This document examines the causes of the 2011 Arab uprisings by testing the relationship between economic grievances, social fragmentation, and mass movement in the Arab world. It analyzes how class-based (horizontal) cleavages related to economic factors like corruption and unemployment compare to group-based (vertical) cleavages along ethnic, tribal and religious lines in predicting popular uprisings. The document reviews literature on the impact of both types of social divisions, finding that only perceptions of corruption were significantly linked to the Arab uprisings, while both high and low levels of ethnic fragmentation were also correlated with mass movement. Tribalism was found to negatively impact protests but it is unclear if this is due to regime type.

1.
Causes of the Arab Uprisings
The opposing forces of economic grievance and social fragmentation
Distinguished Majors Thesis, University of Virginia
Philip David Sweigart
Social differences can be divided into two varieties: class‐based and group‐based differences. In societies where
class‐based differences are prominent, mass movement is more likely to occur. Where group‐based differences are
more significant, social fragmentation along ethnic, tribal and religious lines makes mass movement less likely. This
study examines the accuracy of these two claims by testing their validity in the context of the Arab uprisings of
2011. Of a list of economic grievance factors including perceptions of corruption, unemployment rates, youth
unemployment rates, and GDP growth rates, only perceptions of corruption are found to have a positive and
statistically significant relationship with mass movement. Both high and low levels of ethno‐religious fragmentation
are found to be correlated with mass movement. Tribalism has a negative effect on mass movement, but it is
unclear whether this effect is actually due to regime type.
April 22, 2012
Photo by Strategic Institute United States Army War College

2. Sweigart 2
Distinguished Major Thesis
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Causes of the Arab Uprisings
The opposing forces of economic grievance and social fragmentation
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PHILIP DAVID SWEIGART
University of Virginia
April 2012

3. Sweigart 3
In early 2011, a series of popular revolutions rocked the Arabic-speaking world as
citizens rose up, overthrowing governments in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt and threatening
autocrats elsewhere. In Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, government forces continue to pacify mass
protests, by force when deemed necessary.
These revolutions are unprecedented in the Arab world, an area where scholars have
speculated for years over the absence of effective mass movement. Academics have studied in
depth the extraordinary resilience of autocratic regimes in the region, regimes that skillfully
employed a repertoire of repression and faux democratic institutions to deflect forces for change.
The role of religious and ethnic differences in Middle Eastern politics has often enjoyed
considerable attention – after 9/11, the Middle East came to be seen as a hotbed of religious
fundamentalism, and as a result many secularist regimes enjoyed support from the United States
and European countries. The popularization of Islamist movements in the 1980s, as well as
widespread sympathy for Al Qaeda after 9/11, led many policymakers and observers to view
historical trends in the region as a struggle between progressive, secularizing leaders and
backwards Islamic fundamentalism, often spearheaded by Iran. The idea of religion and
religious intolerance as one of the primary causes of unrest in the region was reinforced by the
invasion of Iraq, which not only led to terrible sectarian violence, but also saw ethnic and tribal
tensions play a deadly role. Even today, the case has been made that the Arab uprisings of 2011
are no more than a continuation of battles that have been fought in the past between secularists,
Islamists, Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims. The successes of Islamist parties in recent
elections in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as manifestations of sectarian and ethno-tribal violence in
Syria and Egypt, are presented as evidence for this viewpoint.

4. Sweigart 4
Largely absent from the above analysis is an appreciation of the economic factors that
have also been at work in the region. Many have cited high unemployment, a burgeoning
population of youths and general social decay as some of the main reasons why protests erupted.
Economic difficulty is common in the Middle East, which suffers from low job creation and high
unemployment, as well as stagnant growth in GDP per capita.
This study was conceived in order to test the significance of tribal, ethnic and sectarian
differences versus economic trends in predicting the mass movements that emerged in 2011. We
expect that sectarianism, ethnocentrism and tribalism are negatively correlated with mass
movement, while economic grievances are positively correlated.
Bill & Springborg (1994) frame this debate admirably in their description of the social
foundations of Middle Eastern power structures. The authors suggest that there are two different
types of cleavages that separate members of a society from each other: class-based, or horizontal,
cleavages, and differences in group membership, or vertical cleavages.
In Western societies, horizontal cleavages are more significant than vertical ones. Large,
formalized organizations that cut across lines of group membership are more powerful than the
networks of personal and social relationships. These organizations are set up to advance the
interests of a certain class of people, such as minorities or the elderly or, in the case of unions,
the working class. Political parties also tend to be class-based. In Middle Eastern societies and
other societies where vertical cleavages are more prominent than horizontal cleavages, most
important decisions are made in the context of small, informal, groups where interaction is
highly personalized. Membership in these groups typically transcends class structures: members
of the same group may belong to the upper, middle or lower classes, and move between them

5. Sweigart 5
with relative ease. In contexts where group formations are resilient, class conflict appears to be
tempered due to the social mobility that they provide. The most effective vehicle for social
advancement is forging alliances with powerful members of one’s own group, not collective
action in the context of class conflict. The most important vertical cleavages are defined by
common descent.
Vertical cleavages: Ethnicities
The importance of descent in determining ethnic identity is well-documented. Max
Weber, Horowitz (1985), Hutchinson & Smith (1996), and Fearon & Laitin (2000) all assert that
ethnic identity is based primarily in some way on descent or myths of descent, although other
factors are also discussed.
A large body of literature explaining the causal link between ethnic differences and civil
conflict emerged in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, when ethnic
nationalisms seemed to regain relevancy following the implosion of Communist ideology. This
was the era of ethnic and sectarian conflicts in the Balkans, the secession of the Central Asian
republics from the USSR, and when Samuel Huntington first published “The Clash of
Civilizations.”
One strand of theory frames ethnic conflict within the large body of literature on civil
conflict. Ethnic and religious variation in a society or organization has been shown to decrease
the likelihood of cooperation (Easterly & Levine 1997, Alesina et al 1999, Collier 2001). Others
transposed international relations theory onto the milieu of ethnic groups, treating ethnic groups
more or less as states. Posen (1993) argued that ethnic groups, like states, experience the effects
of the security dilemma: a history of inter-group conflict, geographic isolation, or vulnerability to

6. Sweigart 6
extremists can engender mistrust between ethnic groups, causing them to take defensive actions
against their rivals that are misconstrued as offensive. Other scholars (Lake and Rothchild 1996,
Walter 1999) picked up on this issue of insecurity, expanding it to include explanations of
rational choice. Collier and Hoeffler’s seminal 2004 article “Greed and Grievance in Civil War”
uses the index of ethno-linguistic fractionalization (the probability that two people will be drawn
from different ethnic or linguistic groups) to quantitatively evaluate its effect, finding that the
higher the value of the index, the more likely a society will experience civil war.
Social psychologists have also offered up a number of explanations for ethnic conflict.
Staub (1989, 2008), theorizes that collective frustration causes groups to vent their anger,
creating conditions in which genocidal violence can occur. Drawing on examples from early
modern European witch hunts, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan
genocide, Glick (2002, 2005, 2008) goes farther, proposing a model of “ideological
scapegoating” in which ethnic groups blame each other for their own perceived misfortunes.
Due to complex causes of misfortune and lack of information, established cultural ideologies and
stereotypes of the “other,” and the attractiveness of blaming others rather than facing their own
shortcomings, ethnic groups often scapegoat other groups, leading to conflict. Others (Hewstone
et al 2008) posit that in situations where sustained positive intergroup contact occurs, stereotypes
break down, lessening the chances of conflict.
Chandra (2006) critiques some of the methodologies used in studies that use ethnicity as
an independent variable. Attempting to standardize definitions of ethnicity, she posits that
“ethnic identity categories…are a subset of identity categories in which eligibility for
membership is determined by descent-based attributes.” These attributes can be either real or
imagined. Chandra then proceeds to define the range of descent-based attributes:

7. Sweigart 7
(a) They are impersonal – that is, they are an “imagined community” in which members are not
part of an immediate family or kin group; (b) they constitute a section of a country’s population
rather than the whole; (c) if one sibling is eligible for membership in a category at any given
place, then all other siblings would also be eligible in that place; and (d) the qualifying attributes
for membership are restricted to one’s own genetically transmitted features or to the language,
religion, place of origin, tribe, region, caste, clan, nationality, or race of one’s parents and
ancestors. (Chandra, 400)
Chandra admits that the ethnic identity categories “appear somewhat arbitrary,” and ultimately
concludes that they present problems for research that measures ethnicity. Ethnicity can change
relatively quickly over time. Languages and places of origin change with migration. Religion
changes through conversion to other faiths. Even genetically transmitted features such as skin
color, while more difficult to alter, can be changed with modern technology. This presents a
special problem for the majority of studies on ethnicity, which assume that it is fixed (Chandra &
Boulet, unpublished). Chandra thus divides ethnic characteristics into two categories: “more
sticky” and “less sticky.”
Ethnic diversity in the Middle East has long played a significant role in the politics of the
region. Restive Kurdish minorities in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey have advocated secession
from those countries and the formation of a Kurdish state since the first World War (e.g., Olson
1989). Berbers and Touareg in North Africa, particularly Algeria, have at times had a
confrontative relationship with their Arab neighbors (Maddy-Weitzman, 2006).
A word should also be said about religion. Religion in the Middle East is a relatively
sticky ethnic characteristic. Bahrain was the only country in the Middle East and North Africa
that did not score “0” in the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Project in 2010 – a score
of zero indicates that there are severe restrictions on religious freedom in that country, including

8. Sweigart 8
but not limited to restrictions on conversion to minority religions. Because conversions to other
religions are so rare, religion is treated in this analysis as a sticky ethnic characteristic.
Tribes
The Middle Eastern context is complicated by the predominance of tribes in addition to
ethnicities. A tribe is a group of individuals united by a common ancestor, or at the very least, a
myth of a common ancestor. Tribes are composed of clans, which are in turn composed of
smaller units called ‘asha’ir, or literally, “groups of ten.” Unlike other parts of the world where
tribes and ethnic groups are largely synonymous, such as Africa, tribes in the Middle East are
ethnically similar and claim common ancestry: tribes can thus be thought of as a subset of
ethnicities (Tibi 1990).
An important question is whether theories of ethnic conflict can be applied in the Middle
Eastern tribal context. Tibi’s (1990) definition of tribes as a kind of sub-ethnicity suggests that
this may be the case. Chandra, as well, includes tribes and clans in her list of ethnic
characteristics, although she may be referring to non-Middle Eastern concepts of the tribe.
However, tribes pose a special problem for the application of ethnic conflict theory because,
even more so than is the case with ethnicities, membership in tribes is highly dynamic and fluid.
Tribal confederations, usually forged through blood ties (imagined or real), are constantly
shifting, fragmenting, and reforming (Bill & Springborg 1994). It is virtually impossible, then,
to construct a quantitative measure that takes into account tribal differences.
Salzman (2008) discusses in detail the importance of tribes in Middle Eastern society and
their political implications with respect to conflict and modernization, drawing on
anthropological ethnographies of Middle Eastern tribes such as Lancaster’s authoritative study

9. Sweigart 9
on the Rwala Bedouin of the Levant (1981), as well as other studies on tribes in Iran (Avery
1965, Fisher 1968), Libya (Evans-Pritchard 1949), Oman (Barth 1983, Chatty 1996), and Saudi
Arabia (Cole 1975). Traditional patterns of conflict in tribal societies, Salzman asserts, reflect an
old Bedouin saying: “I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother,
and my cousin against the outsider.” Salzman calls this the principle of “ally with the closer
against the more distant.” Not only do these mantras express the system of vertical cleavages
that divide tribes and clans, but they also recall the “security dilemma” invoked in studies of
ethnic conflict, reflecting the realist strand of international relations theory.
Horizontal cleavages: Class
A second body of literature explores the role of horizontal cleavages, particularly class
differences, in causing mass movements. The theory that economic grievances bring about
collective action first arose in the 1960s. Relative deprivation theory (Davies 1962, 1969; Gurr
1968, 1970; Feierabend et al 1969) holds that collective action occurs when there are gaps
between expectations and reality. These gaps cause individuals to mobilize collectively in order
to narrow the gap. Increasing political repression or unexpected economic decline were two
commonly suggested factors. Out of resource mobilization theory developed social breakdown
theory, which suggests that collective action occurs when the social structures that normally
regulate human life deteriorate or collapse, sowing frustration and moral outrage (Thompson
1971, Scott 1976). The pressures that weaken social structures can be demographic, ecological,
or economic in nature.
Breakdown theory was challenged in the 1970s by resource mobilization theory,
championed by Charles Tilly (1975, 1978) and others. Proponents of RM theory attributed

10. Sweigart 10
collective action to social solidarity rather than social breakdown, citing examples from Western
Europe, China and Russia to substantiate their claims. Collective action, dubbed “contentious
politics” or “politics by other means,” came to be seen as a tactic of highly cohesive groups,
wielded in the pursuit of group interests. RM theory quickly became the dominant paradigm for
explaining collective action.
Proponents of breakdown theory challenged this conclusion. Piven & Cloward (1977) in
their analysis of social movements in the United States in the 1930s and 1960s assert that the
breakdown of social structures due to the Great Depression and rapid modernization and
migration following WWII led to collective action in the 1930s and 1960s. Useem (1997; 1998),
citing examples from the civil rights movement and later race riots, contends that the RM and
breakdown theories explain two different phenomena. RM theory explains routine collective
action such as electoral rallies and peaceful protest, while breakdown theory is a better
explanation for non-routine collective action such as rebellion, collective violence and riots.
Caren (2011) revisits the role of social breakdown in causing collective action, offering a
quantitative analysis of three causes of economic grievance: relative inequality, economic
decline and unemployment, and ethnic or group discrimination. Caren also investigates other
factors, such as the percentage of youths in the general population.
Research design and measurements
The unit of analysis is the Arab nation-state. For the purposes of this study, which is to
examine the causes of non-routine, anti-government mass movements, Lebanon and Iraq are
omitted from the universe of Arab states under discussion, because their governments are too
weak to exert control over large sections of society. Using indicators of tribalism, ethnic

11. Sweigart 11
fragmentation and economic grievance, we will test each of these three measures for their effects
on mass movement. Because the dependent variable of mass movement will be a binary variable
coded as “0” or “1,” the statistical model used in testing will be logistical regression. Tribalism
and ethnic fragmentation are expected to have a negative relationship with mass movement,
while economic grievances are expected to exhibit a positive relationship.
In order to measure the degree to which a society is fractionalized along ethnic lines, an
adaptation of the index of ethno-linguistic fractionalization as described by Bossert et al (2005)
is used. This index, used by Collier and Hoeffler in 2004, expresses the probability that two
individuals selected at random from the population come from two different ethnic or linguistic
groups. The equation used to calculate the index is the following:
The value pk represents the share of group k in the total population. We depart from the
traditional ethno-linguistic index to include religious groups in addition to ethnic groups, better
reflecting the degree of fractionalization present in Middle Eastern societies. For example, while
the original index might classify Syrians as “Arabs” or “Kurds,” the new index classifies Syrians
as “Sunni Arabs,” “Alawite Arabs,” “Christian Arabs,” “Druze Arabs,” and “Sunni Kurds.” The
justification for adding religion is that it is one of the descent-based characteristics included in
Chandra. The proportion of ethno-linguistic-religious groups in countries was calculated from
various sources. Where applicable, data was used from the CIA World Factbook. Data on the
religious composition of national populations was gathered from publications by the Pew Forum

