As global attention remains focused on those regions freshly emerging from popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, there unfortunately persists a lack of genuine insight into the value shifts and motivating factors that drove each individual revolution. Today we are faced with varying degrees of similar transitional tensions in Syria, Turkey, and reigniting now in Egypt. Global public opinion on these events is often clouded when a nation’s external communications are dominated by an elite discourse that effectively marginalizes true popular sentiments. So how do we attempt to understand the contours of public unrest? By finding opportunities to ask questions.
In 2012, Ellen Lust, Professor of Political Science at Yale, and Jakob Wichmann, founding partner of JMW Consulting, launched the Transitional Governance Project as one of the first series of public opinion polling in the North African region. The project conducted surveys on the ground in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya about one year after each country’s respective post-revolution elections, aiming to gauge individual understandings of the meaning of democracy, preferences toward religion and its involvement in the state, and voting behaviors across various demographics.
At the Council on Foreign Relations, the Project on Middle East Democracy’s Executive Director Steve McInerney hosted Lust and Wichmann to present on their project’s findings. McInerney opened the discussion by indicating as its impetus the absence so far of “an understanding of where the publics are” in each post-revolution country thanks to a lack of a history of public opinion polling under their respective “repressive environment[s]”, giving the rest of the world only “snapshots” into public sentiment in on election day. These isolated instances of insight leave out large segments of the population and misguide our perceptions of what are deeply complex transitions.
Professor Lust began the presentation with an explanation of the survey’s findings on the meaning of democracy for members of each nation. She reported the “widespread idea that democracy is a good thing” across 80 to 90 percent of aggregated date from all three countries, but subtle differences within each nation as to how people actually define as “democracy”. The majority of survey respondents in Egypt expressed the opinion that democracy meant providing economic welfare and basic necessities for a population. Among respondents in Tunisia the majority believed instead that democracy’s purpose was to give citizens the freedom to criticize government. Those in Libya saw democracy as a mechanism through which to use elections to change the government.
Lust expanded on the implications of these findings in “challenging blanket notions” of a population’s needs in a transitionary period and what may or may not maintain their investment in the process of democracy. Instead of structuring our analysis of transitions around a repetitive popular rhetoric on the need to empower women and youth in MENA countries, we should base our discussions on more representative, population-based data.
Wichmann then presented findings on religion’s role on life in each country and popular opinions on its involvement in government. The study operationalized the variable of “religiousness” by asking respondents how often they attended mosque, what role religion played in their concept of identity (whether they would identify as Muslim before Libyan, etc.), and to what extent their religious and political values influenced one another in terms of voting behavior. Respondents in Egypt expressed that their feelings on religious involvement in the state did not affect their voting preferences in terms of whether or not they would support an Islamist candidate. Opinion on religious involvement with the state did affect voter preference in Tunisia, while respondents in Libya expressed that none of these variables affected their voting behavior. From these data, analysts then measured the presence of support for “some role of political Islam” in each country, finding 50 percent support in Libya and only 30 percent support in both Egypt and Tunisia.
The study used three variables on a spectrum of values to measure religion and voting preferences: “consistent Islamist” values in voting behavior; “center/mixed values”; and expression of “secular” values. Key findings in this category showed “consistent Islamist” voting behavior among 25 percent of populations in Egypt and Tunisia, but only among 10 to 15 percent of Libyans. Mixed values and more central voting tendencies showed up in 50 percent of Egypt’s survey responses and 40 percent of those in Tunisia and Libya. Despite the somewhat polarizing discourse being broadcasted among elites in Egypt, these key findings show “large centers in the population” where “elections are still somewhat up for grabs…[and] Islamist parties will not dominate forever”. Wichmann explained that the survey further cements the reality that “the elections of Egypt and the high proportion of the Islamist vote are more complex than one would think, and have less to do with religion.”
There are secular personal values at work that buck the traditional tendency to shroud all political crises in the MENA region in issues of Islam. As Wichmann said, “Islamist voters have many other reasons for their vote.”
The Transitional Governance Project’s findings indicate of a wealth of complex themes underlying transitions in different nations which traditional media outlets often trivialized under a simplifying rhetoric. We group Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya under those nations in the “Arab Spring” as if they all happened in the same way, for the same reasons, and ultimately mean the same thing. As we look forward to global decisions being made about Syria, Turkey, and Egypt, avoiding these simplifications to look for answers to questions like those asked in Lust and Wichmann’s study is the only way to accurately portray and understand what is really going on. Why has there been such a lack of previous fieldwork on the subject in the region? Are we comfortable with the storyline of the Middle East as a barren land for women and children run by radical Islam? There is this story, and there are those told by the people that embody each nation. We should choose the latter.
Photo: FreedomHouseDC (cc).
