Polarization and Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East

This chapter uses data on welfare and perceptions to gauge the relation between polarization and popular dissatisfaction in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region. After a decade from the Arab Spring, the MENA region ranks among the worst in terms of subjective wellbeing. This syndrome was especially pronounced in the Arab-Spring countries - Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen - but the ranks of the unhappy swelled in nearly all Arab countries. Also, in nearly all developing Arab countries, especially the four Arab Spring countries, the middle class was doing worse in relative terms than other income groups according to measures tracking changes in mean consumption in the 2000s. Building on previous analytical work identifying a relation between growing polarization and increasing negative perception of Moroccan households before and after the Arab Spring, this work hypothesizes that this relation is upheld also for other countries in the region. Likewise in Morocco, we argue that the relatively worse perception of poor, vulnerable, and lower middle-class households mirrors the ongoing hollowing out of the welfare distribution's middle and its concentration in the tails.