Outcomes of the Arab Spring: Experimental Evidence from Egypt, Jordan & Tunisia

• In Event: Experiments on Protest and Collective Action

Abstract

How far are values affected by severe shocks in the political context where one lives? This is a central question that forms one of the central debates in political science, economics, and sociology. In this paper, we make use of the different outcomes of the Arab Spring to test this question in three Arab countries. For most of its history, one classical view of the Arab World has been of around 400 million people governed by rulers with almost absolute powers. Following the Arab uprisings, Arab institutional settings and the experiences of Arabs started to diverge providing a quasi, natural-experiment-like context that enables the investigation of whether social values look different depending on the context one lives in. We focus on three countries where the uprisings produced different outcomes; Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan. We examined three central values (altruism, cooperation and trust) through standard economic, lab-in-the-field experiments on a sample of 250 subjects per country. Our results indicate that different institutional contexts generate differentiated value sets. More than 50% of the Tunisians, Egyptians and Jordanians show a trust level of zero. This reflects the general low trust levels in the Arab World. While Egyptians report the least levels of altruism and honesty, Tunisians reciprocate cooperation the least and tend to be the harshest punishers. Syrians in Egypt seem to adopt most of the behaviours of Egyptians. They report more egoistic and less cooperative choices than Syrians in Jordan and Syrians in Syria. The Jordanian sample scores highest in prosocial and cooperative behaviour.

Authors

• Mazen Hassan, Cairo University

• Sarah Mansour, Faculty of Economics and Political Science

• Engi Amin, Cairo University