as banking and finance are often blamed as key impediments to Algerian development. The banking system was singled out for early reform in 1986,…
State-led security responses and violent extremism: a comparative analysis of Libya, Egypt and Tunisia
“This article investigates the link between the deterioration of state-society relations and the increase in state-sponsored violence in the MENA region in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. It does so to address the question of whether state-led security responses are directly related to the perceived proliferation of violent extremism networks. Relying on the comparative analysis of Libya, Egypt and…
Muslim Attitudes Towards the European Union
“How do Muslim citizens across the globe perceive the European Union? And what factors influence their EU attitudes? This book offers the first systematic theoretical and empirical analysis of Muslim citizens’ EU attitudes in and outside the European Union. Using the best empirical data available, the book demonstrates that Muslim citizens’ attitudes are not shaped by their denomination and religious…
The Multidimensional Impact of Islamic Religiosity on Ethno-religious Social Tolerance in the Middle East and North Africa
“Ethno-religious tolerance is crucial for establishing sustainable democracy, which is scarce in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This study provides an empirically grounded and nuanced critique of Orientalist studies simply pointing at Islam. It presents a systematic analysis of the impact of religious belonging, belief, and behavior on social tolerance in the MENA, based on 32 uniquely synchronized…
Saudi Arabia plans for its economic future: Vision 2030, the National Transformation Plan and Saudi fiscal reform
“In response to a rapid decline in world oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman introduced a new economic blueprint called Saudi Vision 2030 and the accompanying National Transformation Plan that would enable the Kingdom to diversify its heavily oil-dependent revenue base, reduce its growing budget deficits, balance its budgets, and promote long-term economic growth. This article analyses…
Self-expression values, loyalty generation, and support for authoritarianism: evidence from the Arab world
“This study examines the micro foundations of political support in Arab polities. Most Arab states rank highly in aggregate human development or economic wealth, but they lag behind in democracy defying the predictions of modernization theory. Modernization and human development perspective implies that increased resources and self-expression values will induce critical political outlooks toward the regime. This study questions the…
Arab spring protests and women’s labor market outcomes: Evidence from the Egyptian revolution
“We analyze the effects of the 2011 Egyptian protests on the relative labor market conditions of women using panel data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). Using unique information from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, we geocode each “martyr”, i.e. demonstrators who died during the protests, based on the location of the political incident. We construct…
The Tunisian Revolution as a Catalyst to the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Revolution in North Africa and the Middle East
“This thesis research project is an attempt to understand the nature, sources, dynamics, and contradictions of the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-11. Contained within the thesis are seven chapters, each outlining political, economic, cultural, and social phenomena that precipitated the Revolution, as well as the dynamics following the Revolution. Chapter 1 provides a discussion of various competing theoretical perspectives on social…
Effects of Modernization and Globalization on Values Change in the Arab World
“This paper argues that social transformation processes generate shifts in public opinion among the public. More specifically, increasing rates of modernization and globalization in the Arab world over the past half century have led to a moving away from religion, tradition, and ethnocentrism to embracing more secular, liberal, and egalitarian values. Ordinary citizens in today’s Arab world are more tolerant…
The Arab Spring Five Years Later Volume One : Toward Greater Inclusiveness
“Since the series of uprisings of the Arab Spring began, the debate in Arab countries has focused almost exclusively on politics and questions of national identity. However, it is economic issues that are driving the agenda, and real economic grievances must be addressed in order for the many transitions to succeed. Hafez Ghanem gives a thorough assessment of the Arab…
Egypt’s 2011–2012 parliamentary elections: Voting for religious vs. secular democracy?
