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ABSTRACT
We examine whether disagreements about the Arab Spring uprisings, in five countries that experienced protests, have transitioned into the non-political sphere. To test this spillover effect, we ask two questions: (a) does interacting with fellow nationals who have opposing attitudes towards the Arab Spring generate less pro-social behaviour compared to situations where such disagreements are absent, and (b) whether the degree of affective polarization – if it exists – depends on the severity of the uprising’s outcome. We explore these questions by running two lab-in-the-field experiments – measuring fairness and interpersonal trust – with 1274 subjects from five Arab countries: Syrian refugees, Sudanese refugees, Jordanians, Tunisians and Egyptians. We find significant results on both fairness and trust among the Syrian sample – who experienced the most violent version of the events – and partly among Sudanese refugees. Our findings indicate that the intensity of political polarization (particularly turning it into a violent conflict and generating refugees) is critical in producing the hypothesized spillover effect of affective polarization.
Acknowledgement
This work was sponsored by the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and has benefited from both financial and intellectual support. The content and recommendations do not necessarily reflect ERF's views. We would like to thank Dr Nora Elbialy for facilitating all logistics related to the field work in Jordan and Tunisia. We would also like to thank Mercy Corps, the NGO in Amman, and specially Mustafa Maher Al-Shaghnobi, for providing us with access to Zaatari camp in Jordan, Dr Ayat Nashwan, the Director of Refugees, Displaced Persons and Forced Migration Studies Center at Yarmouk University, Basma Mensi, Hashem Nabas, Pakinam Fekry, Nourhan Abdelhamid, the IT team of the experimental lab at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science (FEPS) Cairo University, the British University in Egypt (BUE) and the Egyptian Research and Training Center (ERTC). We also acknowledge the support of the Institute of Law and Economics (ILE) at Hamburg University for hosting research stays and meetings involving the authors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Lynch, The Arab Uprising; Lynch, “The Arab Uprisings Never Ended.”
2 Schlumberger, Debating Arab Authoritarianism.
3 Ianchovichina, “Economic Costs of Post-Arab-Spring Civil Wars.”
4 UNHCR, “Forced Displacement in 2016.”
5 Elsayyad and Hanafy, “Voting Islamist or Voting Secular?” 109–30.
6 Brooke and Hassan, “Does Learning About Protest Abroad Inform Individuals’ Attitudes,” 428–45; Lynch, “The Arab Uprisings Never Ended.”
7 Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology.”
8 Orhan, “The Relationship Between Affective Polarization and Democratic Backsliding.”
9 Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization,” 129–46.
10 At least until 2020 when we fielded our experiments in Tunis.
11 We repeated the same design (with 529 subjects) while making the control “playing against a fellow Arab” with no Arab Spring view disclosed and the treatment “playing against an Arab with an opposite Arab Spring view.” However, we did not find significant results in this pan-Arab design, which reinforces our claim that the Arab Spring varied in intensity and was viewed differently in each country.
12 Druckman et al., “Affective Polarization, Local Contexts and Public Opinion,” 28–38.
13 Haas et al., “Polarizing Information and Support for Reform,” 883–901; Huber and Malhotra, “Political Homophily in Social Relationships,” 269–83.
14 Huber and Malhotra, “Political Homophily in Social Relationships,” 269–83.
15 Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology.”
16 Gimpel and Hui, “Seeking Politically Compatible Neighbors?” 130–42.
17 Alford et al., “The Politics of Mate Choice”, 362–79; Martin et al., “Transmission of Social Attitudes”; Levendusky and Malhotra, “(Mis)Perceptions of Partisan Polarization.”
18 Michelitch, “Does Electoral Competition Exacerbate Interethnic.”
19 McConnell et al., “The Economic Consequences of Partisanship”; Panagopoulos et al., “Risky Business.”
20 Gift and Gift, “Does Politics Influence Hiring?” 653–75.
21 McConnell et al., “The Economic Consequences of Partisanship.”
22 Bayat, “The Arab Spring and Its Surprises,” 587–601; Chamkhi, “Neo-Islamism in the Post-Arab Spring,” 453–68; Elsayyad and Hanafy, “Voting Islamist or Voting Secular?” 109–30; Esposito, Sonn, and Voll, Islam and Democracy; Stepan and Linz, “Democratization Theory and the Arab Spring.”
23 Hassan, Lorch, and Ranko, “Explaining Divergent Transformation Paths,” 553–78.
24 Lynch, Freelon, and Aday, “Online Clustering, Fear and Uncertainty.”
25 Al-Arabi, Tracing the Dangers of the Political Divide.
26 Pettigrew and Tropp, “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory.”
27 Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization,” 129–46.
28 Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology,” 405–31; Orhan, “The Relationship Between Affective Polarization and Democratic Backsliding.”
