Grievances or skills? The effect of education on youth political participation in Egypt and Tunisia
| Author | Caroline Krafft,Miquel Pellicer,Ragui Assaad,Colette Salemi |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512120927115 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/
International Political Science Review
2022, Vol. 43(2) 191 –208
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120927115
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Article
Grievances or skills?
The effect of education
on youth political
participation in Egypt
and Tunisia
Miquel Pellicer
Maynooth University, Ireland and University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Ragui Assaad
University of Minnesota, USA
Caroline Krafft
St Catherine University, USA
Colette Salemi
University of Minnesota, USA
Abstract
The educated have figured prominently in protests and elections in several Middle East and North
Africa (MENA) countries. The dominant explanation for this pattern centers on grievances and
unfulfilled aspirations due to low education returns in the MENA. However, the pattern may simply
reflect the unequalparticipation observed in many democracies where education provides skills and
resources that facilitate political participation. This article compares the roles of skills and griev-
ances in explaining the relationship between education and youth political participation during and
after the Arab Spring. We use youth surveys with detailed data on education and political partic-
ipation from Egyptand Tunisia. We control for parental education and family background to partially
account for the potential of background to drive the education and participation relationship.
Overall, our results are consistent with the skill channel and lend little support to the grievance
channel. Our findings raise concerns about the exclusion of uneducated youth from both uncon-
ventional and conventional political participation in MENA politics.
Corresponding author:
Miquel Pellicer, Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstrasse 65, 47057 Duisburg, Germany.
Email: miquel.pellicer@uni-due.de
192 International Political Science Review 43(2)
Keywords
Political participation, Middle East and North Africa, youth, education, grievances
Introduction
Before the Arab Spring, elections in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were held
in hegemonic authoritarian regimes where turnout was driven by clientelistic linkages, coer-
cion, or appraisals of regime quality (De Miguel et al., 2015). Poverty and lack of education
were strong predictors of electoral participation (Pellicer and Wegner, 2014). With the Arab
Spring this pattern of political participation changed in some Middle Eastern countries, with
educated citizens taking center stage in protests and elections. Protest participants in the
Arab Spring were more likely to be among the more educated (Beissinger et al., 2012;
Sieverding and Ramadan, 2015). Surveys of voters in the fairly free elections following
the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya showed that more educated, urban
voters were more likely to turn out than uneducated, rural ones (Benstead et al., 2013).
1
Most democracies around the world display a positive relationship between education
and political participation (Gallego, 2014). The standard explanation for this relationship is
that education provides skills and resources that encourage political participation (Brady
et al., 1995). The positive relation between education and political participation observed in
the MENA when contexts were freer could thus reflect simply an evolution towards the
familiar unequal participation patterns around the world.
However, this has not been the standard account of the role of education for political
participation during and after the Arab Spring. The more frequently invoked narrative
focuses on youth grievances. Concerns about lack of access to formal stable jobs and
the frustration and discontent this engenders in youth are common around the world
(United Nations Development Programme, 2014). However, in the MENA these concerns
are particularly heightened (World Bank, 2014). In particular, returns to education are
especially low for MENA youth (Krafft, 2018; Salehi-Isfahani et al., 2009), and as a
result the educated youth in the MENA are thought to have particularly high levels of
grievances. The standard accounts of the Arab Spring depict the turnout of highly educated
youth as stemming from their high grievances, not from their mobilization advantage
(Goldstone, 2011; Sanborn and Thyne, 2014).
This article seeks to disentangle the skill and grievance channels for driving youth polit-
ical mobilization in Tunisia and Egypt during and immediately after the Arab Spring. These
two channels have very different consequences for the type of grievances that are articulated
and heard in the MENA. If the grievance channel is the main driver, the higher grievances of
the educated would be articulated and heard. If the skill channel is the main driver, the
grievances of the uneducated in the MENA may remain unarticulated.
Assessing the grievance and skill theories is not straightforward, for two reasons. First,
youth feature prominently both in accounts of recent political participation in the MENA,
and in the grievance explanation of this participation. A focus on youth requires informa-
tion on a sufficiently large number of youth, which is typically lacking in the representative
opinion surveys commonly used, such as the Arab Barometer or the World Values Survey.
Second, education is correlated with many other variables relevant for political participa-
tion, such as family background. Accounting for this is important in order to isolate the role
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