The Arab Spring , Support for Democracy , and Political Action : Seeking an Explanation for the Authoritarian Paradox in the Middle East

This paper investigates the relationship between support for democracy and willingness to take political action in the Middle East before and after the Arab Spring. Despite general support for democracy in many Arab nations, as evidenced by open popular protests, most of the region remains under authoritarian rule. To explain this, I analyzed survey data from the World Values Survey that asked citizens in Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt whether they favored a democratic system of government and what types of political action, such as demonstrating, they had taken or would be willing to take. I found that the majority of respondents in each of these nations favored democratic rule, at least in an abstract sense, but most of them were unwilling to take actions that challenged authoritarian regimes. This revealed a disconnect between citizens’ wish for a new government and their desire to strive to bring about change. Willingness to take political action actually declined after the Arab Spring, although there were exceptions in each nation. This decreasing willingness to take political action, whether it is caused by apathy towards unsuccessful protests or by increased government crackdown, has made achieving democracy even more difficult in the Arab world. INTRODUCTION: THE AUTHORITARIAN PARADOX From late 2010 to mid-2012, a series of democratic uprisings sprang up in nations across the Arab world. These uprisings, known as the “Arab Spring” in the West, started with peaceful protests and grew to full revolutions in some nations, with regimes even being toppled in few while little changed in others. These uprisings showed the culmination of mass popular support for democracy in the region, but they did not lead to stable democracies or democracies at all in most cases. While some gains were made in various nations, the most significant of these being the establishment of a relatively strong democracy in Tunisia, the reality is that most of the region remains under authoritarian rule.