For a moment in early 2011, it looked like demonstrators across the Arab World would overturn regimes and the scholarship investigating them. But political systems and political science proved more robust than initially expected. As the dust settled, nondemocracies still pervaded the region and the clubs of state repression still trumped the courage of young activists. This paper situates the uprisings of 2011 in comparative perspective. I argue that the movements which sought to emulate Tunisia's example fell short of political or social revolution and, unless they were bolstered by external military intervention (as in Libya) also failed to change regimes. Moreover, the longer the protests took to reach a conclusion, the more modest was their yield. While Egyptians accomplished a leadership change in February--ousting President Hosni Mubarak through a mass sit-in and a military coup--nine months later their Yemeni counterparts were unsuccessful at decisively breaking President Ali Abdullah Saleh's authority, much less shattering his political and security apparatus. It follows that to date the clearest answer to the question, "What is the Arab Spring a case of?" would be: a set of crises, brought about by popular unrest, in which nondemocratic regimes violently reasserted their hold on power.

As the events of the Arab Spring unfold, scholars have been speculating about the similarities and differences across various protest movements. Are these revolutionary movements? Do they have characteristics in common with revolutionary movements elsewhere? In order to understand these questions, this paper attempts to examine the micro-foundations of protest behavior across Tunisia and Egypt. How similar, for example, were the reasons for participation in protest across the two cases? Further, how similar were these motives to those in other protest/revolutionary moments in states outside the region? Using data from the Second Wave Arab Barometer (administered right after the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia) this paper seeks to address these questions. The paper will first examine the extent and magnitude of the protests in each country, comparing and contrasting the key motives and priorities shaping protest behavior in the each state. Second, the paper will compare findings from the Arab world to protest behavior in Ukraine using a dataset of 1800 individuals collected in 2005, three months after millions of Ukranians poured onto the streets for seventeen days. This paper will concentrate on the similarities and differences across these protest movements and, where possible, make inferences about what these similarities and differences mean for the trajectory of political development in the Arab World.

I argue that the institutionalization of military leaders as bureaucratic elites in Egypt prevented a successful and immediate transfer of power following widespread popular uprisings in early 2011. The paper attempts to bridge a gap in the literature in which the institutionalization of the military and its effects on moments of transitions has been overlooked, using Egypt as a unique and informative case study. The literature on revolutions suggests that one of the most crucial components of a successful revolution is the moment of military defection; when the military ceases to use violence or the threat of violence to defend or support the old regime, enabling the emergence of a new center of sovereignty to take power. However, the pivotal moment in February when the Egyptian military decided not to fire on protesters did not permit a new center of sovereignty to materialize. Instead, the Egyptian military essentially defected to itself, maintaining not only a traditional coercive role but also expanding its role as a major bureaucratic entity with extensive political and economic powers. The paper begins with a brief history of the military in Egyptian politics since the establishment of the republic in 1952, focusing on the period of increasing professionalization and bureaucratization of the military under former President Hosni Mubarak and outlining the military’s control and ownership of important sectors of the Egyptian economy. I then discuss literature on revolutions, the structure and role of the military in post-colonial and developing countries (with a particular focus on a small but growing literature focusing on militaries in the Middle East), and the role of elites in moments of political transition to provide a framework for conceptualizing Egypt’s revolutionary moment. When read together, these literatures provide important insights on how institutionalization of the military’s coercive and bureaucratic roles prevented a successful transition of power in Egypt. I conclude with implications regarding Egyptian and regional politics. Egypt provides an interesting example of how preexisting military, bureaucratic, and elite structures have influenced the outcome of a revolutionary moment, and how these institutions have remained largely unaffected by superficial shifts of political power. I also offer suggestions for how my framework can be used to explore recent political turmoil in Libya, Tunisia, and Syria, where different configurations of military institutionalization have resulted in varying levels of revolutionary success.

It has been claimed that the Arab Spring is a youth-driven phenomenon characterized by rising economic and political grievances which eventually translated into large-scale protest. This paper seeks to describe and analyze the youth cohort that is said to have been behind the downfall of several Arab regimes. In doing so, it asks which types of individuals were likely to participate in protests: were the protesters generally unemployed, more educated, and younger, or were other factors driving citizens to the streets? Using newly-available data from the second wave of the Arab Barometer—collected during the Arab Spring—we evaluate many of the commonly-held claims about the nature of these protests. We compare the results of this survey with earlier surveys in the Arab World in order to determine: a) if the Arab youth have truly become more politically engaged; and b) to what extent the recent wave of protests that has swept across the Arab World is distinct from earlier patterns of mobilization.

The uprisings of 2011 altered the political landscape in the Arab world, prompted early elections in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia,[1] and provided us an unprecedented opportunity to examine critical questions regarding the relationship between social networks, political institutions and elections. Focusing on these countries allows important cross-temporal and cross-national variation. In all cases, earlier elections were held in an environment of long-standing (and apparently stable) authoritarianism. In 2011, elections were held in an atmosphere of uncertainty –arguably as founding elections in Tunisia (where the break with the past is most dramatic), as elections in a highly charged contestation over extent of change in Egypt, and as elections under uncertainty but controlled reform in Morocco. The paper explores the extent to which changing levels of uncertainty and the nature of contestation has altered electoral behavior. It rests on the premise (and evidence) that elections in the long-standing authoritarian regimes were best understood as understood as competition over access to state resources (e.g., wasta), rather than as contestation over policies, executive office-holding, or broader rules of the game. Moreover, in many cases, they were often best understood as competitions between social networks that tie voters and candidates (in what are often viewed as clientelistic relationships), rather than as individual exchanges between voters and candidates. To what extent has the uncertainty of 2011 altered this? How, when and where do social networks and expected personal benefits continue to drive voting? How does this differ depending on the issues at stake in the elections, and how does it differ across voters (e.g., new entrants into voting vs. voters who have previously engaged)? This paper will examine these questions by drawing on systematic studies of campaigns in the 2010 Egyptian, 2011 Egyptian, Moroccan and Tunisian elections, on surveys in Egypt (2011) and Morocco (2012), electoral outcomes and secondary sources. In doing so, it will contribute to the literature on elections under authoritarianism and transitions (e.g.., Malesky, Blaydes, Masoud, Lust, Lindberg), and to that on clientelism (e.g., Magaloni, Stokes, Dunning and Stokes, Kitschelt and Wilkinson, etc.)