29 Tajfel, “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination.”
30 Leach and Sabatier, “To Trust an Adversary Policymaking.”
31 Haas, Hassan, and Morton, “Negative Campaigns, Interpersonal Trust, and Prosocial Behavior.”
32 Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds, The Arab Spring; Masoud, “Egyptian Democracy.”
33 Hetherington and Rudolph, Why Washington Won’t Work; Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
34 Lapate et al., “Inhibition of Lateral Prefrontal Cortex.”
35 Fehr and Schmidt, “A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation,” 817–68.
36 Jolls, “Fairness, Minimum Wage Law, and Employee Benefits.”
37 Nugent, “After Repress”; Ali-Eldin Helal Mai Mogeeb, Egypt after the Revolution.
38 Orhan, “The Relationship Between Affective Polarization and Democratic Backsliding”; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology,” 405–31.
39 Luguzan et al., The Arab Transformations Report.
40 Cassar, Grosjean, and Whitt, “Legacies of Violence,” 285–318.
41 Kijewski and Freitag, “Civil War and the Formation of Social Trust,” 717–42.
42 Lopez-Ibor et al., Disasters and Mental Health.
43 Serneels and Verpoorten, “The Impact of Armed Conflict”; Kecmanovic, “The Short-Run Effects,” 991–1010.
44 Lubkemann, “Migratory Coping in Wartime Mozambique.”
45 Baingana, Bannon, and Thomas, “Mental Health and Conflicts”; Mollica et al., Trauma and the Role of Mental Health.
46 Ianchovichina and Ivanic, “Economic Effects of the Syrian War,” 1584–627.
47 Reuters, “Factbox: The Cost of Ten Years.”
48 Lynch, “The Arab Uprisings Never Ended”; Woldemichael, “Sudan’s Transition.”
49 Yom, “Jordan’s Protests Are a Ritual, Not a Revolution.”
50 Again, until March 2020 when we fielded our experiments in Tunis.
51 Dridi, “Tunisia Facing Increasing Poverty.”
52 Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization,” 129–46; Iyengar and Westwood, “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines,” 690–707; Carlin and Love, “The Politics of Interpersonal Trust,” 43–63.
53 Fershtman and Gneezy, “Discrimination in a Segmented Society,” 351–77.
54 Interview conducted with staff of one of the NGOs running the camp, October 2019.
55 CNN, Daraa: The Spark that Lit the Syrian Flame, 1 March 2012. https://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/01/world/meast/syria-crisis-beginnings/index.html.
56 Al-Jazeera, Explainer: What Are the Clashes in Syria’s Deraa About? 13 August 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/13/explainer-what-are-the-clashes-in-syrias-daraa-about. France-24, Daraa, Cradle of Uprising Against Syrian Regime, Starts to Rebuild After 75-day siege, 7 September 2021. https://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210913-syria-daraa-bombing-blockade-truce-assad-russia.
57 Silove, “Adaptation Among Refugees.”
58 We would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for suggesting adding such a sample which allowed us to make this disentanglement.
59 Sudanese refugees in Egypt – as well as all other refugees in the country – do not live in refugee camps but live in normal accommodation along with fellow nationals, as Egypt does not run refugee camps.
60 For the Sudanese sample, we used the term “the events that the Arab World has seen between 2011 to 2019.”
61 The matching between subjects in each session was not a “physical” matching which would have required that each subject had to be matched with another who had an opposing view in the same room (in the different view treatment for example). Instead, it was virtual matching Grewal et al., “Poverty and Divine Rewards.” where a respondent could be matched with a partner at a previous session. Such matching style was meant to deal with the – otherwise crippling – situation where some sessions did not have a perfect 50/50 split between subjects’ attitudes on the Arab Spring. Moreover, it also ensured that the only thing subjects knew about their partners was their position on the Arab Spring (as their partners could not be even present in the same room).
62 As we were allowed only two days inside the Zataari camp by the security approval, the logistics allowed us to sample only around 80 subjects per treatment/control. We therefore had to be parsimonious about our treatment design as well as the control. For example, we could not add a treatment where subjects were matched with partners with the same Arab Spring view which would have allowed for an interesting comparison.
63 To examine whether affective polarization also manifests itself on the pan-Arab level, we repeated the same design (but with 529 different subjects) while making the control “playing against a fellow Arab” with no Arab Spring view and the treatment playing against an Arab with an opposite Arab Spring view. We did not find significant results in this pan-Arab design. The relevant figures are included in the online supplemental appendix (figures A3 and A4).
64 The experiment was programmed on lime survey. Subjects were informed at the beginning of the experiment that each subject’s payoffs will be determined based on her/his choices and those of her/his partner in the experiment.
