Social Capital, Islam, and the Arab Spring in the Middle East

Abstract

To what extent do participatory civil society dynamics, rooted in self-assertive social capital, help explain the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011? How do pro-democratic Arab attitudes matter in promoting elite-challenging collective actions? Does Islam support or hinder elite-challenging, self-assertive social capital? To answer these questions, this study systematically examines the variation in self-assertive (emancipative) social capital in Egypt and Jordan from a comparative perspective. By using emancipative social capital theory, this article embarks on an individual-level quantitative analysis derived from the World Values Survey database to explore the empirical nexus between pro-democratic attitudes, elite-challenging actions, and Islamic values in order to partly explain comparatively high-intensive and persistent uprisings in Egypt and relatively low-intensive and less persistent demonstrations in Jordan. The findings offer critical insights in understanding the social capital dimension of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 and contribute new clues about empirical interactions between Islamic resurgence and civil society dynamics in the Muslim world.

Keywords:

• Arab Spring
• Islam
• social capital
• collective action
• Egypt
• Jordan
• Middle East

Notes

Welzel, Inglehart and Deutsch (2005) demonstrate that emancipative social capital, measured by elite-challenging actions, has comparably higher civic payoffs than traditional social capital measured by voluntary associations, at both societal and individual levels.

The structure in social capital can be in the form of groups, organizations or networks: see Coleman (1990) for a detailed discussion.

By drawing from Welzel, Inglehart and Deutsch's (2005) conceptualization of emancipative social capital measured by three elite-challenging actions asked by the WVS project.

On 11 February 2011, a long-term dictator—Hosni Mubarak—fell from power.

The Guardian, ‘Cairo's biggest protest yet demands Mubarak's immediate departure,’ accessed February 10, 2012 (URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/04/day-of-departure-hosni-mubarak).

The Guardian, ‘Thousands join 'day of rage' across the Middle East’, February 25, 2011, accessed on February 10, 2012 (URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/25/thousands-join-day-of-rage-across-middle-east).

Derived from the WVS (2000–2008) question: ‘How satisfied are you with the financial situation of your household? If 1 means you are completely dissatisfied on this scale and 10 means you are completely satisfied, where would you put your satisfaction with your household's financial situation?’

A Cronbach's alpha coefficient (0.747) is statistically acceptable for the internal reliability and consistency of emancipative social capital's additive index. No inter-item correlation fell below .30—a minimum necessary threshhold (de Vaus, 2002, p. 184).

For missing values in the income variable, data imputation from the values derived from a variable indicating economic social class was used.

The odds ratio, however, does not prove that elite-challenging actions increase the chances for revolutions; rather, they manifest a strong association (at this stage) between the variables under analyses.