12. Sweigart 12
on Religion and Public Life. For Oman, data was used from an academic paper on ethnic
differences in that country (Kharusi 2012).
Tribal structures are endemic in Middle Eastern countries and present a special challenge
for measurement. Because it is impossible to gather precise data on tribes, and the importance
and relevance of tribes varies enormously from country to country or region to region, the level
of tribalism in a given country will be measured through a qualitative analysis of the composition
of governing institutions. Using lists of national leaders from the 2010 CIA World Factbook, the
tribal origins of high-ranking government officials and military commanders (depending on the
country, usually the prime minister and/or president, foreign minister, defense minister, finance
minister, interior minister, chief of staff, heads of intelligence and sometimes police chief or
other important military figures) will be measured for the diversity of family origins. On the
basis of that analysis, countries will be classified as “less tribal” or “more tribal,” respectively
coded as 0 or 1. Less tribal countries will display high levels of diversity at the highest levels of
government, while more tribal countries will exhibit low levels of diversity, with nearly all high-
ranking officials belonging to one or a few tribes and families. Government officials whose
relatives have previously been in government but who may not have relatives in government at
the present time are still counted as related to other officials. Inherent in this measurement is the
assumption that regimes reflect the social makeup of their societies, which may or may not be
the case. The results of this measurement are reported in Figure 2. Justification for the results is
provided below:
Algeria – 0 . All of the important figures in Algeria’s government are from differing
tribal and family origins. Algeria’s president, Abdulaziz Bouteflika, was born in Oujda, a town
located across the Moroccan border. Although he rose to prominence as a member of the

13. Sweigart 13
powerful “Oujda clan,” headed by former president Houari Boumedienne, the Oujda clan was
not a tribal or family group, but rather a cadre of rebel commanders in the Algerian War of
Independence who had been based in Oujda (Joffe 1997). Bouteflika also holds the defense
portfolio. PM Ahmed Ouyahia, FM Mourad Medelci, Finance minister Karim Djoudi, National
Gendarmerie commander General Ahmad Boustilla, armed forces chief of staff Mohamad
Lamari, and Algeria’s dreaded intelligence chief, Mohamad Medienne, also known as “Toufik”,
do not appear to be related to one another. Algeria is coded as “0”.
The GCC States: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and
Oman – 1. In the Gulf monarchies, virtually every important government official is a member of
the royal family. In Saudi Arabia, the only high-ranking government figures that are not from
the House of Saud are chief of staff Saleh al-Muhaya and Ibrahim al-Assaf, both originally from
Qassim province in the Nejd region of Saudi Arabia – the same region in which the Saud family
has its origins. The Sabah family dominates the upper echelons of Kuwait’s government. In
Bahrain, every important member of the cabinet, down to the captain of the Royal Guard, is from
the Khalifa tribe. Qatar’s ruling Thani family is prominent in government, although the Attiyah
family holds a few mid-level and upper-level posts. Government ministries in the United Arab
Emirates are split relatively evenly between the Nahyan clan, which rules Abu Dhabi, and the
Maktum family from Dubai. In Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said wields personal control over
most government ministries, holding portfolios for defense, foreign relations and finance, while
delegating lesser tasks to other members of the Busaid clan of which he is a member.
Egypt – 0. Before the 2011 revolution, Egyptian government was relatively non-tribal in
composition. President Hosni Mubarak, PM Ahmed Nazif, Defense minister and chief of staff
Mohamad Tantawi, FM Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, Finance minister Yousef Boutros-Ghali, Interior

14. Sweigart 14
minister Habib al-Adly, and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman do not appear to be related to one
another.
Jordan – 1. While Jordan’s royal family has not penetrated government institutions to
the same extent as is visible in the Gulf, the Hashemite monarchy has shrewdly forged alliances
with powerful Jordanian and even Palestinian families, often through marriage. The Rifai
family, originally from Safad in Galilee, has long been prominent in Jordanian politics. PM
Samir Rifai, who also held the defense portfolio, is the son and grandson of Jordanian prime
ministers. His great-aunt was married to Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh’s father, who after her
death married the daughter of Hassan bin Talal, King Abdullah II’s uncle. Finance Minister
Umayya Toukan is the son of Ahmed Toukan, a Palestinian regime loyalist who was briefly
prime minister in 1970 during the Black September crisis. The Majali family, from Kerak in
central-southern Jordan, has also traditionally held a few significant government posts: the
current head of the Public Security Directorate, a branch of the Jordanian intelligence services, is
Hussein al-Majali, whose father Hazza’ al-Majali was PM. Hussein’s sister, Taghrid al-Majali,
married Prince Muhammad bin Talal, King Abdullah II’s uncle. It seems that every political
figure in Jordan is somehow related. The exception to the rule is Jordan’s military, which is one
of the most professional in the Middle East.
Libya – 1. Due to the intensely personal control that Muammar al-Qaddafi exerted over
pre-revolutionary Libya, it is especially difficult to determine which Libyan government officials
were significant players. The subsequent defection of many high-level officials during the
course of the revolution indicates that most were probably not related to the Qaddafi family.
Several key figures, however, did not defect and are related to Qaddafi. Among these are
military intelligence chief Abdallah al-Senussi, who is married to Qaddafi’s sister-in-law,

15. Sweigart 15
Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hasan al-Kabir al-Qaddafi, Special Forces commander
Al-Saadi al-Qaddafi, and National Security Advisor Mutassim al-Qaddafi. The incidence of
family connections in the Libyan government is significant enough to justify a coding of “1”.
Morocco – 1. The family of King Mohammed VI, like the Hashemite family in Jordan,
depends on a number of important families in government. PM Abbas al-Fassi appears to be
somehow related to FM Taieb Fassi-Fihri. Minister of Finance and Economy Salaheddine
Mezouar is not related to the royal family, but the political party of which he is a member was
founded by King Hassan II’s brother-in-law. Army Inspector General Abdelaziz Bennani is
related to the queen of Morocco, Salma Bennani. Morocco’s police chief, Housni Benslimane, is
related to Abdel Krim Khatib, the founder of the opposition Justice and Development party. His
cousins, Mohamad Saad Hassar and Moulay Ismail Alaoui, also hold significant government
posts, while another cousin is married to former PM Mohamad Karim Lamrani.
Syria – 0. President Bashar al-Asad is related to General Intelligence director Hafez
Makhlouf, his maternal cousin, Republican Guard commander Maher al-Asad, and deputy chief
of staff Assef Shawkat (married to Bashar’s sister). The Asads are from the town of Qardaha in
Lattakia province, in the western coastal mountains, and are members of the Kalbiyya tribal
group. The Interior minister, Said Mohamad Samur, hails from Jibla, a town neighboring
Qardaha. While these are not insignificant figures in the regime, the rest of the figures are
largely unrelated. Defense Minister Ali Habib Mahmud was also from the coastal mountain
regions, near the city of Tartus, although not related. VP Farouk al-Shara’a, who was one of the
longest serving foreign ministers in the world and close to Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Asad, is a
Sunni Muslim from Dera’a, a town in the south. FM Walid Moualem is from Damascus,
although his family traces their roots to the Zubaid tribe. Chief of staff Daoud Rajiha is a Greek

16. Sweigart 16
Orthodox Christian from Damascus governate. PM Mohamad Naji Otari is from Aleppo, in the
north of Syria. Air Force intelligence chief Jamil Hassan and General Security Director Ali
Mamluk are Sunnis. While a few government figures are related, many very significant ones are
not.
Tunisia – 0. Tunisia’s pre-revolution government, although highly corrupt, was not filled
with relatives of President Ben-Ali. PM Mohammed Ghannouchi was widely viewed as a
technocrat. FM Kamel Morjane worked for the UN before becoming defense minister, then
foreign minister. Interior Minister Rafiq Kasem, defense minister Ridha Grira, and finance
minister Mohamad Chalgoum do not appear to be related.
Yemen – 0. Yemen’s pre-revolution government was surprisingly diverse. President Ali
Abdullah Saleh was from northern Yemen. His VP, Abed Rabbo Mansour al-Hadi, was a former
government official in South Yemen before unification. PM Ali Muhammad Mujawar was from
Shibwa province in southern Yemen. Interior minister Mutaher al-Masri, finance minister
Noman al-Suhaibi, and defense minister Ali Nasir Mohammad al-Hassani also do not appear to
be related.
In order to minimize the effects of changing ethnic identities, as described by Chandra,
the period under examination will be limited to 2011. This period also provides the most
variation in oucomes: while the impetus for collective action in the Middle East had been
building momentum for two decades (Lynch 2012), incidents of mass movement during that
period were largely routine rather than non-routine in nature. Social movements before 2011,
largely limited to strikes and labor protests, are better analyzed through the prism of RM theory
rather than the economic factors suggested by social breakdown theory. Limiting the analysis to