65 This version of the dictator game is structured to measure pro-social behaviour at different costs. In the first block (first 3 scenarios) the cost of choosing the prosocial option (option X) increases as the incentive to switch to Y increases from scenario 1 to 3. This is why the first block provides a consistent measurement of fairness on which we rely for our findings. A subject that keeps choosing X although Y becomes more and more tempting has a strong fairness preference. The second block (scenarios 4 to 6) downscales the prosocial option to check how robust preferences are and whether subjects are tempted to switch when the base incentive changes from 180 to 150. The third block (scenarios 7 and 8) is intended to compare preferences to efficiency. Scenarios 7 and 8 are replicas of scenario 1; changing only the points allocated to the other person in case Y is chosen. In case a person selects option X in the first and seventh scenario but switches to Y in the eighth scenario, this means this person prefers efficiency to pro-sociality.
66 An example to clarify the payoffs each partner gets from the dictator game. First, Player A and Player B are matched together from the beginning of the experiment. Second, in the dictator game, suppose the computer randomly selects scenario 1 for the payment, where Player A, for instance, chose option X in scenario 1 (Player A gets 180 points; the other partner gets 180 points) while player B chose option Y (Player B gets 230 points while other gets 130 points). Third, the computer algorithm randomly assigns Player B the role of the dictator and Player A the role of the receiver for the payoff (therefore, Player B’s choice (Y) becomes the reference for the payoff). The final payment for this game becomes 130 points for Player A and 230 points for Player B.
67 Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe, “Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History,” 122–42.
68 The conversion rates were as follows: 10 points = one Egyptian pound for Egyptians and Sudanese; 0.10 Jordanian Dinars for Syrians living in Jordan and Jordanians, and 0.3 Tunisian Dinars for Tunisians.
69 This is according to the exchange rate of 18 July 2022, when the experiments with Sudanese subjects took place.
70 This is expected as our Syrian, Sudanese and Egyptian samples were non-student samples whereas our Jordanian and Tunisian samples were mainly student samples.
71 We were warned by our “gatekeeper” NGO at the Zataari camp from asking our Syrian refugees subjects about their sectarian identity in the post-experiment questionnaire in order to avoid stirring any controversy that might result in blocking our access to the camp. The same warning applied to asking any direct political or ideological questions. We therefore cannot report any data on such demographics/attitudes, nor include them as controls in subsequent regressions.
72 In order to simplify the comparisons – and since complete fairness and complete unfairness are of special interest in our analysis – we drop subjects with intermediate preferences hereafter. The online supplemental appendix however includes the whole analysis re-run with these intermediate preferences.
73 Dunn’s pairwise comparison test shows that there is a significant difference between fairness in no view disclosed and opposing view (p-value = 0.037). No other comparisons are significant.
74 They are mutually exclusive, as we introduced a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 for completely fair subjects and the value of zero for completely unfair subjects.
75 Notice that the coefficients for `opposite view’ for Jordanians and Tunisians have approximately the same size as their counterparts for Sudanese, whereas the coefficients’ standard error is larger.
76 Probit model is used because our outcome variable is binary. Our model will calculate a predicted probability of being fair based on our predictors.
77 The relevant tables (A4 and A5) and figures (A1 and A2) are in the online supplemental appendix. We would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for suggesting adding this further check.
78 Spierings, “Trust and Tolerance Across the Middle East.”
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Notes on contributors
Mazen Hassan
Mazen Hassan is a professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University and the School of Economics and Politics, New Giza University. He has a PhD degree in politics from Oxford University and a Master's degree in politics from Warwick University (UK). He has been previously a research fellow at MIT Center for International Studies, Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. Emails: [email protected] and [email protected].
Engi Amin
Engi Amin is an assistant lecturer at the Socio-Computing department at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. She has an MSc. in socio-computing and a BSc. in Statistics. Emails: [email protected] and [email protected]
Sarah Mansour
Sarah Mansour is an associate professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University and at the School of Economics and Politics, New Giza University. She has obtained both her Masters and PhD degrees in Economics from Warwick University in the UK. She has also been a Carnegie Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and a Norbert-Elias fellow at ZiF, Bielefeld University, Germany. She has been the director of the Center for Institutions, Economics and Law in Egypt and the Master in Law and Economics of the Arab Region Programme (MLEA), a joint programme between FEPS and the Institute of Law and Economics at Hamburg University. Emails: [email protected] and [email protected]
Andreas Nicklisch
Andreas Nicklisch is a Professor of Economics and Statistics at the Center for Economic Policy Research at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons, Chur, Switzerland. He graduated in Economics at the University of Jena, Germany, in 2002 and received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena, in 2005. The same year, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany, as a Research Affiliate. In 2010, he became Assistant Professor for Microeconomics at the School of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Hamburg, Germany. Since 2016, he works at the Center for Economic Policy Research. He is a behavioral and experimental economist. His latest work is focused on behavioral institutional designs that enhance the cohesion of cooperation within societies, and the effect migration has for social norms and values. Email: [email protected]