The Arab Spring Implications for Gender Equality Values: Has Anything Changed?

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Opinion and Comparative Politics

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of Arab values and opinions toward an extremely important issue for the Arab region, namely gender equality, which is crucial to understand and detect changes that happened, if any, during the course of the Arab Spring movement. Through its analysis, the paper aims to track public opinions over time and across Arab countries using the Arab Barometer surveys, which offer a rich dataset on public opinions collected from representative samples of Arab citizens living in different Arab countries. The study attempts to answer a number of questions, including: Have values of Arab societies changed after the Arab Spring? Are there any differences between countries which witnessed the revolutions and those which were indirectly affected? Do societal values correlate with outcomes of gender equality in Arab countries? And, what are the factors that affect the individual values of gender equality? For its value analysis, the study relies on the Arab Barometer database, which consists of a group of public opinion surveys on samples of individuals living in different Arab countries regarding their opinions on a variety of issues including women’s empowerment. These surveys have been conducted in six rounds that extended from 2006 to 2021. To answer its questions, first, the paper starts with a descriptive analysis of the trends of Arab social values toward gender equality and women’s empowerment before and after the Arab Spring. Second, the paper constructs an index to assess individual social values toward gender equality. Furthermore, to analyze the impact of Arab Uprisings on values toward gender equality and women’s empowerment, the paper employs the Difference-in-Difference (DiD) technique, where the treatment considered here is the exposure to Arab Spring in countries that witnessed the uprisings compared to other Arab countries.

Author

• Samar Abdelmageed