Bread, freedom or social justice? An empirical investigation into the determinants of the Arab Spring

Is it a yearning for more political freedom, or a demand for the more mundane economic necessities of life which drives large waves of potentially destabilizing mass protests against authoritarian regimes? We examine this question in the context of the Arab Spring, which originated from Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and soon spread through the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We use a static fixed effects model and a dynamic GMM model on a panel of 14 MENA countries for the period 2006–2017 to identify the major socio-economic and political determinants of both non-violent and violent Arab Spring protests. One of the main findings of our article is that, in contrast with the “intermediate regimes hypothesis”, the intermediate regimes tend to be more stable compared to both strictly authoritarian and relatively democratic regimes. Further, more nuanced dimensions of democracy, in terms of institutional checks on the authoritarian regime, have a positive impact on stability and reducing protests. With regard to socio-economic factors, our results show that factors leading to better living standards, such as higher economic growth and higher levels of GDP per capita, and transfers in the form of public expenditure (“authoritarian bargain”) partly mitigate the grievances and the resulting protests.