Individual preferences for democracy in the Arab world explaining the gap

Abstract EN

We take a new look at the question of the Arab democratic exception.

We use the new sixth wave of the World Value Survey, which was collected between 2012 and 2013, and which included for the first time 12 Arab countries, up from only four in wave 5.

We innovate empirically, by measuring the demand for democracy in a more robust way than past studies, and conceptually, by looking at how the forces of modernist aspirations, economic grievances, social preferences, and attachment to the status-quo interact for particular socio-economic groups to determine their preference for a democratic order over an autocratic one, and how these are affected in the Arab region by specificities related to self-interest, culture, and policy.

Our statistical analysis reveals a democratic gap in the Arab region, which is correlated, and thus possibly explained in parts, by lower emancipative effects of education among the educated, compared to global experience.

We argue that these effects must have been shaped in parts by the policies of power preservation pursued by the autocratic regimes of the past, rather than by local culture lone.