…Secondly, the government should fight corruption, tax avoidance (which according to the Income and Sales Tax Department in 2016 cost the budget JD 3 billion), mismanagement, and cronyism to make Jordanians feel their taxes are being put to a good use. One study, conducted by the University of Jordan Strategic Studies Center and NAMA Consultants, argues that only 35% of…
Aseel Alayli
Gender Inequality and Economic Inclusion in Tunisia: Key Policy Issues
….Sociocultural prescriptions about gender roles have changed less than the secular nature of the state might suggest. According to the sixth wave (2010-14) of the World Values Survey, 71% of respondents agreed that “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women” (see Table 2). The gender breakdown suggests that more men (82%) than women…
Exploring Support for Democracy Across the Globe
This report is the first comprehensive analysis on the state of support for democracy across the globe using data from the Global Barometer Surveys. The focus is on support for democracy both because democracy is at the core of the GBS surveys, and because, as a political system, it is currently facing an uphill battle to defend its legitimacy. By exploring the state of support for democracy…
Can fighting corruption help Arab states sell painful economic reforms?
Perceptions matter In a 2016 report by Transparency International in nine Arab states, 61 percent of citizens polled said they believed corruption was on the rise in their countries, and 68 percent said their government was “doing badly” in fighting corruption. In Jordan, 75 percent of respondents said they believe corruption had increased, while an Arab Barometer survey in 2016…
Jordan faces its historical reckoning
….. After former Prime Minister Hani Mulki had proposed in early May reforms to address a multiyear economic adjustment plan agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donors, it became clear that the government had pushed past the limit of what citizens could bear financially or accept politically. Jordanians are and feel poor after years of gradual austerity,…
Authoritarian Nostalgia Among Iraqi Youth: Roots and Repercussions
…. Disillusion with Democracy A common refrain these days is that Iraq “needs a strong leader like Saddam.” During my time in the country, I heard these sentiments expressed by teenagers and twenty-somethings who were, at most, elementary school students during the Ba’athist era. These observations, though anecdotal, are corroborated by survey projects. Both the Arab Barometer and the Shi’a…
A Decade of Public Opinion Research in MENA : The Arab Barometer Project
This presentation covered the following areas: About The Arab Barometer Question Areas Capacity Building Tracking Public Opinion Online Data Analysis Portal Academic Journals In the Recent News The Fifth Wave Outreach
Who votes for Islamists? A cross-national study of 10 Muslim-majority countries
The literature on Islamist voters is scarce. There are little emphases on Islamist voters and, conversely, plenty of scholarly works on Islamist movements and Islamists who support and sympathize with them. Therefore, this thesis aims to remedy this shortcoming in the political science literature and study Islamist voters as political animals. Precisely, the study is focused on underlining the main…
Arab Public Opinion: Between Attachment to Islam and Commitment to Democracy
International surveys of personal values have existed for almost 40 years (since 1981) in most European countries (the European Values Study or EVS) and in many countries of the world (the World Values Survey), enabling us to observe the evolution of the values of the citizenry in many areas (religion, family, politics, trust, tolerance etc.). Only in much more recent…
Islamists are losing support in Jordan
…. What student politics show Many political scientists know Jordan University because its researchers help implement the Arab Barometer surveys. However, within student politics, JU is also a microcosm of society. It can be restive, with fee protests and tribal feuding recently agitating its Amman campus. It is also enormous. Of Jordan’s 300,000 university students, nearly 15 percent study at…
Anger Management : The Politics of Frustration in the Arab World and its Implications for the West
…… According to Michael Robbins, an American who heads Arab Barometer, society is driving change, with much of the region growing less religious (The Economist 2017-1). Although the figures need to be studied with some perspective, it seems that Egyptians are praying less (see Table 4), with a decrease of piety over time and these shifts most visible among the young-…
The Arab Barometer
In 2005, Amaney Jamal, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics and director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and Mark Tessler, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, jointly launched the Arab Barometer, a project designed to document and record public sentiment through polling in countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Now…