“This study investigates whether individuals’ attitudes towards democracy and secular politics have any influence on voting behaviour in Egypt. Based on data from survey conducted immediately after the Egyptian parliamentary elections in January 2012, this study finds that Egyptians’ attitudes towards democratic governance were quite negative around the parliamentary elections, yet Egyptians still endorsed democracy as the ideal political system…
Increasing Entrepreneurial Impact in the MENA Region
“This chapter treats countries of Middle East and of North Africa (MENA) as two similar but culturally distinct sub-regions of MENA. Using data collected by academics and international organisations (e.g. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, OECD, UNDP), Qatar, U.A.E., Jordan in the Middle East, and Morocco in North Africa, emerge as the countries most likely to have the potential to develop a…
Challenging Information Scarcity. The Effect of Internet Use on Protest under Authoritarian Regimes
“The importance of profoundly understanding the drivers behind protest under authoritarian regimes is hard to overestimate. Mass mobilisation can be the prelude to dramatic political ruptures that affect the lives of many. This can be for the better, as Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution or Slobodan Milosevic’ overthrow demonstrate, but protests can also be the overture of a nightmare, as revealed by…
Political Participation and Political Citizenship
“This chapter discusses the various definitions of political participation and political citizenship, as they encompass many activities used by citizens to influence the selection of political leaders or the policies they pursue. It also highlights the importance of political participation and citizenship, and how participation extends beyond parties and citizens’ involvement in certain aspects of the electoral process through independent…
Multiple fragmentations de la Méditerranée : quelles perspectives pour la sécurité régionale? (French)
“Double fragmentation on the southern and northern scale: what consequences? The Mediterranean is a space of ideological tensions, economic disparities and security tensions. Security is a strong common priority for the peoples and governments of the region. How can it become a common constructive project for the future?”
Revolution and Counterrevolution in Egypt
“Over eighteen days in January 2011, Tahrir Square in Cairo was featured in broadcasts around the world as the epicenter of Egypt’s thawra, or revolution. Festooned with flags and signs and posters, pulsing with the beat of music and speakers and protest chants from loudspeakers and stages, and filled with the sense of changing history, the square was temporarily transformed…
Outsourcing Welfare. how the Money Immigrants Send Home Contributes to Stability in Developing Countries
“In order to meet the International Monetary Fund’s debt-reduction guidelines, many developing country governments have had to retrenth their social welfare systems. This text is about how remittances – the hundreds of billions of dollars international migrants send to family members in their home countries each year – are helping to fill this welfare gap and prevent civil unrest in…
Envy and the Islamic revival: Experimental evidence from Tunisia
“I design and conduct a survey with an embedded lab-in-the-field experiment to test whether envy triggers popular support for the Islamic revival using a nationally representative sample of 600 Tunisians. Individuals exposed to high inequality may feel envious if they perceive that the success of others is granted rather than earned. Thus, envious individuals may be motivated to engage in…
Turnout in Transitional Elections: Who votes in Iraq?
“Electoral turnout in Iraq is a puzzling phenomenon. Despite the country’s lack of a democratic past, undeveloped party system, volatile political alliances, inexperienced voters, ethnic politics, sectarian violence, and terrorism, Iraqis’ electoral engagement has reached impressive levels. Given the importance of political participation at the foundational stages of democracy, this article places the individual within a broad context to draw…
Affinity, arming, consequences, and perceptions: an introduction
This article provides an introduction to the special issue on Political violence: affinity, arming, consequences, and perceptions. The issue contains panel analyses, theoretical investigations, and a quantification study. With respect to terrorism, four of the articles study perceptions regarding democratic skepticism, security effectiveness, refugee hosting risks, and financial well-being. Although much of the special issue addresses aspects of terrorism, some…
Science and Innovation Policies in North African Countries: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities
“Effective science, technology and innovation (STI) policies and strategies reflect a country’s successful contribution to scientific advancement. While the economic and geopolitical framework of many North African Countries (NACs) transformed enormously during the past decades, their relevant policies and performance were not responsive enough in adapting to these dynamics. This review is meant to highlight the current development and evolution…
Talking with the Muslim World
“The struggle against terrorism in the Middle East has led to a quest to find ways to counter the appeal of violent extremists. Thus far, US counter-messaging has failed to articulate a normative position that is responsive to the deeply-held beliefs of the majority of the world’s Muslims. To form a sounder approach, one must acknowledge that there are two…
Tunisia: Changing Patterns of Women’s Representation
