Arab public opinion in grim times

The new Arab Barometer wave offers a window into changing attitudes across the region.

The Arab Barometer just released the findings of its seventh wave, conducted from 2021-22. Over at TMC, Michael Robbins and Amaney Jamal present some of the key findings: shockingly widespread food insecurity, declining but still strong support for democracy, increasing support for women’s equality, deteriorating views of China. (You can also listen to me talking with Robbins about the results of the survey on the podcast here.) At the Arab Barometer site you can download six fantastic reports which systematically summarize and analyze the findings better than I could: Mohamed Abufalgha on migration; Michael Robbins on democracy and governance; Salma al-Shami in food insecurity; MaryClare Roche on gender attitudes; Robbins again on views of the US and China; and Nisrine Hilizah on race and anti-Blackness.

The release of a new Arab Barometer wave is always a big deal in the MENA political science community. It’s the gold standard for serious scientific public opinion survey research in the region, and it makes all of its data fully available for researchers to download and use. It’s hard to exaggerate how many academic journal publications on the Middle East have drawn on this freely available, high quality data. The consistent questions across seven waves allow for analysis of trends, while also (though this isn’t done often enough) allowing for cross-regional comparisons using Afrobarometer and other regional counterparts. I highly encourage junior scholars working on the MENA region to look into Arab Barometer data, and also to reach out to them about possibly adding questions relevant to their research to their battery. They are very nice people who are endlessly supportive of junior scholars and deeply dedicated to building up the local capacity of research centers in the countries they study.

I’m not going to try to present all of the major findings here. Robbins and Jamal have already done a great job of that. Instead, I want to reflect on two big issues on which I’ve recently published edited collections which offer intriguing alternative readings of the results: views of democracy, and view of racism and anti-Blackness.

Attitudes towards democracy

The headline finding of the seventh wave is that, as Robbins puts it, “there has been a dramatic increase in the degree to which the region’s citizens believe democracies are bad for economic performance, stability, and decisiveness.” Large majorities still believe that democracy is the best system of government despite its problems- ranging from highs of 81% in Lebanon and 77% in Jordan to lows of 54% in Morocco and 65% in Egypt - but the clear shift in views captures something quite real. In Tunisia, the percentage agreeing that democratic systems are better than other systems despite their problems declined from 85% in 2016 to 72% in 2021. In Morocco, the drop was even steeper, from 79% in 2016 to 54% in 2022. And no country tops 65% in agreeing that democracy is always preferable.

There are many of reasons distinctive to the Arab world for this shift towards pessism about democracy, but it’s interesting to compare these results to the findings of the Afrobarometer on the same topic. Last week, the Program on African Social Research released a collection of essays I edited entitled “Africa’s Struggle for Democracy.” Many of the authors drew on Afrobarometer data in their papers. Sulley Ibrahim, for instance, noted that support for democracy remains fairly strong even in countries which have experienced military coups: 62% and 75% of Burkinabe and Malians respectively reject military rule, while 57% of Guineans are satisfied with democracy as a form of government. Mahamadou Bassirou Tangara and Moumouni Diallo find that 60% of Malians express support for democracy in the 2019-20 Afrobarometer survey, but that’s down almost thirteen points from its 2014-15 peak of almost 75%. Louis Tomavo, looking at all 34 countries in the most recent Afrobarometer wave, shows that over 68% say democracy is the best system of government. There’s a wide range, though, from 90% agreeing with that in Ethiopia to only 37% in Angola. In other words, the democratic decline is global, not exclusively Arab. I’d like to see a good comparative study of the trends in the Middle East and those in Africa drawing on the Arab Barometer and Afrobarometer data — who’s going to write it?

Another big finding is the dramatic growth in the percentage of respondents agreeing that democracy tends to produce weaker economic performance: 72% of Iraqis, 70% of Tunisians, 63% of Palestinians, 57% of Jordanians. It’s easy to see why Iraqis or Tunisians would associate their nominally democratic systems with their disastrous economic conditions. But the broader trend of belief that democracy causes economic problems is striking, given how few Arabs actually live in democratic systems. Beyond the decades-long evidence that Arab autocracies have generally produced disastrous economic results, more recent resurgent autocracies haven’t done better: since his 2013 military coup, Sisi’s hyper-autocratic regime in Egypt has produced grim economic results, while since Kais Saied’s Tunisia can’t even keep basic food on the shelves. It’s easy to understand the growing appeal of a strongman who can deliver economic results (i.e. the China or UAE model), but all experience in the Arab world points to strongmen delivering terrible economic results through corruption, clientalism and crony capitalism. That disconnect between beliefs and lived reality bears additional research.

Views on race and anti-Blackness

This wave was the first time that Arab Barometer asked about views on race. I was particularly interested in this because of the work the collaborative POMEPS-PASR work I’ve doing with Hisham Aidi and Zachariah Mampilly on race in the Middle East and North Africa (especially see last year’s collection Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach). Many of the authors in that collection explicitly problematize the equation of race and Blackness, pointing towards dynamics of racialization in cases such as Lebanon, Turkey and Palestine. So I was absolutely fascinated to see how many respondents in the survey distinguished in their minds between racial discrimination and Blackness. Across most of the region, far more respondents believed that racial discrimination was a problem in their country compared to discrimination against Black individuals. Tunisia and Sudan were the only two countries in the survey where a majority thought both were a problem (see this outstanding piece by Afifa Ltifi for background on why that might be in Tunisia, and this one by Zachary Mondesire on Sudan).

Some of the individual country results were fascinating. In Egypt, only 8% said racial discrimination is a problem and 6% discrimination against Black individuals; anyone who has observed the treatment of Sudanese in Egypt or broader patterns of racial stereotypes would find this difficult to accept at face value. 59% of Palestinians said racial discrimination was a problem, but only 23% linked that to Blackness; this seems like a quite clear statement of their experience of racialized treatment by Israel (see Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan’s piece for more on that dynamic). In Jordan, 63% said racial discrimination was a problem, but only 17% connected that to Blackness; this suggests that respondents may be thinking of racial discrimination in terms of the Jordanian-Palestinian ethnic divide. Hopefully, the next wave of the Barometer can probe these puzzles with a more refined battery of questions that can really delve into how Arabs across the region understand race and its connection to Blackness.

On the Middle East Political Science Podcast

We released another great episode of the podcast this week. Nazanin Shahrokni of the London School of Economics discussed her new book, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran. The book offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran, and Shahrokni really does a great job of showing how that history helps make sense of the current wave of protests in Iran. (Starts at 1:07). Tarek Masoud of Harvard University then discusses his chapter in The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research Since the Arab Uprisings, which focuses on Islamism and the study of religion and politics in the Middle East. (Starts at 36:46). And, as mentioned above, Michael Robbins of the Arab Barometer discusses the seventh wave of the survey of the attitudes of citizens across the MENA. (Starts at 56:49).