Popular Grievances and Perceptions of Socioeconomic Conditions in the Arab Region Prior to the Uprisings

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, analysts have advanced a range of hypotheses about the grievances that formed the backdrop to mass mobilization. To date, little empirical research examines the validity of the large array of proposed sources of disaffection, particularly at the micro-level. We use public opinion data from 2009-2010 from Arab countries that experienced mass mobilization to assess attitudes towards general satisfaction, sectors such as health, education, and labor markets, and perceptions of fairness in the economy and social life, and disaggregate the results by socioeconomic class and age cohort in order to probe accounts of middle-class grievances, lower-class deprivation, and intergenerational disjunctures. We find mixed support for the hypotheses derived from the scholarship on the lead-up to the uprisings. We find a consistent income gradient in satisfaction, particularly general satisfaction and satisfaction with the labor market. We find similar gradients in perceptions of health services and of dignity in virtually all countries. Perceptions of corruption show a gradient in some countries and a reverse gradient in others. Intergenerational differences in class satisfaction show no consistent patterns across countries and sectors, but youth disaffection within a given class is more common than its converse. The cross-national variation in patterns of discontent across classes and generations suggests that diffusion processes rather than a common set of grievances may have been at the root of the Arab uprisings.