17. Sweigart 17
the Tunisian revolution of December 2010 to January 2011, and the events around the Middle
East that followed it, also controls for the immediate cause or spark of the revolutions, namely
the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi and the subsequent overthrow of the Tunisian
government.
Economic grievances will be measured by examining four different indicators: the
Perceptions of Corruption index from Transparency International, rates of growth in GDP,
unemployment, youth unemployment. The GINI index of inequality would have been included
in the analysis, but information was incomplete. While other scholars have used GDP per capita
on a PPP basis, the effects of GDP are complicated in the GCC member states by the millions of
expatriates who reside in those countries and whose numbers tend to rise and fall with rates of
economic growth. Due to the problems of measurement that this poses, national GDP growth
rates are used. Unemployment poses a similar problem in the GCC states: rates of
unemployment are calculated as a percentage of the entire workforce, both nationals and non-
nationals. This tends to deflate the rate of unemployment among nationals because all non-
nationals are employed; without employment they would lose their work visas and be deported to
their countries of origin. For Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the only two GCC states for which
complete data is available, the unemployment rate is adjusted upwards using the latest figures
available for the proportion of non-nationals resident in those countries to more accurately reflect
rates of unemployment among nationals (Shah 2007).
The corruption index (Figure 3) is constructed through surveys that Transparency
International distributes to local NGOs in various countries, which then rate the level of
corruption that they perceive in their government. It is particularly useful because it measures
perceptions, which are often more important than reality in triggering collective action. It is

18. Sweigart 18
available for all country-years from 2003 and onwards. GDP growth rates are obtained from the
2011 IMF World Economic Outlook. Unemployment rates (Figure 4) are taken from the IMF
World Economic Outlook for 2011. Where data is unavailable from the IMF, it is taken from the
International Labor Organization’s (ILO) “Key Indicators of the Labour Market,” (KILM) 2011.
For the two countries that lack data from both of these sources, Yemen and Libya, data is drawn
from publications from the Arab Labor Organization, rough estimates in the CIA World
Factbook, and news sources. Youth unemployment rates (Figure 5) are taken from the KILM,
except for Oman and Yemen. Youth unemployment in Oman is taken from an ILO report, and
unemployment in Yemen is taken from a news report. Unemployment, youth unemployment,
and GINI index data are incomplete for several countries.
The mobilization of mass movements will be measured qualitatively. An examination of
news reports and articles will ascertain to what extent collective action is country-wide.
Movements that numerically small, taking root in one or two regions or cities but failing to
sustain themselves over time or spread farther afield, will be classified as “local” and coded as
“0”. These small movements share many characteristics with routine movements, which are
better explained by RM theory. Movements that are nation-wide and mobilize at least tens of
thousands in every major city will be classified as “national” and coded “1”. These movements
are generally non-routine and are thus better explained by grievance and breakdown theory.
Results are displayed in Figure 6, while justification is provided below using information from
news reports:
Algeria – 0. Although protests in Algeria began in many cities in January and February
2011, on February 12th a few thousand protestors were decisively halted in Algiers by as many as

19. Sweigart 19
30,000 riot police (Nossiter & Williams A11). Minor protests continued, but rarely in numbers
above several hundred, and were unable to gain traction.
Bahrain – 1. Protests in the tiny island country of Bahrain began on February 14th, 2011
with several thousand protestors occupying the Pearl roundabout in downtown Manama, the
capital and only major city. Escalation continued until the 22nd of February, when approximately
150,000 protestors occupied Pearl roundabout, according to the Bahrain Independent
Commission of Inquiry. (Bassiouni et al, 2011)
Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – 1. These three nations experienced nationwide protest
movements that led to the fall of their regimes. In the case of Libya, the protest movement
morphed into a full-scale rebellion.
Jordan – 0. Protests here began in January 2011 and peaked on February 25th, when 7-
10,000 protestors marched on the streets of Amman. Protests eventually lost momentum and
subsided.
Kuwait – 0. A few isolated protests occurred, the biggest not drawing more than a few
thousand on September 21st. A group of protestors stormed parliament in November calling for
the resignation of the prime minister (Baker).
Morocco – 0. Demonstrations in Morocco were organized by online youth activists to
begin on February 20th, 2011. Protests in the capital Rabat reportedly drew 10,000 people, and
widespread looting and protests continued to occur there and elsewhere in the country for several
months, petering out by late summer.

20. Sweigart 20
Oman – 0. A few hundred protesters gathered to demonstrate against government
corruption in January. Protests in the northern city of Sohar attracted several thousand people
and continued for several months, but were eventually cleared by the police.
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates – 0. No protests were reported in these countries.
Saudi Arabia – 0. Protests organized in the capital city of Riyadh for March 11th
famously fell flat, with thousands of police and plainclothes security officers flooding the streets
as a single man protested. While protests have been much more numerous and persistent in the
eastern provinces, which are populated by a Shia minority, they have not spread to the rest of the
country.
Syria – 1. Protests began on March 15th, when security forces beat a number of youths in
Dera’a for spray-painting “the people want the overthrow of the regime” on a wall. Escalation
was gradual but persistent, leading to an unconfirmed protest of 100,000 people in the southern
town of Dera’a on the 25th of March. They quickly spread around the country, to Idlib province,
Homs, Hama, and Deir az-Zour, with areas escaping government control for weeks on end.
Significantly the protests did not seem to take root in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo,
although they raged in the poorer suburbs. Also, in areas where minorities predominate, such as
the coastal mountain areas and the coastal towns of Lattakia and Tartus, protests have attracted
fewer participants. Many have speculated that this may be because minorities enjoy a privileged
status under the Asad regime. Information has also been extraordinarily hard to collect and
verify, due to the media blackout that is being enforced by the government. Despite these
difficulties, protests in Syria are widespread and numerous enough to justify classifying them as
“national.”

21. Sweigart 21
Yemen – 1. Protests erupted as early as January 2011 in the capital, Sana’a and Aden.
By March 2011, they had spread to Hudaydah, Ibb and Taiz. Huge numbers of people
participated in the protests – one protest in Sana’a on March 4th allegedly stretched out for two
kilometers, while on March 8th nearly a million protestors marched in the city of Ibb.
We expect that countries with deep ethnic or tribal divides will be less likely to
experience mass movements. But if class-based grievances are causing today’s mass
movements, countries that experience increasingly high levels of inequality, unemployment and
inflation, as well as low levels or stagnation of GDP, should be more likely to experience mass
movements. Movements that mobilize over economic grievances should have a much greater
ability to mobilize participants from all sections of society. For this reason, we expect that
nationwide protest movements will be mobilize primarily around economic grievances. To test
these propositions, several hypotheses have been formulated:
H1: Nations that score higher on the index of ethno-linguistic-religious fractionalization
(ELR index) should experience a lower level of collective action.
H2: Nations that are more tribal in their social makeup should experience lower levels of
collective action.
H3: Nations with increasing rates of growth in corruption should experience higher levels
of collective action.
H4: Nations with decreasing rates of growth in GDP should experience higher levels of
collective action.

