Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution

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Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution Extended Abstract: Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution: A Spatial Demographic Analysis of Protest, Violence, and Voting Patterns Nicholas Reith, University of Texas at Austin Abstract: In the wake of the past two years of popular uprisings and revolutions in the Arab region, three theoretical explanations with a major demographic component have gained prominence. These three “new” theories posit 1) a youth bulge, 2) demographic disparities, and 3) the role of digital media, respectively as likely causes of revolution and of the success of Islamist parties in elections. Using Generalized Spatial Two-Stage Least Squares Regression to analyze sub-national data from Tunisia, preliminary results indicate that these three phenomena are not statistically significant predictors of the occurrence of protest, the timing/duration of protest, or the district vote percentage for the main Islamist party “Ennahdha.” Further analysis with both time and spatial dimensions will clarify other demographic factors that seem to be linked to protest, violence and vote outcomes, including government marginalization and women’s demographic factors. Introduction: The Tunisian Revolution, which began in December 2010, caught most Middle East and Political Science scholars by surprise and inspired similar uprisings in other Arab countries. The success of Islamists in post-revolutionary elections has however surprised few. The revolutions of the Arab Spring have offered fertile ground for research on social movements from a variety of perspectives. Three persistent theoretical explanations for the outbreak of these revolutions, all of which have a demographic component, seem to have gained significant prominence in the brief space of the past two years. These are the theories of “youth bulge,”(Hvistendahl 2011) “demographic disparities,”(LaGraffe 2012) and “digital media revolution” (Khondker 2011). Together, these can be seen as reinventions of previous Neo-Malthusian theories of “grievances” or “deprivation”(Malthus 1888; Opp 1988), “relative deprivation”(Gurney and Tierney 1982), and “technologies of freedom”(Pool 1983) respectively. To some extent, each of these has also been posited as a demographic explanation for the rise of Islamist movements, and the success of Islamist parties in elections from Algeria’s in 1991 to Turkey, Gaza, Tunisia and Egypt in more recent times. (Brown 2006; Santos Bravo and Mendes Dias 2006; Khamis 2011; Stepanova 2011; Bunt 2003) In this paper I propose to test these three theories in the sub-national context of Tunisia by looking at the effects of the youth bulge, demographic disparities, and technological diffusion on three outcomes: protests, repressive anti-revolutionary violence, and elections voting patterns in time- spatial perspective. 1 of 25 Existing Approaches: The first of the three above-mentioned theories, and the most explicitly demographic, points to the political consequences of having a “youth bulge” in the age structure. This theory harkens back to some of the earliest demographic work of Thomas Robert Malthus, and early social movement theories of “grievances” and “deprivation”. Under this heading, political scientists such as Jack Goldstone, Daniel LaGraffe, Henrik Urdal, and Richard Cincotta have found themselves allied with demographers such as John Weeks and others in advising the US government on strategic foreign policy, with Goldstone claiming that “in terms of broad probabilities, demography tells you almost everything you ought to know.” (Hvistendahl 2011; Goldstone 2002; LaGraffe 2012) Although, the theory of “youth bulge” may seem simplistic or deterministic, its proponents convey its plausibility by emphasizing the deprivation side of the story with convincing national level descriptive statistics, or through cross-national data analysis. In sum, they argue, it is not only the large youth cohort between ages 15 and 29 that explains revolutions, but also their grievances in terms of lack of economic opportunities for jobs, and social opportunities for marriage.1 (Dhillon 2007) Goldstone summarizes the basic proposition well: “The rapid growth of youth can undermine existing political coalitions, creating instability. Large youth cohorts are often drawn to new ideas and heterodox religions, challenging older forms of authority. In addition, because most young people have fewer responsibilities for families and careers, they are relatively easily mobilized for social or political conflicts. Youth have played a prominent role in political violence throughout recorded history, and the existence of a “youth bulge” (an unusually high proportion of youths 15 to 24 relative to the total adult population) has historically been associated with times of political crisis. Most major revolutions ... [including] most twentieth-century revolutions in developing countries—have occurred where exceptionally large youth bulges were present.”(Goldstone 2002) Goldstone and other proponents of this “youth bulge” theory are in good company with macro-historical sociologists such as Charles Tilly, who have considered population growth dynamics to be one of several major factors in revolutions throughout history. (Tilly 1996) The second of these three theories is really a corollary and slight refinement of the first. It adds a “relative deprivation” component to the first, using the terminology of “disparities.” In this variant, it is not only the large youth cohort and their grievances, but also specific relative grievances and glaring inequalities, which lead to revolution. (Al- Momani 2011).2 The main motivation for introducing this “relative” component is that, 1 In fact, there was certainly a hardship component to Mohamed Boazizi’s decision to commit public suicide by self-immolation. His fruit cart and sole means of earning his living was arbitrarily confiscated. However, according to his mother, his cart had been confiscated several times before. Rather, the major reason for his drastic action was the insult of being publically slapped by a woman police officer, which he considered an affront to his honor and that of his tribe, a sentiment with which she agreed. (Abouzeid 2011) 2 According to Al-Momani (2011) The combination of socio-economic hardship, inequality, and the large “youth bulge” of Middle Eastern societies acted as a major catalyst for the new political changes of the region. The demographics of the Middle East made it ripe for revolution: 60 percent of the population is 2 of 25 for all of their cross-national statistical models, traditional “youth bulge” deprivation theories are hard pressed to explain why countries with even more youth, or even poorer youth do not have revolutions. Thus, in a sub-national twist, proponents of “demographic disparities” explanations argue that it is relative poverty, and relative unemployment of certain groups or regions that leads to revolutionary conditions. Seen from another perspective, all of the major “deficits” identified by the recent UNDP Arab Human Development Reports, beginning in 2002, (knowledge, freedom, gender equality, and human security) are compounded by the demographic youth bulge that puts additional strain on states. (UNDP 2012) In the specific example of Egypt, one recent paper has argued that it was the combination of two factors: first, too many unemployed university graduates with higher expectations and time on their hands, and second, the rapid rise in food prices, which pushed 3 million lower middle class Egyptians below the poverty line, that explains the revolutionary events of 2011. (Korotayev and Zinkina 2011) Proponents of “disparities” explanations for revolutions also do a good job of demonstrating plausibility, thus salvaging some elements of deprivation theories. However they clash explicitly with newer theories of “resource mobilization,” which claim that social movements, and revolutions can only occur when there are enough organizational and financial resources available to for sustained revolt. And for all their macro-level merits, relative deprivation theories are no better at explaining the demographic characteristics of areas that support revolution. As Korotayev and Zinkina (2011) point out, there are clearly difficulties in comparing the political context of one particular Arab country (in this case Egypt) with those of other Arab countries, let alone with countries in other regions. Even protests by ostensibly similar groups may stem from different sets of grievances. Finally, the third of these schools of new-old theories is that which puts forth the “role of digital media,” as an explanation for the Arab Spring revolutions, and which is essentially a more nuanced, networked, and updated version of Ithiel de Sola Pool’s classic thesis in Technologies of Freedom. (Pool 1983) In the less reified version of this theory, it is not precisely Facebook and Twitter that made revolutions happen. Rather the rapid scaling up of local, national and transnational networks of communication through new technology is believed to have spurred the revolutions on in a variety of ways from actually organizing protests to framing the revolutions for both domestic and international audiences. (Howard and Hussain 2011; Khamis 2011; Stepanova 2011; Ray 2011) In one theorization, Anthropologist John Postill (2011) argues that digital media transforms the political communication landscape into one of “epidemiography,” whereby political messages of protest and dissent spread like viruses, faster than authoritarian governments can contain
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