“Benstead traces women’s descriptive political representation in Tunisia from the first woman elected to parliament in 1959 to the introduction of the law of parity following the Arab spring, which commits the state to ensuring equal representation in elected institutions. Under Ben Ali’s state feminism, the Constitutional Rally for Democracy (RCD) implemented a 20% party quota in 1999, which it…
The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. Social, Political and Economic Transformations
“The Arab Uprisings were unexpected events of rare intensity in Middle Eastern history – mass, popular and largely non-violent revolts which threatened and in some cases toppled apparently stable autocracies. This volume provides in-depth analyses of how people perceived the socio-economic and political transformations in three case studies epitomising different post-Uprising trajectories – Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt – and drawing…
Popular Support for Democracy in Autocratic Regimes: A Micro-Level Analysis of Preferences
“Scholarly opinions diverge as to which citizens in autocratic regimes actually prefer democracy to the status quo. While some argue that citizens with higher levels of socioeconomic status are more likely to prefer democracy because they desire political equality, others argue that the poor should prefer democracy most because they will have more relative power to affect redistributive policies. Analyzing…
Conceptions of Sharia and Support for Militancy and Democratic Values: Evidence From Pakistan
“Numerous empirical studies of the relationship between popular support for Islamism and support for democracy and violence have yielded inconclusive results. We suspect that this is largely because scholars have not operationalized support for Shari`a in ways that capture the concept’s multi-dimensionality. In this paper, we employ data derived from a carefully designed survey instrument that casts unique insights into…
Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view
“Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on…
Arab Public Opinion: Between Attachment to Islam and Commitment to Democracy
“International surveys of personal values have existed for almost 40 years (since 1981) in most European countries (the European Values Study or EVS) and in many countries of the world (the World Values Survey), enabling us to observe the evolution of the values of the citizenry in many areas (religion, family, politics, trust, tolerance etc.). Only in much more recent…
The Arab Spring, Support for Democracy, and Political Action: Seeking an Explanation for the Authoritarian Paradox in the Middle East
“This paper investigates the relationship between support for democracy and willingness to take political action in the Middle East before and after the Arab Spring. Despite general support for democracy in many Arab nations, as evidenced by open popular protests, most of the region remains under authoritarian rule. To explain this, I analyzed survey data from the World Values Survey…
In the Triple Threat to Tunisia’s Democracy, Corruption is King
“As austerity protestors clash with security forces in Tunisia, the country’s young democracy is threatened by a triple challenge: Insecurity, a lack of socioeconomic development and persistent corruption are interlinked and reinforce each other. Individually and in concert they undermine citizens’ confidence in the democratic system and hamper its ability to produce democracy dividends. Corruption is the most pernicious of…
The Frailties of Lebanese Democracy: Outcomes and Limits of the Confessional Framework
“Lebanon is frequently referred to as a model of a plural and stable democracy in the Middle East: a multi-ethnic and pluri-religious society that guarantees political representation through a power-sharing confessional framework. Numerous authors also see the consociational model as the best democratic alternative given such a high degree of domestic heterogeneity. However, by emphasising Lebanese stability vis-à-vis a troubled…
Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy. World System and World Values Perspectives
“This book provides an in-depth analysis of public opinion patterns among Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. On the basis of data from the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer Project and the Arab Opinion Index, it compares the dynamics of Muslim opinion structures with global publics and arrives at social scientific predictions of value changes in the region. Using…
Introduction to Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment Across the Globe: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Research
“This chapter establishes definitions of key concepts such as women’s political empowerment and establishes the theoretical and empirical goals of this volume. We identify the complexities in defining women’s global political empowerment, critically review prior research on elites and masses to develop definitional and measurement goals, and tie women’s global political empowerment to broader social concerns and processes. We briefly…
Political Elites in the Middle East and North Africa
“The Middle East and North Africa, consisting of most of the Arab League members plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey, are regions of the traditional Muslim homeland that lie closest to Europe and where post-colonial elites were particularly conditioned by the dialectics of emancipation. The more protracted the struggle, the greater the opportunities to forge populations into new nations led by…
How Global Citizenries Think about Democracy: An Evaluation and Synthesis of Recent Public Opinion Research
“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes…
Transitional Justice in Tunisia: Any Role for Islam?
In a study on transitional justice in post-Arab Spring Tunisia, AB’s suvey data is cited to show that the majority of Tunisians consider the economic situation and corruption as the most important problems facing the country. Read the full article at E-International Relations.