22. Sweigart 22
H5: Nations with increasing rates of growth in unemployment should experience higher
levels of collective action.
H6: Nations with high levels of youth unemployment should experience higher levels of
collective action.
Two extenuating factors must be controlled for in this study: the effects of the rentier
state and regime type. Regime type and institutional differences among Arab states have been
speculated to have an effect on mass movements. Generally speaking, every Arab state prior to
the 2011 uprisings was an autocracy. These autocracies fell into one of two categories:
monarchies and presidential dictatorships (most of which came to power through military coups).
It is important not to select cases on the dependent variable: Gelvin (2012) and others have noted
that not a single Arab monarchy (with the possible exception of Bahrain) was seriously
threatened by the uprisings of 2011, while presidential autocrats were overthrown in Tunisia,
Libya, and Egypt, and faced severe opposition in Yemen and Syria. Yet he draws no causal link
between monarchies and the lack of uprisings. Simply noting that monarchies did not experience
uprisings is no proof that monarchy has an effect. What is of more concern for this study is that
monarchs in the Middle East are located in countries that are expected to be classified as “very
tribal” – the GCC states and Jordan. Thus, monarchy is a confounding variable, as what can pass
for the effects of tribalism might actually be an unknown effect of monarchy. In order to control
for regime type, monarchy will be treated as a dummy variable, with monarchies receiving a
value of “1” and non-monarchies coded as “0” (Figure 8).
Rentier state theory, developed in the early 1970s by Mahdavi (1970) and expanded upon
by others (Beblawi and Luciani 1987; Yates 1996; Ross 2001, 2006, 2009; Gray 2011), suggests

23. Sweigart 23
that revenue accrued from oil has special properties that decrease the likelihood of democratic
transitions in autocracies. While democracy is not the primary focus of this study, of more
concern is the mechanism by which oil rents prevent democracy. Ross (2001) suggests that oil
revenues prevent democracy by three mechanisms. Firstly, they remove the need for taxation in
oil-rich autocracies, thereby dissolving the social contract between the state and its citizens. Oil-
rich autocracies sponsor massive welfare states that provide subsidies for basic necessities such
as health care, housing, electricity, water, food and petrol. This economic largesse provides a
basis of legitimacy for the regime. Secondly, oil and gas rents create a “repression effect.” States
that accrue large amounts of revenue from natural resource sales are able to spend more on
internal security, and are better able to crush democratic movements. Thirdly, a “modernization
effect” suggests that revenue due to natural resource rents is not spent in ways that encourage the
development of a democratic society. Ross identifies a lack of occupational specialization and
lower levels of education as key in this regard.
Of these three effects, only the rentier effect will be controlled for. Marc Lynch (2012)
suggests that increases in repression were actually positively correlated with increases in mass
movement in the 2011 uprisings: in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, regimes that immediately
cracked down brutally on uprisings found that instead of halting them, repression fueled popular
anger. Other regimes that were less brutal, such as Algeria, were not challenged to the same
extent. This is in agreement with the work of proponents of breakdown theory such as Useem
(1998), who suggests that repression is useful in repressing routine collective action but tends to
have the opposite effect on non-routine collective action. Since the Arab uprisings of 2011 are
assumed to be an example of non-routine collective action, this study will not control for

24. Sweigart 24
repression. With regard to the modernization effect, Gray (2011) submits that, at least in the
GCC states, modernization has been proceeding at a rapid pace in spite of massive oil rents.
The rentier effect, however, must be controlled for not because of its anti-democratic
effects but because it provides an alternative definition of citizenship that is primarily economic
rather than political. This complicates the causal link between economic grievances and social
breakdown, and mass movement. In a state where the rulers claim personal ownership of the
country (Saudi Arabia, named after the Saud family, comes to mind) and frame the distribution
rents among the population as an act of generosity rather than a response to citizens’ rights,
traditional economic grievance issues lose their rationale. By both removing economic
grievances and preventing collective action, the rentier effect acts as a confounding variable. It
is not possible to include it as a cause of economic grievances because although it deals with
economic outcomes, it is based on the notion that citizenship in a rentier state is economic by
definition, rather than political. This differs fundamentally from the economic relationship that
this study proposes between the state and its citizens. While rentier state theory deals with the
effects of the political and economic structure of a country, deprivation and social breakdown
theories measure the effects of economic changes over time.
In order to control for the rentier effect, a variable is constructed based on “oil rents per
capita” in Ross’s 2009 study. The new variable, “oil and natural gas rents per capita,” (Figure 7)
will be calculated from data provided by the World Bank. For select countries, other significant
sources of rent are also included. For Egypt, U.S. military aid, and revenues from the Suez
Canal are included. For Jordan, U.S. aid for FY 2008 is also included. For countries that receive
nontrivial foreign assistance, World Bank figures for foreign assistance are included. In addition
to these changes, oil rents per capita are calculated based on the citizen population of countries.

25. Sweigart 25
In the Gulf, for example, many countries have a large population of expatriate workers, who
sometimes form a majority of the population. But because expatriate workers are not citizens,
they are not eligible for much of the economic largesse that the government distributes, and are
therefore excluded from calculations.
Another way in which rents interact with perceptions of hardship is through government-
funded subsidies. Subsidies represent the direct economic effects of rents, and are part of the
economic social compact between states and their citizens. Not surprisingly, rentier states are
more able than non-rentier states to bankroll massive subsidies. As well as controlling for rents
per capita, the effects of subsidies will be analyzed. Ideally, it would be possible to construct a
quantitative variable, “subsidies per capita” in U.S. dollars that includes subsidies for fossil fuels,
water, food, health care and electricity, but for many countries data was not in the public domain.
Instead, analysis will be qualitative. Information on subsidies is contained in Figure 9.
Analysis and results
H1: null hypothesis not rejected. Upon closer analysis, ELR fractionalization appears to
have a different causal relationship to collective action than previously thought. We had
originally expected high fractionalization to impede mass movement and low fractionalization to
facilitate it. Instead, both high and low fractionalization appeared to cause mass movement,
while not a single one of the seven observations with moderate levels of fractionalization (0.13 to
0.42) experienced significant mass movement:

26. Sweigart 26
Figure 10: Mass movement and ethnic fractionalization
1.2
TUN EGY LIB BAH YEM SYR
Incidence of mass movement
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
MOR KSA UAE ALG KUW OMN JOR
0 QTR
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
Ethno-linguistic-religious fractionalization
Jordan, which is an outlier with a value of 0.453 on the ELR fractionalization index but no mass
movement, was based on the inclusion of Palestinians as a separate ethnic group from Jordanians
– a questionable division, but one that the author felt was justified due to the significant
polarization and tensions between Palestinians and Jordanians in that country. More
interestingly, although perhaps coincidentally, the three observations that scored lowest on the
ELR index (Egypt, Tunisia and Libya) experienced mass movements that succeeded in
overthrowing their governments, while in the three high-scoring observations (Bahrain, Yemen
and Syria), the protestors failed to topple the regime. At risk of generalizing, the lack of success
of mass movements in highly fractionalized countries may be due to governments’ success in
emphasizing ethnic and sectarian differences, transforming their own group into a support base.
The effects of fractionalization along the lines of ethnicity and religion are more
complicated than had been supposed. The bimodal distribution of mass movements, clustered
around the upper and lower parts of the ELR fractionalization continuum, suggest that a different
causal mechanism is at work.

