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Behind the Masks of Protesters Behind the Masks of Protesters Unravelling the Motivations and Opportunities for Arab Spring Participation Chris Wegner Master’s Thesis Department of Political Science University of Oslo Spring Semester, 2015 II Behind the Masks of Protesters Unravelling the Motivations and Opportunities for Arab Spring Participation Chris Wegner Master’s Thesis Department of Political Science University of Oslo Spring Semester, 2015 III © Chris Wegner 2015 Title: Behind the Masks of Protesters: Unravelling the Motivations and Opportunities for Arab Spring Participation Chris Wegner http://www.duo.uio.no/ Press: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo IV Abstract This thesis analyzes and compares the motivations and opportunities that drove Arabs to par- ticipate in the so-called Arab Spring in the countries of Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia and Yemen. I employ a rather unique bottom-up approach of identifying the factors that moved individuals to take to the streets – an approach that has been mostly neglected by scholarly works focus- ing on Arab Spring participation. By quantitatively analyzing the most recent survey data of the Arab Barometer, I find that motivations and opportunities play a complementary role in determining protest participation. More specifically, I show that participation in the Arab up- risings was most consistently motivated by perceptions of unequal treatment and simultane- ously facilitated by opportunities afforded through membership in political parties and/or civil organizations as well as the usage of the internet for political matters. Furthermore, attending religious gatherings, such as Friday prayers, seemed to have facilitated protest participation only in countries that experienced regime leadership change, such as Tunisia and Yemen. Overall, the robustness of my findings suggests that future research on social movements should continue to use motivations (based on grievances) and opportunities in a complemen- tary approach. Key words: Arab Spring, motivations, relative deprivation, opportunities, regime change, quantitative research, binary logistic regression V VI Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have contributed to this thesis by means of advice, feedback, proof-reading, or motivational support. Most notably, I would like to extend my appreciation to my supervisor, Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, for the tremendous amount of work and time in supporting me every step of the way. I would also like to thank Håvard Strand for guidance and support when my initial thesis proposal was declined. Special thanks also to James A. Glasgow who helped with proof-reading final versions of my thesis. Finally, my gratitude extends to all my friends and family who supported me with interesting discussions and invaluable encouragement throughout the process of writing. Chris Wegner Oslo, 15.05.2013 Word count: 36.541 VII Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... V Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. VII Table of Contents .................................................................................................................. VIII List of Tables ............................................................................................................................ XI List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... XII Acronyms and Abbreviations ................................................................................................ XIII 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Laying the Ground: Regime Overthrow vs. Regime Survival ..................................... 4 1.2 Macro-Level Explanations for Regime Durability ...................................................... 8 1.3 Micro-Level Factors that explain Regime Durability ................................................ 12 1.4 Recent Developments in Four Cases ......................................................................... 13 1.5 Concluding Remarks and Structure ........................................................................... 16 2 Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................................... 18 2.1 Theorizing the Arab Spring: Why Social Movement Theory? .................................. 18 2.2 A Review of Relative Deprivation Theory ................................................................ 20 2.2.1 Motivations leading to Arab Spring Participation ..................................................... 25 2.3 Resource Mobilization Theory and Opportunity Structures ...................................... 31 2.3.1 Opportunities facilitating Arab Spring Participation ................................................. 32 2.4 Addressing the Criticism: Why RD still matters today .............................................. 36 2.5 A Complementary Approach: RD and Opportunities ................................................ 37 2.5.1 Establishing a RD framework for Arab Spring participation .................................... 38 2.5.2 Connecting Opportunity Structures with RD ............................................................. 40 2.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 41 3 Data and Methods ............................................................................................................. 43 3.1 Data and Cases ........................................................................................................... 43 3.1.1 Case Selection ............................................................................................................ 43 3.1.2 Case-specific Data Information ................................................................................. 45 3.2 Data-related Challenges ............................................................................................. 46 3.3 Operationalization ...................................................................................................... 47 3.3.1 The Dependent Variable ............................................................................................ 48 3.3.2 The Independent Variables ........................................................................................ 51 VIII 3.4 Model ......................................................................................................................... 62 3.4.1 Assumptions of Binary Logistic Regressions ............................................................ 63 3.5 Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................. 64 4 Findings and Discussion ................................................................................................... 65 4.1 Results ........................................................................................................................ 68 4.2 Findings and Discussion ............................................................................................ 68 4.2.1 Motivational Factors .................................................................................................. 68 4.2.2 Opportunistic Factors ................................................................................................. 74 4.2.3 Control Variables ....................................................................................................... 76 4.3 Adjusting for Potential Time Lags – Comparing the Findings with Data from AB Wave 2 ....................................................................................................................... 76 4.3.1 Motivations ................................................................................................................ 78 4.3.2 Opportunities .............................................................................................................. 79 4.3.3 Control Variables ....................................................................................................... 80 4.4 Improving Results – Taking New Social Media Out ................................................. 80 4.4.1 Motivations ................................................................................................................ 83 4.4.2 Opportunities .............................................................................................................. 84 4.4.3 Control Variables ....................................................................................................... 85 4.5 Bringing It All Together: A Summary of the Findings .............................................. 85 4.6 Assessing the Goodness of Fit ................................................................................... 87 4.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 92 5 Robustness Diagnostics .................................................................................................... 94 5.1 Reliability ................................................................................................................... 94 5.2 Validity ......................................................................................................................
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