The Middle East and North Africa is one of the least democratic regions in the world. At the same time, decades of research show robust support for democracy among MENA residents. A paradox ... or is it?

Hannah Ridge explores the "democracy paradox" by parsing the meanings that citizens assign to the Arabic word dimuqratiyya. Drawing on Arab Barometer data from across the region, as well as original surveys in Egypt and Morocco, she shows that democracy and dimuqratiyya are typically not the same thing. Dimuqratiyya focuses on egalitarianism and socio-economic outcomes. Conflating the two has led to misconceptions about public support for democratic governance.

 

About the author:

Hannah Ridge (she/her) is an assistant professor of political science at Chapman University. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Pozen Center. She completed her PhD in Political Science at Duke University, specializing in comparative politics and political methodology.

Her research focuses on how citizens understand democracy, what makes them want democratization, and what makes them satisfied with the democracy they have. This includes their attitudes towards political institutions, like party systems and liberal values. She also examines the role religion and ethnic hierarchies play in the state and citizens' political behavior.

 

About the discussant:

Lindsay Gifford is Assistant Research Professor at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University (2009), supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Professor Gifford also completed a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Anthropology at UCLA.

Professor Gifford’s research focuses on everyday life under the authoritarian state in the Middle East, and Middle Eastern refugee experiences through forced migration trajectories in the region and into the diaspora in the Global North. She is the author of “Homeland (Dis-)Engagement Processes among the New Syrian Diaspora”  in The Contemporary Middle East in an Age of Upheaval (James L. Gelvin, ed., Stanford 2021) and “Middle Eastern Refugeehood in the Happiest Place on Earth: Syrians and Iraqis Entering Finland’s Welfare State Bureaucracy” in Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees (Marcia Inhorn and Lucia Volk, eds., Berghahn 2021), among others. Her dissertation research focused on informal gendered civil society networks under the authoritarian Syrian state, particularly working class women’s rotating credit associations.

Co-sponsored by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Political Science, Pozen Center for Human Rights.