Determinants of input- and output-oriented conceptions of democracy in the Arabic world: a multi-level analysis (German)
“Since the 1990’s, more and more studies have been analyzing conceptions of democracy. This study focuses on determinants of conceptions of democracy in the Arabic world. Thereby, we distinguish between input- and output-oriented conceptions of democracy. Whereas the former ones are highlighting procedural elements of democracy, the latter ones focus on materialistic aspects of democracy. We test different theories (modernization…
Who votes for Islamists? A cross-national study of 10 Muslim-majority countries
The literature on Islamist voters is scarce. There are little emphases on Islamist voters and, conversely, plenty of scholarly works on Islamist movements and Islamists who support and sympathize with them. Therefore, this thesis aims to remedy this shortcoming in the political science literature and study Islamist voters as political animals. Precisely, the study is focused on underlining the main…
Arab Public Opinion: Between Attachment to Islam and Commitment to Democracy
International surveys of personal values have existed for almost 40 years (since 1981) in most European countries (the European Values Study or EVS) and in many countries of the world (the World Values Survey), enabling us to observe the evolution of the values of the citizenry in many areas (religion, family, politics, trust, tolerance etc.). Only in much more recent…
Anger Management : The Politics of Frustration in the Arab World and its Implications for the West
…… According to Michael Robbins, an American who heads Arab Barometer, society is driving change, with much of the region growing less religious (The Economist 2017-1). Although the figures need to be studied with some perspective, it seems that Egyptians are praying less (see Table 4), with a decrease of piety over time and these shifts most visible among the young-…
No Arab Bourgeoisie, No Democracy? The Entrepreneurial Middle Class and Democratic Attitudes since the Arab Spring
This study examines the democratic attitudes of the Arab world’s small business community before and after the start of the Arab Spring. We begin by analyzing the results from three waves of the Arab Barometer surveys (2006–2009, 2010–2011, and 2012–2014). All together, these datasets comprise more than 34,000 individuals, which include 3,075 small business owners across fourteen Arab countries. Our…
What Money Can’t Buy: Wealth, Inequality, and Economic Satisfaction in the Rentier State
How do perceived inequalities in allocation impact citizen satisfaction with state-distributed benefits in rentier societies? Resource-rich rentier regimes are widely theorized to maintain the economic and political satisfaction of subjects through wealth distribution. Yet, while qualitative research in the rentier states of the Arabian Peninsula has identified unequal distribution as a source of discontent, the relative importance of objective versus…
Gender, migration and the Arab Spring: evidence from Egypt
Dans les années récentes, plusieurs pays du Moyen Orient et de l’Afrique du Nord (MENA) ont témoigné des vagues de manifestations et de mouvements révolutionnaires, connus sous le nom du « Printemps arabe ». Ces séries de manifestations se sont révélées contagieuses ; elles ont commencé en Tunisie en 2010 et se sont rapidement propagées dans la région. L’Egypte, le…
Limiting Change Through Change: The Key to the Algerian Regime’s Longevity
Algeria is an island of stability in a tumultuous region. Almost seven years after the Arab Spring uprisings, the Algerian regime has shown a significant degree of resilience and adaptability. The country’s relative peace and the regime’s longevity reflect the capacity of elites to dispense political and economic resources in a controlled manner. This approach has created an appearance of…
Review of Islam and Politics in the Middle East: Explaining the Views of Ordinary Citizens by Mark Tessler
Mark A. Tessler is a prominent political scientist, Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, who has worked on comparative politics, International Relations and world politics for more than forty-five years. His works have been translated into French and Persian. He is probably the leading authority on public opinion in the Middle East, and has published numerous…
The EU, Resilience and the MENA Region
Resilience is one of the key concepts introduced in the European Union’s foreign and security lexicon, especially following its inclusion as the main leitmotif of the EU Global Strategy (EUGS). Unveiled by the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission (HR/VP) Federica Mogherini in late June 2016, the EUGS…
Where Are Ennahdha’s Competitors?
The past decades have witnessed a remarkable transformation in the ideology of Tunisia’s Ennahdha. While in the 1970s the movement could have been described as an “anti-democratic and illiberal movement […] determined to impose religious law over democratic electoral decisions,”1 it is today better known (and seeks to be known) as a Muslim Democratic party—a party inspired by Islam yet…
The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia: Social, Political and Economic Transformations
The Arab Uprisings were unexpected events of rare intensity in Middle Eastern history – mass, popular and largely non-violent revolts which threatened and in some cases toppled apparently stable autocracies. This volume provides in-depth analyses of how people perceived the socio-economic and political transformations in three case studies epitomising different post-Uprising trajectories – Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt – and drawing…
The EU-Tunisia Privileged Partnership – What Next?
