“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes…
Kathrin Thomas
The Process of Revolutionary Protest: Development and Democracy in the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-2011
“Research on democratic revolution treats revolutionary protest, and revolutionary protest participation, as unitary events. This conceptualization is at odds with how `revolutionary’ protest often unfolds—protest does not begin life as democratic or revolutionary but grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. Using an original event catalogue of protest during the twenty-nine days of…
Determinants of input- and output-oriented conceptions of democracy in the Arabic world: a multi-level analysis (German)
“Since the 1990’s, more and more studies have been analyzing conceptions of democracy. This study focuses on determinants of conceptions of democracy in the Arabic world. Thereby, we distinguish between input- and output-oriented conceptions of democracy. Whereas the former ones are highlighting procedural elements of democracy, the latter ones focus on materialistic aspects of democracy. We test different theories (modernization…
Turkey in the Middle East
Turkey, as country with a long history in the region and its promotion of “shared brotherhood”, has exerted a significant influence on Middle Eastern societies. Even though Turkey followed pro-Israel and anti-Islamist policies in the past, its policies have increasingly become anti-Israel and pro-Islamist with the increasing prominence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the Arab Spring, a period in which…
Godly Governance
This paper seeks to investigate Muslim support for religious governance in Arab Muslim-Majority countries, focusing on the role of personal piety. It does so by exploring the relevant literature and deriving hypotheses from it, which are subsequently tested by using survey data of the Arab Barometer (Wave III and IV). The following analysis conducts hierarchical linear regression with the dependent…