27. Sweigart 27
Logistical regression analysis was performed separately on each the remaining variables:
tribalism, oil and natural gas rents per capita, unemployment rates, tribalism, GDP growth rates,
the GINI index, and corruption levels.
H2: null hypothesis not rejected. Analysis reveals that the effects of tribalism on mass
movement were significant. Countries that were more tribal were less likely to experience mass
movements:
Figure 10: Tribalism and Mass movement
More tribal Less tribal
Mass movement 1 7
No mass movement 4 2
Logistical regression analysis was performed on the relationship between tribalism and mass
movements, with the following results:
As was feared, however, monarchy and tribalism were covariate. All countries that were
classified as tribal were monarchies, except for one (Libya), while not a single non-tribal country
was a monarchy. It is not clear, then, to what extent the effects of tribalism are in actuality
effects of monarchy, although clearly one or the other (or both) are decreasing the likelihood of
mass movements occurring. Without more variation in the sample, it is impossible to draw firm
conclusions.
H3: null hypothesis rejected. Increasing levels of perceived corruption appear to have a
strong positive effect on the incidence of mass movement. For each country, simple linear

28. Sweigart 28
regressions were performed on observations of the corruption index from 2003 to 2011 in order
to determine the trajectory of corruption. The value of the coefficient slope of the line of best fit
indicated which countries were becoming more corrupt and which were becoming less corrupt.
Logistic regression analysis was then performed on the values of the slope coefficients in order
to test whether countries where the corruption score was decreasing (i.e., the country was
becoming more corrupt) were more likely to experience mass movements than countries that
were becoming progressively less corrupt. This was found to be the case, with corruption’s
effects significant at the p=.1 level:
It is perhaps not surprising that the most theoretically sound indicator of economic grievances
and social breakdown is the best predictor of mass movement. With a coefficient of -21.6,
decreasing levels of corruption have a strong negative effect on mass movement. This means
that countries that showed gains of 0.05 each year (or 0.45 from 2003-11) were predicted to
experience no mass movement. Scholars have speculated that perceptions of government
corruption may have been a significant factor in bringing protestors out on the streets (Gelvin
2012). It makes sense, then, that corruption’s effect on mass movement is statistically
significant.
H4: null hypothesis not rejected. In order to quantitatively measure the effects of GDP on
the incidence of mass movements, regression was performed on GDP growth data points from
1991 to 2009 to determine the trajectory of growth. (For Kuwait, data for 1991 to 1993 was

29. Sweigart 29
excluded due to the effects of the first Gulf War and its aftermath.) A one-year lag was assumed
for the effects of economic decline to be fully realized and to avoid reverse causality – if
economic data for 2011 had been used, it would be unclear whether economic changes in that
year had caused protests or resulted from them. Based on the line of best fit, projections for
growth rates in 2010 were calculated and then subtracted from actual growth rates to find the
“shortfall.” A logistical regression of the resulting data revealed that GDP growth is a poor
predictor of mass movement:
With a p-value of .241, the effect of GDP growth is actually positive – countries with increasing
growth rates are actually more likely to experience mass movements than countries with
decreasing growth rates. This may be because of the effects of rent. Perhaps oil-producing
rentier states were more likely to be economically impacted by the fall in oil prices that
accompanied the 2009 global financial crisis, and also less likely (according to rentier theory) to
experience democratic mass movements.
Controlling for rents reveals that part of the positive effect of GDP growth on mass
movement is explained by oil and natural gas rents, as the coefficient decreases from 0.26 to 0.11
and the p-value increases to 0.65:

30. Sweigart 30
As expected, rent also has a negative effect on protest of -0.085 for every $1,000 in rent
per capita. This means that countries with $12,000 in rent per capita or more should not
experience mass movements – an observation that holds true in the dataset.
Nor does a qualitative analysis of GDP growth trends in each individual country shed
light on the causes of mass movement, even after omitting observations in which rents per capita
in 2008 exceeded $10,000. In Algeria, growth was highly volatile, but even after three straight
years of decreased growth rates from 2004 to 2006, no protest movement emerged. In Egypt, the
growth rate from 2008 to 2009 dropped 2.5 percentage points, but increased again in 2010. A
protest movement might have occurred when annual growth rates decreased from 5-7.5 percent
in 1996-98 to around 3 percent in 2001-03, but no overtly anti-government protests happened at
that time, although there were significant protests against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians
during the intifada that may have released some pent-up pressure (Lynch 2012). If any country
might have been expected to experience a revolution in 2011 due to decreasing rates of growth, it
was Jordan, where annual GDP growth rates decreased from 8 percent in 2007 to 2 percent in
2010, but Jordan was spared. In Yemen, the growth rate of GDP had been gradually slowing
down for two decades. Perhaps the only country that fit the model is Tunisia, which was badly
affected by the global economic crisis in 2009.
The prevalence of subsidies throughout the Arab world sheds some light on the extent of
the rentier effect. Many scholars, such as Gelvin (2012), submit that the privatization of

31. Sweigart 31
government companies and moves to end subsidies were one factor that led to revolutions, as the
social compact that had been established after independence was dissolved. In general, however,
the effect of subsidies better reflected rentier theory: governments with higher subsidies tended
not to experience nationwide protest movements. The exception to this general rule was Libya.
Although Libya’s subsidies were smaller in relation to other rentier states in the region, it still
challenges the analysis that rentier states tend not to experience mass movements.
Ultimately, neither rent nor GDP growth rates are good determinants of mass movement.
H5: null hypothesis not rejected. Unemployment was analyzed in the same way as the
Perceptions of Corruption index – linear regression was performed for the values of
unemployment for each country and the slope coefficients for all observations used in logistic
regression. Due to insufficient data for Bahrain, Libya, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Yemen,
these observations were omitted from the analysis. The result is reported below:
With a p-value of 0.533, unemployment is a weak predictor of mass movement.
H6: null hypothesis not rejected. Youth unemployment was used instead of the
percentage of the youthful population, based on the reasoning that unemployed youth are more
likely to protest than employed youth. Using the most recent figures for youth unemployment in
each country, logistical regression was performed with the following results:

32. Sweigart 32
Youth unemployment is positively associated with mass movements, but the effect is not
statistically significant, making youth unemployment a poor predictor of mass movement.
Limitations
The study was plagued throughout by problems of measurement. For many countries,
data was low quality, limited or even non-existent. There was a clear divergence between
unemployment figures reported by government ministries and those reported or estimated by
outside sources. The CIA estimated in 2003 that unemployment in Yemen stood at around 35
percent, while official government figures reported 11.46 percent and 16.3 percent for 2002 and
2004, respectively. Measurements for rent were imperfect, as it was not possible to gather data
on every type of rent accrued by governments – figures were not available for revenue from
import and export duties, which for many countries is a significant source of revenue. Even the
Perceptions of Corruption index, which was ultimately the most useful variable for predicting the
desired outcome, had a relatively broad confidence interval, especially for earlier observations.
Statistical significance was a problem.
In calculating the ethno-linguistic-religious fractionalization index, measurements of the
percentages of ethnic and religious groups in each country were rudimentary. In most cases,
exact figures were not available for the percentage of ethnic groups, usually for political reasons.
Shia Muslims in the Gulf are neglected, marginalized and discriminated against, while Berbers in
North Africa and Kurds in Syria constantly face pressures to assimilate. Not surprisingly,

33. Sweigart 33
governments who persecute these minorities do not usually provide demographic figures on
them. North Africa in particular posed a special problem that illustrates Chandra’s concept of
“sticky identities.” Because almost all Arabs are of Berber extraction and a large percentage of
Berbers speak Arabic, it was a challenge to decide whether to include all Berber-speakers in the
Berber ethno-linguistic group (including those who know Arabic), or to limit the group to those
who speak Berber but not Arabic. Ultimately, a decision was made for the latter on the basis that
Berbers who speak Arabic are in the process of assimilation, but it is doubtless the case that
many of these identify strongly as Berbers, not Arabs.
The importance of tribal affiliations was very difficult to measure. As noted above, there
are problems with basing the level of tribalism in a society on an analysis of the identities of
government figures. Certainly countries that are not tribal tend not to have tribes in power
(Western Europe and the United States come to mind here), and tribal countries tend to have
tribal governments. But often this rule does not hold true. For instance, Turkey under Ataturk
illustrates an example of a government that is more forward-looking and Westernizing (hence
non-tribal), ruling over a Turkish citizenry that was still very traditional at that point.
Conversely, the rapid modernization and urbanization taking place in the GCC states may be
slowly eroding the tribal ties among their populations, but they remain very much ruled by tribes.
Another difficulty posed by measuring tribalism in this way is that, as Bill & Springborg
(1994) explain, formal institutions are often relatively meaningless in contexts where the tribe is
more important. Real power is contained in informal connections expressed in family and tribal
affiliation. For example, the minister of defense may be overruled by the chief of staff of the
armed forces, if the chief of staff is related to the president and the minister is not.