On 15 May 2018, Tunisia and the European Union (EU) will hold an Association Council meeting where they are expected to adopt partnership priorities, the dedicated framework used since the review of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2015 in replacement of the former action plan. Since the last Association Council meeting in May 2017, some voices on both sides…
The Islamic State’s Lingering Legacy among Young Men from the Mosul Area
After expulsion of Islamic State forces from Mosul, Iraq’s government declared the country “fully liberated” and the Islamic State “defeated.” But field interviews and non-threatening psychological experiments with young Sunni Arab men from the Mosul area indicate that the Islamic State may have lost its “caliphate,” but not necessarily the allegiance of supporters of both a Sunni Arab homeland and…
Instability in the South
The Arab uprisings of 2011 (and their national aftermaths) have led to a collapse of the regional order, thus transforming the Southern Mediterranean shores into a basin of persistent instability. The continuing volatility and conflicts in NATO’s southern neighborhood directly affect the security of the Alliance. Threats emanating from terrorist groups and the migration crisis are largely due to economic,…
Survey Research in the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities
Survey research has expanded in the Arab world since the 1980s. The Arab Spring marked a watershed when surveying became possible in Tunisia and Libya, and researchers added additional questions needed to answer theoretical and policy questions. Almost every Arab country now is included in the Arab Barometer or World Values Survey. Yet, some scholars express the view that the…
Who Benefits from Consociationalism? Religious Disparities in Lebanon’s Political System
This study examines the extent to which confessional identities in Lebanon are responsible for shaping individual views toward their government. Specifically, I investigate disparities between religious groups in their perceptions of democracy and democratic principles as applied in Lebanon. Using nationally representative data from the Arab Barometer’s survey of Lebanon, I find that when compared to Maronite Catholics, Druze, and…
Popular Support for Democracy in Autocratic Regimes: A Micro-Level Analysis of Preferences
Scholarly opinions diverge as to which citizens in autocratic regimes actually prefer democracy to the status quo. While some argue that citizens with higher levels of socioeconomic status are more likely to prefer democracy because they desire political equality, others argue that the poor should prefer democracy most because they will have more relative power to affect redistributive policies. Analyzing…
Surveys and Countering Violent Extremism
The intent of this practitioner guide is to better acquaint development practitioners with the use of surveys in preventing or countering violent extremism (CVE). Surveys are an excellent way to gather systematic data about violent extremism, as well as the behaviors and attitudes of the general public or important segments of the population such as victims, potential perpetrators, and even…
Advances in Survey Methods for the Developing World
Political scientists are fielding more and more surveys in the developing world. Yet, most survey research methodology derives from experiences in developed countries. Researchers working in the developing world often confront very different challenges to collecting high-quality data. Census data may be unreliable or outdated, enumerators may shirk, political topics may be sensitive, and respondents may be unaccustomed to and…
The Road to Higher and More Inclusive Growth in the Middle East and North Africa
Despite recent gains, regional growth remains too low and the benefits are shared by too few. Average incomes are stagnant, and poverty is rising in areas of conflict. Frustration runs high over the lack of job opportunities and access to affordable, high-quality public services. The call during the 2014 Amman Conference1 to generate robust growth, create jobs, provide equal opportunities,…
Implicit Attitudes Toward an Authoritarian Regime
Existing research on public opinion under authoritarianism focuses on the deliberative half of cognition. Yet in psychology, implicit attitudes and subconscious associations are often viewed as foundational, the basis for explicit attitudes and behavior. This paper adapts the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) to study Egyptian citizens’ attitudes toward President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Roughly 58% of respondents hold positive implicit…
In the Triple Threat to Tunisia’s Democracy, Corruption is King
As austerity protestors clash with security forces in Tunisia, the country’s young democracy is threatened by a triple challenge: Insecurity, a lack of socioeconomic development and persistent corruption are interlinked and reinforce each other. Individually and in concert they undermine citizens’ confidence in the democratic system and hamper its ability to produce democracy dividends.
