This paper empirically studies the voting outcomes of Egypt's first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success in the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist vs. secular voting. We identify three dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: the socio-economic profile, the economic structure and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence which suggests that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Later voting stages in the sequential voting setup do not exhibit a bandwagon effect.
Egyptian women have played an unprecedented role in the Arab Spring democratic movement, possibly changing women's perception about their own rights and role. We question whether these events have translated into better outcomes within Egyptian households. We conjecture that potential changes must have been heterogeneous and depended on the local intensity of protests and women's participation over 2011-13. We exploit the geographical heterogeneity along these two margins to conduct a double difference analysis using data surrounding the period. We find a significant improvement in women's final say regarding decisions on health, socialization and household expenditure, as well as a decline in the acceptation of domestic violence and girls' circumcision, in the regions most affected by the protests. This effect is not due to particular regional patterns or pre-existing trends in empowerment. It is also robust to alternative treatment definitions and confirmed by triple difference estimations. We confront our main interpretation to alternative mechanisms that could have explained this effect.
One hundred and eight newspaper accounts of events of the Arab Spring were analyzed in an attempt to define how the events and the accompanying Internet censorship were framed in the news coverage in mainland China compared with that in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The newspapers in all three media markets were found to have constructed their coverage within the ideological boundaries prevailing in their respective markets. This resulted in differing news stories about the same event or the same issue. News framing was analyzed in terms of news perspective and favorability toward the protesters or the government. Framing of Internet censorship reporting was also analyzed. The results show significant differences in coverage among the three markets. The frames employed in the coverage are interpreted in terms of the markets' ideological differences and differences in press freedom. The reasons for these differences and theoretical implications are explored.
PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the impact of governance quality on total unemployment in general and female unemployment in particular in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, comparing the post-Arab Spring period to the pre-Arab Spring era.Design/methodology/approachA fixed-effects model was used to analyze data from 15 MENA countries from 2002 to 2019.FindingsOur results generally indicate that following the Arab Spring, an enhancement in governance quality is linked with a reduction in unemployment in the MENA region, specifically in the Levant and GCC regions, with this reducing effect being stronger for female unemployment compared to total unemployment. Yet, this trend does not hold in North Africa, where government improvements do not result in better employment.Originality/valueThis study uniquely uncovers the different effects of governance quality on unemployment across sub-regions and sheds light on its significant implications on female unemployment. The findings offer valuable insights for policymakers interested in the relationship between governance quality and economic outcomes in the region.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2022-0826
Abstract One of the most overlooked areas of study in the post-Arab Spring narrative is the symbiotic relationship between language and politics. Framed by the micro and macro-level approaches to discourse, the paper's scope is twofold. First, it identifies and discusses how language elements underpin the performative role of language (Austin 1975 [1962]) and considers Searle's (1969) work on speech-acts and rhetoric through irony and metaphor. Second, it discusses how the study of language, through power and ideology, provides a candid and deeper understanding of Tunisian politics; an 'internal' perspective on how participants in these discourses perceive the Tunisian people, society, culture, and politics, reflecting on a decade since the revolution. The paper hinges on various textual genres, such as televised interviews, debates, and rap songs, sampling some emerging new sociopolitical spaces wherein, through discursive themes, participants address Tunisia's political and economic grievances since the revolution.
This paper analyses the goals and instruments of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) before and after the Arab Spring, and enquires why there has been little substantive change in the European Union's (EU's) approach to the neighbourhood, notwithstanding the acknowledged opportunity for democratic change and the EU's stated willingness to contribute to it. It argues that the institutional governance of the ENP has largely conditioned the EU's response to the historic changes in the neighbourhood. The EU's actorness has been tamed by the underlying differences among EU member states and this has particularly played out in policy areas where the EU institutions have less freedom to act on behalf of the Union. Overall, the EU has asserted itself as neither a strategic actor nor a normative power, but rather as a bystander, trapped in its internal institutional process and passively reacting to crisis events by proposing long-term solutions with little short-term impact. Adapted from the source document.
Two years after the outbreak of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring, the bloom is off the rose. Fledgling democracies in North Africa are struggling to move forward or even maintain control, government crackdowns in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere have kept liberalization at bay, and Syria is slipping ever deeper into a vicious civil war that threatens to ignite the Middle East. Instead of widespread elation about democracy finally coming to the region, one now hears pessimism about the many obstacles in the way, fear about what will happen next, and even open nostalgia for the old authoritarian order. The skepticism is as predictable as it is misguided. Every surge of democratization over the last century -- after World War I, after World War II, during the so-called third wave in recent decades -- has been followed by an undertow, accompanied by widespread questioning of the viability and even desirability of democratic governance in the areas in question. Adapted from the source document.
This essay provides programmatic and administrative recommendations for the effective building of civil, governmental, and private capabilities to help implement human development driven by local communities in Morocco in light of the Arab Spring. The essay relates a human development model rooted in decentralization to situations with powerful regional implications: in Iraq, Palestine, and the Western (Moroccan) Sahara. The engine for sustainable human development depends on local communities and neighborhoods identifying, planning, and implementing the socioeconomic and environmental projects they most need. Morocco has created a number of essential national frameworks for promoting such development, but their implementation is inadequate due to a lack of financing, of effective training, and of the application of methods that promote communal dialogue and democratic planning. Human development is examined in the context of free trade, with particular attention paid to rural areas, where most poverty is concentrated.
The subject of this paper is a case study based on evidence gathered informally through delivery of a course at Birzeit University entitled 'Modern and Contemporary European Civilization' and from end-of-semester evaluations that asked students to reflect on the impact of the course on their lives. The author is, naturally, aware of the limitation of the methodology used in this study, and does not claim that its findings can be generalized authoritatively to a wider group of people in the Arab world. What is clear, however, if one considers reviews of internet blogs and media programme debates, is that extrapolations from this evidence have wider reference, revealing commonalities and similarities between Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and Arab youth involved in the Arab Spring on the subject of political reform. The discussions engaged in by my students actually parallel the debates generated by traditionalists and secularists in post-revolution Egypt and Tunisia. These debates revolve around what it means to live in a civil, democratic state that grants social justice and freedoms, and crucially, at present led by scholars and politicians, address the possibility of reconciling the concept of modernity with Islam and the legislative framework of Islamic law (sharīʿah). It could be argued that the data collected are specific to this one case study, since Palestinians living under Israeli occupation form a unique group in the Arab world and probably are more concerned with basic issues of daily life and more sensitive to Western concepts of modernity. The significance of this data is, however, that gathered during the Arab Spring, they were based on reactions to material covered in a class which related to issues raised by the Arab revolutions, such as democracy, liberalism and revolution. Furthermore, these tentative findings suggest that more research is needed into issues such as the role of education, gender, tolerance and the reconciliation of Islam with modernity – areas of interest which are of particular importance at a time when Islamic groups are winning elections and debates on concepts of authority, democracy and liberalism occupy the foreground of media programmes in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia.