34. Sweigart 34
The coding of Yemen is a case in point. Even a casual observer of the Arab world would
recognize that in comparison to other Arab societies, Yemen should be coded as “more tribal,”
yet this was not at all apparent in the composition of the Yemeni government. The president’s
relatives were prominent in a few branches of the armed forces, but were totally absent from the
cabinet of ministers and other prominent government posts. One explanation for this
discrepancy is that because Yemen’s central government was weak, President Saleh found it
necessary to offer concessions to important members of powerful southern tribes, giving them
high-ranking government posts. Another explanation is that those government posts might be
relatively insignificant due to the impotence of formal institutions. The real source of power in
the Yemeni government may instead have been Saleh’s relatives in the military. All in all, a
better way to measure the importance of the tribes would have been to conduct a survey of an
appropriate number of randomly selected subjects in each country asking them questions about
their daily habits, who are their closest friends and associates, and other questions that would
indicate how important the tribe is to them.
Attempts to code mass movements as “local” or “national” were also less than
satisfactory. Ideally, information would be available about the numbers of people present at
every rally in every city and town during 2011. This would have allowed the researcher to give a
rating to each country based on how widespread and numerous the protests were. In reality, a
host of factors converged to make it incredibly difficult to measure the size and breadth of mass
movements in detail. Media blackouts imposed by hostile governments, the difficulty of access
due to violence in many areas, and the tendency of activists to inflate the actual number of
participants at rallies and protest marches made it virtually impossible to measure mass
movements with any accuracy. Also, the “yes/no” coding system does not capture the very real

35. Sweigart 35
differences between many movements. Libya’s movement to overthrow Qaddafi and Syria’s
rebellion against the Assad regime evolved in a very different direction than the Egyptian and
Tunisian protest movements. Finally, the decision to use binary coding for mass movements also
meant that there was insufficient variation in the dependent variable to perform a multivariate
regression analysis, meaning that testing was restricted to simple logistical models with one or
two independent variables.
Another unfortunate but unavoidable limitation in this study was that the lack of data
precluded measuring the effects of inequality on mass movement. Due to the political sensitivity
of data about inequality, most traditional measures of inequality, such as the GINI index or the
share of income of the richest 10 percent of the population, were unavailable for the majority of
countries in the sample. This is a significant drawback, particularly because inequality may have
shed light on the reasons why high levels of ethno-linguistic-religious fractionalization appear to
be correlated with mass movement. It is conceivable that conflict and mass movement may be
more likely to occur in situations where vertical cleavages and horizontal cleavages coincide.
This can happen when one group becomes economically or politically dominant and other
groups are disenfranchised. In these circumstances, the effects of economic deprivation/social
breakdown theory and resource mobilization theory combine to explosive effect. Non-routine
collective action is sparked by economic grievances and social breakdown, while group
structures and social connections provide fertile ground for social movements to take hold,
transforming them from non-routine into routine movements. One proposed example of this
phenomenon occurred in Lebanon, where the perceived dominance of the Maronite Christians in
the 1970s led to discontent on the part of other groups, particularly the Shia in the south,

36. Sweigart 36
sparking a long and bloody civil war. Another example might be Bahrain today, where a Shia
majority claims that it is discriminated against by the island’s Sunni ruling family.
The fact that horizontal and vertical cleavages coincide is not enough by itself to explain
why highly fractionalized countries tended to experience mass movements. The dominance of
one group over others need not be limited to highly fractionalized countries. But the larger the
disenfranchised group is, the greater its ability to foment a nation-wide uprising. Two of the
three observations that were highly fractionalized and that were coded as having mass
movements, Bahrain and Syria, are ruled by minority regimes. The existence of a
disenfranchised majority may be the reason why they experienced nation-wide protest
movements, whereas in other countries with relatively small minority groups, such as Morocco
or Saudi Arabia, disenfranchised groups were too small of a minority to cause mass movement
on a national scale.
Another limitation of this study is that it does not control for citizens’ perceptions of the
utility of joining in mass movement. The calculus employed by Tunisians when they first began
protesting against the government in December of 2010 was very different from the perceptions
of Egyptians, who had seen the success of the Tunisian revolution. Even more different is the
case of Syria, where citizens had seen two successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia but also a
stalled protest movement in Libya that was quickly evolving into a civil war. In short, it was
impossible even to control for the broader historical context of each mass movement, much less
the perceptions of each protester or non-protestor.
Lastly, this study is using state-level observations to draw conclusions about an outcome
(mass movement) that ultimately depends on the individual. The assumption in this study that

37. Sweigart 37
national economic hardship leads to personal economic grievances is not a foregone conclusion.
In fact, the only statistically significant relationship found between economic factors and mass
movements was the perceptions of corruption index, which directly measured perceptions rather
than corruption itself. Seemingly, it would be possible to gather data at the individual level: one
might assume that a simple random survey, asking protesters in each country why they decided
to protest, could have easily identify their motivations. But this is not necessarily the case. Arab
societies have been brutalized for decades by secret police agencies, or the mukhabarat, as they
are known colloquially. Suspicion and fear of government reprisal could prevent many from
replying with honesty, and would influence the results of such a survey.
Conclusion
It is somehow appropriate that among the economic grievances studied, the best predictor
of mass movement was the Perceptions of Corruption index. The entire causal relationship
between economic hardship and mass movement was predicated on the assumption that
economic decline and social decay was perceived as such by citizens, who then mobilized
against the regime. The only indicator that clearly described perceptions, however, was the
index of corruption. Other data dealt solely with the macroeconomic situations in various
countries.
Another interesting result was that both high and low levels of fractionalization seem to
be positively correlated with the incidence of mass movement. Further study, probably with a
more experimental focus, is needed in order to explore the role of fractionalization in causing or
facilitating mass movement. The caveat is that researchers must now deal with the effects of
reverse causality – the sectarian narrative of violence that has broken out in places such as Syria

38. Sweigart 38
and to a lesser extent Bahrain may have been the result of mass movement and unrest, rather than
its cause. The construction of post-hoc identities based on ethnic group and sect, often
encouraged by governments, can obscure previous forms of identity that may have been more
important prior to the polarization process.
Another area in which further research is needed is the effects of regime type on mass
movements. While it is true that no monarchies in the Arab world were overthrown or even
faced nation-wide protest movements, not every monarchy is the same. Absolute monarchies
such as Oman or Saudi Arabia, where kings rule by decree, differ greatly from the constitutional
monarchies in Jordan and Morocco that have parliaments and at least some of the trappings of
democracy. Responses to domestic unrest differed accordingly, as absolute monarchs in oil-rich
Gulf countries announced enormous social welfare programs costing in the tens of billions of
dollars, while monarchs in Jordan and Morocco made concessions to opposition parties,
dissolved unpopular parliaments, and reshuffled cabinets.
Bill & Springborg in 1994 identified signs that the group-centric social structure of
Middle Eastern society could be slowly eroding. Westernized, university-educated doctors,
engineers and other professionals comprise a new class of individuals that seek prestige and
position based on merit rather than personal connections and group membership. The emergence
of this class, they propose, could have one of two effects. At best, it could unleash forces that
herald the start of an era in which the power of official institutions ultimately eclipses that of
personal networks and private groups. At worst, the new class could be corrupted and coopted
by governments that see it as both a threat and a useful tool.