Morocco 2040: Emerging by Investing in Intangible Capital
Titled “Morocco 2040 – Emerging by Investing in Intangible Capital”, the Morocco Country Economic Memorandum 2017 is a comprehensive report aimed at assessing Morocco’s recent economic performance and its prospects for growth over the next two decades. The report outlines the economic governance reforms that could facilitate the achievement of an ambitious, albeit realistic, scenario of faster sustainable economic growth…
Security Reform during Democratic Transitions Experimental Evidence from Tunisia
The “Arab Spring” of 2010-2011 demonstrated that authoritarian collapse does not guarantee a transition to democracy. After revolutions, newly elected governments face a dilemma: they must rely on existing security institutions to restore order and stability, but they also must reform these potentially counterrevolutionary forces. In addition, these governments are now responsible to newly enfranchised populations. This paper offers a…
Understanding the Context: Hopes and Challenges in 2011
This chapter discusses the causes of the Arab Uprisings, who took part, what people saw as the main challenges facing their country and what their hopes were. It outlines the principal explanations for the Uprisings, then uses survey data to explore people’s views on key issues. We consider what we can learn from public opinion surveys about ordinary people’s assumptions…
How Terrorism Affects Attitudes toward Democracy: Tunisia in 2015
Tunisia is the only country that emerged from the Arab Spring as a democracy. However, Tunisian democracy is threatened by political divisions, economic problems, and the threat of terrorist attacks. We shed light on Tunisia’s democratic prospects by examining (1) the degree to which major terrorist attacks in 2015 influenced Tunisian public opinion on democracy and (2) the extent to…
Did the Egyptian protests lead to change? Evidence from Egypt’s first free Presidential elections
Did the Egyptian protests lead to political change? I examine the effects of the first and second waves of Egyptian protests that started in 2011, on voting outcomes during Egypt’s first free Presidential elections that took place between May and June 2012. I geocoded the “martyrs” – demonstrators who died during the protests – using unique information from the Statistical…
Socio-economic Inequality and the Failure of Development Strategies for the Middle East
The main drivers of the Arab Uprisings were economic grievances and a perceived growth in inequalities. Poor economic growth and lack of inclusive policies are the underlying causes of insecurity in the region The main concerns of people in the MENA are economic security and corruption. People think that the best way in which the EU can help their countries…
Tunisia’s Corruption Contagion: A Transition at Risk
Corruption is a destabilizing force in Tunisia, infecting all levels of its economy, security, and political system. Once tightly controlled under former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, corruption has now become endemic, with everyday citizens engaging in and benefitting from corrupt practices. Numerous legal measures and civil society initiatives have been working to fight corruption, but it is perceived to…
World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law
The past 20 years have seen enormous progress around the world in socioeconomic indicators. The rapid diffusion of technology and greater access to capital and world markets have enabled economic growth rates that were previously unfathomable, and they have helped lift over 1 billion people out of poverty. And yet increased flows have also led to rising inequality, both within…
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…
Egypt
Egypt is one of the few great empires of antiquity that exists today as a nation state. Despite its extraordinary record of national endurance, the pressures to which Egypt currently is subjected and which are bound to intensify are already straining the ties that hold its political community together, while rendering ever more difficult the task of governing it. In…
Monarchy and Effective Governance: The Success of Middle Eastern Monarchies and the Arab Spring
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Spring from the perspective of regime types within the Middle East and North Africa. The intense year of protest that spread throughout the Arab world had disparate effects between countries which this paper investigates. Utilizing an institutional approach, I separate the Arab world into monarchic and…
What Drives Migration from the Middle East? Why People Want to Leave Arab States
Drivers of migration include conflicts and instability, but are mostly economic. Over half of migrants and displaced persons originating from MENA stay within the region. Most likely to emigrate are young educated men seeking temporary stays to find work. EU public debate focuses on potential security threats from population inflows, but ignore economic benefits both to host countries and to…
Beyond the Arab Spring: Will economic and security challenges further test Tunisia’s democracy?