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Challenging Assumptions about Regional Transitions
August 8, 2013
As global attention remains focused on those regions freshly emerging from popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, there unfortunately persists a lack of genuine insight into the value shifts and motivating factors that drove each individual revolution. Today we are faced with varying degrees of similar transitional tensions in Syria, Turkey, and reigniting now in Egypt. Global public opinion on these events is often clouded when a nation’s external communications are dominated by an elite discourse that effectively marginalizes true popular sentiments. So how do we attempt to understand the contours of public unrest? By finding opportunities to ask questions.
In 2012, Ellen Lust, Professor of Political Science at Yale, and Jakob Wichmann, founding partner of JMW Consulting, launched the Transitional Governance Project as one of the first series of public opinion polling in the North African region. The project conducted surveys on the ground in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya about one year after each country’s respective post-revolution elections, aiming to gauge individual understandings of the meaning of democracy, preferences toward religion and its involvement in the state, and voting behaviors across various demographics.
At the Council on Foreign Relations, the Project on Middle East Democracy’s Executive Director Steve McInerney hosted Lust and Wichmann to present on their project’s findings. McInerney opened the discussion by indicating as its impetus the absence so far of “an understanding of where the publics are” in each post-revolution country thanks to a lack of a history of public opinion polling under their respective “repressive environment[s]”, giving the rest of the world only “snapshots” into public sentiment in on election day. These isolated instances of insight leave out large segments of the population and misguide our perceptions of what are deeply complex transitions.
Professor Lust began the presentation with an explanation of the survey’s findings on the meaning of democracy for members of each nation. She reported the “widespread idea that democracy is a good thing” across 80 to 90 percent of aggregated date from all three countries, but subtle differences within each nation as to how people actually define as “democracy”. The majority of survey respondents in Egypt expressed the opinion that democracy meant providing economic welfare and basic necessities for a population. Among respondents in Tunisia the majority believed instead that democracy’s purpose was to give citizens the freedom to criticize government. Those in Libya saw democracy as a mechanism through which to use elections to change the government.
Lust expanded on the implications of these findings in “challenging blanket notions” of a population’s needs in a transitionary period and what may or may not maintain their investment in the process of democracy. Instead of structuring our analysis of transitions around a repetitive popular rhetoric on the need to empower women and youth in MENA countries, we should base our discussions on more representative, population-based data.
Wichmann then presented findings on religion’s role on life in each country and popular opinions on its involvement in government. The study operationalized the variable of “religiousness” by asking respondents how often they attended mosque, what role religion played in their concept of identity (whether they would identify as Muslim before Libyan, etc.), and to what extent their religious and political values influenced one another in terms of voting behavior. Respondents in Egypt expressed that their feelings on religious involvement in the state did not affect their voting preferences in terms of whether or not they would support an Islamist candidate. Opinion on religious involvement with the state did affect voter preference in Tunisia, while respondents in Libya expressed that none of these variables affected their voting behavior. From these data, analysts then measured the presence of support for “some role of political Islam” in each country, finding 50 percent support in Libya and only 30 percent support in both Egypt and Tunisia.
The study used three variables on a spectrum of values to measure religion and voting preferences: “consistent Islamist” values in voting behavior; “center/mixed values”; and expression of “secular” values. Key findings in this category showed “consistent Islamist” voting behavior among 25 percent of populations in Egypt and Tunisia, but only among 10 to 15 percent of Libyans. Mixed values and more central voting tendencies showed up in 50 percent of Egypt’s survey responses and 40 percent of those in Tunisia and Libya. Despite the somewhat polarizing discourse being broadcasted among elites in Egypt, these key findings show “large centers in the population” where “elections are still somewhat up for grabs…[and] Islamist parties will not dominate forever”. Wichmann explained that the survey further cements the reality that “the elections of Egypt and the high proportion of the Islamist vote are more complex than one would think, and have less to do with religion.”
There are secular personal values at work that buck the traditional tendency to shroud all political crises in the MENA region in issues of Islam. As Wichmann said, “Islamist voters have many other reasons for their vote.”
The Transitional Governance Project’s findings indicate of a wealth of complex themes underlying transitions in different nations which traditional media outlets often trivialized under a simplifying rhetoric. We group Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya under those nations in the “Arab Spring” as if they all happened in the same way, for the same reasons, and ultimately mean the same thing. As we look forward to global decisions being made about Syria, Turkey, and Egypt, avoiding these simplifications to look for answers to questions like those asked in Lust and Wichmann’s study is the only way to accurately portray and understand what is really going on. Why has there been such a lack of previous fieldwork on the subject in the region? Are we comfortable with the storyline of the Middle East as a barren land for women and children run by radical Islam? There is this story, and there are those told by the people that embody each nation. We should choose the latter.
Photo: FreedomHouseDC (cc).