39. Sweigart 39
Do the mass movements sweeping the Middle East stem from class-based conflict? The
supposed emergence of a modernizing middle-class as an agent of social change was posited by
Manfred Halpern as early as 1963 in order to explain the waves of political change sweeping the
region at that time. As it became clear later on, old social structures proved resilient and the
alleged social “revolutions” of the 1950s and 60s were in reality small, usually personalized
groups of army officers seizing power. Observers today would do well to avoid a similar
mistake. At this point in time, it is still unclear whether or not the current political events in the
region will mark the beginning of real change, or result in more of the same.
Yet there are signs that in the Middle East, as elsewhere, economic grievances can act as
a basis for social movements. Issues of social concern, of which corruption is but one, have the
power to mobilize millions, as the recent revolutions in the Arab world demonstrated. Nor is the
story over – social discontent continues to simmer in many countries today, nearly eighteen
months after the Tunisian revolution began. Simply because a number of countries have not
experienced mass protest movements yet does not mean that they will escape them in the future.

40. Sweigart 40
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Appendix: Tables & Graphs
------------------------------------------------
Fig. 1: Index of ethno-linguistic-
religious fractionalization Figure 2: Tribalism coding
Country Score Country Score
Algeria 1 0.32 Algeria 0
Bahrain 0.42 Bahrain 1
Egypt 0.1 Egypt 0
Jordan 0.453 Jordan 1
Kuwait 0.349 Kuwait 1
Libya 0.13 Libya 1
Morocco 0.183 Morocco 1
Oman 0.41 Oman 1
Qatar 0.18 Qatar 1
Saudi Arabia 0.219 Saudi Arabia 1
Syria 0.504 Syria 0
Tunisia 0 Tunisia 0
UAE 0.255 UAE 1
Yemen 0.469 Yemen 0
Figure 3: Transparency International Index of Corruption
Country 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Algeria 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3 3.2 2.8 2.9 2.9
Bahrain 6.1 5.8 5.8 5.7 5 5.4 5.1 4.9 5.1
Egypt 3.3 3.2 3.4 3.3 2.9 2.8 2.8 3.1 2.9
Jordan 4.6 5.3 5.7 5.3 4.7 5.1 5 4.7 4.5
Kuwait 5.3 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.3 4.3 4.1 4.5 4.6
Libya 2.1 2.5 2.5 2.7 2.5 2.6 2.5 2.2 2
Morocco 3.3 3.2 3.2 3.2 3.5 3.5 3.3 3.4 3.4
Oman 6.3 6.1 6.3 5.4 4.7 5.5 5.5 5.3 4.8
Qatar 5.6 5.2 5.9 6 6 6.5 7 7.7 7.2
Saudi 4.5 3.4 3.4 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.3 4.7 4.4
Syria 3.4 3.4 3.4 2.9 2.4 2.1 2.6 2.5 2.6
Tunisia 4.9 5 4.9 4.6 4.2 4.4 4.2 4.3 3.8
UAE 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.2 5.7 5.9 6.5 6.3 6.8
1
Figures for Algeria’s Berber population (20-25 percent) are drawn from: Silverstein, Paul, “Berbers in France and
Algeria: Realizing Myth,” Middle East Research and Information Project, No. 200, Winter/Spring 1995.

46. Sweigart 46
Yemen 2.6 2.4 2.7 2.6 2.5 z2.3 2.1 2.2 2.1

47. Sweigart 47
Figure 4: Unemployment rates
Country
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Source
Algeria 27.31 25.66 23.71 17.68 15.3 12.3 11.8 11.3 10.21 10.03 IMF
Bahrain 3 5.6 KILM
Egypt 8.808 10.05 11.28 10.53 11.47 10.92 9.205 8.78 9.523 8.987 IMF
Jordan 14.69 15.33 14.44 14.7 14.84 14.06 13.1 12.65 12.94 12.5 IMF
Kuwait 1.097 1.305 1.221 1.42 1.349 1.37 1.701 1.671 1.639 2.072 IMF
Libya 30 13 20.74
Morocco 12.3 11.3 11.4 10.8 11 9.7 9.8 9.6 9.1 9.1 IMF
ILO,
Oman 17 16 15 ALO
Qatar 0.5 KILM
Saudi 8.34 9.66 10.35 11 11.52 12 11 9.8 10.46 10 IMF
Syria 8.171 11.67 10.8 12.3 8 8.3 9.2 10.9 8.1 8.4 IMF
Tunisia 15.13 15.26 14.51 14.24 12.8 12.5 12.4 12.6 13.3 13 IMF
UAE 3.1 4 KILM
Yemen 11.46 35 16.3 18.46 ALO
Figure 5: youth unemployment levels (KILM)
Country
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Algeria 47.8 43.4 31.1 24.3
Bahrain 20.1 28.3
Egypt 27.7 27.1 34.1 29.9 24.8
Jordan 28.3 27.5 27
Kuwait 11.3
Libya N/A
Morocco 18.9 17.6 17 15.4 15.7 16.6 18.3 21.9
Oman 30 (ILO)
Qatar 1.6
Saudi Arabia 28.2
Syria 26.3 19.5 18.3 19.1 22.4 16.7 19.2
Tunisia 30.7
UAE 8 12.1
Yemen 52.9

48. Sweigart 48
Figure 6: Incidence of Figure 7: Oil & Natural Figure 8: Monarchy
national protests gas rents per capita, 2008 Country 0-no, 1-yes
Country Protests Country Rents Algeria 0
Algeria 0 Algeria 2091 Bahrain 1
Bahrain 1 Bahrain 13409 Egypt 0
Egypt 1 Egypt 534 Jordan 1
Jordan 0 Jordan 174 Kuwait 1
Kuwait 0 Kuwait 83801 Libya 0
Libya 1 Libya 10582 Morocco 1
Morocco 0 Morocco 1 Oman 1
Oman 0 Oman 15827 Qatar 1
Qatar 0 Qatar 273644 Saudi Arabia 1
Saudi Arabia 0 Saudi Arabia 17360 Syria 0
Syria 1 Syria 775 Tunisia 0
Tunisia 1 Tunisia 392 UAE 1
UAE 0 UAE 27923 Yemen 0
Yemen 1 Yemen 380

49. Sweigart 49
Figure 9: Subsidies
Average fossil fuel Public health
Country subsidies/capita spending/capita Other subsidies
(includes electricity)2 (constant 2005 $)3
Algeria $298.4 257 $2.4bn for food (2008)†
Bahrain - 794 food and fuel subsidies worth $1.33bn (2008)4
Egypt $250.1 108 $4.4bn on food, $2.2bn on other subsidies†
Jordan - 303 Food and fuel subsidies worth $330m in 2009†
Kuwait $2798.6 911 Food; water; free education; housing
Libya $665 491
Morocco - 93 $3.4bn for fuel; $700m for food (2008)†
Oman - 479 Food; water; petrol subsidized to $1.20/gallon
Qatar $2446 1257 Food; water
Saudi $1586.6 609 $20bn for water5
Arabia
Syria - 80 $7.6bn for fuel, $1.7bn for food (2008)†
Tunisia - 262 $700m for fuel, $900m for food (2008)†
UAE $2489.6 1149 Food; water
Yemen - 30 $1.8bn for fuel (2009)6
†
Calculated using data from the World Bank and Ronald Albers and Marga Peeters, “Food and
Energy prices, Government Subsidies and Fiscal Balances in South Mediterranean Countries,”
Brussels: European Commission, 2011. Except in the case of Syria, this data does not include
implicitly subsidized products, such as domestic petroleum production that is offered at
discounted prices.
2
Figures from 2010. Taken from “Fossil fuel consumption subsidy rates as a proportion of the full cost of supply,”
IEA World Energy Outlook, 2011. Accessed online at: http://www.iea.org/subsidy/index.html.
3
2010 figures calculated from information provided by the World Bank.
4
“Bahrain spends $1.3bn on inflation subsidies,” Reuters, June 10, 2008.
5
Ailam, Abeer. “Subsidies give Saudis an appetite for oil.” Financial Times, May 12, 2011.
6
Breisinger, Clemens and Wilfried Engelke and Olivier Ecker. “Petroleum Subsidies in Yemen: Leveraging Reform
for Development.” International Food Policy Research Insitute Discussion Paper, March 2011. Accessed online at:
http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/ifpridp01071.pdf