POL41920 Political Behaviour in the Middle East and North Africa

Academic Year 2019/2020

The 2011 Arab Uprisings have brought the grievances of Arab citizens to the fore. Youth but also many ordinary citizens that had been excluded from politics for decades participated in large scale demonstrations, and, in some countries, in the first meaningful elections of their lives. While most autocratic regimes came out on top of the crises, the scale of the protests highlighted the important connections between grievances, political participation, and political choice in the Middle East and North Africa.
This module explores political behavior in the MENA both from the perspective of citizens and opposition movements. It makes use of the large array of public opinion data that has been generated in Arab countries over the past decade on issues ranging from views on democracy, support for terrorism, social capital, appraisals of performance of state institutions, and political participation. In the first part of the module, we will use these data to learn about citizens' view of democracy, institutions and their grievances and political participation and combine them with macro-level indicators about different MENA countries. In the second part, we will use content analysis to code party platforms and focus group data to learn whether parties are able to address key grievances of their citizens.