Grievances or skills ? the effect of education on youth attitudes and political participation in Egypt and Tunisia

Abstract EN

There are two prominent accounts of the 2011 Arab Uprisings and the role of education in youth mobilization.

The first argument focuses on grievances: this hypothesis rests on a link between educational attainment and youth job aspirations that the labor market has not been able to fulfill.

These unfulfilled aspirations fuel grievances and, hence, protest.

The other argument focuses on mobilization costs.

The central hypothesis is that education provides the skills, knowledge and/or contacts that facilitate political participation.

This paper assesses and attempts to disentangle these two accounts by examining the effect of education on measures of grievance, political knowledge, and political participation using rich youth surveys from Egypt and Tunisia.

In order to partially deal with the endogeneity of education, we control for parental education and sibling fixed effects.

We find a strong and robust correlation of education with political knowledge and political participation, but not with grievances.