This paper examines Afrobarometer public opinion data to assess the extent to which citizens have embraced political challenges since 2011. Do Tunisians perceive an improvement of the country and the North Africa region since the events of the Arab Spring? Are they supportive of democracy and the way it is being implemented? What role do they think religion should play…
A Broken Social Contract, Not High Inequality, Led to the Arab Spring
During the 2000s, expenditure inequality in Arab countries was low or moderate and, in many cases, declining. Different measures of wealth inequality were also lower than elsewhere. Yet, there were revolutions in four countries and protests in several others. We explain this so‐called “inequality puzzle” by first noting that, despite favorable income inequality measures, subjective well‐being measures in Arab countries…
Fostering support for non-democratic rule? Controlled political liberalization and popular support for non-democratic regimes
When the Cold War ended, many non-democratic regimes across the globe embarked on a course of controlled political liberalization, hoping to stabilize their autocratic rule by mitigating popular demands for democratization and increasing regime legitimacy. But does this strategy actually work? This article uses multi-level analyses to examine how the degree of political liberalization affects regime support in non-democratic political…
Handbook of Empirical Research on Islam and Economic Life
Islamic economics and finance (IEF) has recently enjoyed a spike in interest and a rise in status from theology-tinged discussion fodder for Muslim intellectuals to a fully fledged academic discipline knocking on the doors of university social science departments. The Handbook of Empirical Research on Islam and Economic Life provides a solid background and overview of current empirical research, evaluating…
Trust and Tolerance across the Middle East and North Africa: A Comparative Perspective on the Arab Uprisings
The protests that swept the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are expected to have influenced two key civic atti-tudes fundamental to well-functioning democracies: trust and tolerance. However, systematic comparative assessmentsof the general patterns and particularities in this region are rare. This contribution theorizes the uprisings’ impact andpresents new society-level measurements of trust and tolerance for the MENA, synchronizing…
Youth, Religion and Democracy After the Arab Uprisings: Evidence from the Arab Barometer
This article compares the changes over time in attitudes of youth in Egypt and Tunisia, two countries that experienced dramatic political changes in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. The primary comparison is the change in attitudes over time within each country; views of youths just after the respective revolutions are compared with views of a similar cohort two years…
Social Distance in Iraq and Lebanon
Research has found that tensions, conflicts, and wars worsen the views groups hold towards each other and, plausibly, increase social distance (Parks 1924; Bogardus 1925; Owen et al. 1981; Siber 1997; Parrillo and Donoghue 2005; Oswald 2005; Strabac 2016). Since the twentieth century the Middle East is caught up in interlocking pattern of crises, conflicts, wars, and terrorism. Almost every…
Measuring Public Support for Democracy: A Resource Guide
Individual attitudes to democracy are important for its functioning and survival. Positive attitudes to, and perceptions of, democracy can support collective resistance to state abuse and help prevent modern democratic backsliding. In contrast, negative attitudes to democracy can drive or signal democratic backsliding and even the deconsolidation of democracy. Scholars assume that high levels of public satisfaction with, trust in,…
Gender Ideals in Turbulent Times: An Examination of Insecurity, Islam, and Muslim Men’s Gender Attitudes during the Arab Spring
Using Arab Barometer data (2011), the authors examine Muslim men’s gender attitudes in four predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern and North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen) during the Arab Spring. They examine if living in insecurity – which may threaten men’s ability to attain masculine ideals – is related to male overcompensation, evident in strong support for patriarchal gender…
Explaining Egalitarian Attitudes: The Role of Interests and Exposure
Women’s exclusion from the workforce in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a substantial problem. The Middle East has the world’s lowest rates of female labor froce participation — 26 perecent compared to 54 percent worldwide (USAID 2014) — and a gender gap in youth unemployment — 43 percent for females and 25 percent for males (Barnes 2013)….
Community-Driven Development and Social Capital: Evidence from Morocco
Community-driven development rests on the principle of development aid through community participation, which is expected to promote pro-social behavior. This paper studies the impact of such a program in Morocco on social capital as measured by economic field experiments. We played a public goods game to measure how much people care about others in the community, an investment game to…
The Desire for Sovereignty — An Explanation of EU Attitudes in the Arab World
A growing body of survey research shows that the European Union (EU) has a relatively benign image around the world, except among Arab populations. What informs Arab citizens’ sceptical attitudes toward the European Union (EU)? Combining literature on Arab public opinion and perceptions of the EU, we argue that Arab citizens’ feelings about the EU are influenced most prominently by…
Coke, Pepsi or Mecca Cola? Why product characteristics affect the likelihood of collective action problems and boycott success
Under what conditions do individuals who profess to boycott products align actual and intended consumption habits? Inconsistency between self-reported participation and practice can help explain why few boycott campaigns harm targets despite high political consumption rates reported in surveys of Americans and Europeans. Arab boycotts are fertile yet unexplored settings in which to assess this proposition. Using data from 820…