 Yeah, I think that would be fine. Yeah, I think we put it on our own, but we didn't... Yeah, he passing notes in case. 15 minutes is sort of... I know they're going to be on the show. And when you speak, you'll need to press yours. You need to eat their speaker. Let me see about that. This is your set up here. Oh, okay. Once I finish. Okay, I think we can get started. I know a number of people will be trickling in, but I think it's time to get going. So good morning. I am Steve Risken with the U.S. Institute of Peace. And on behalf of the Institute and a number of partnering organizations, and they are the Arab Barometer, the Arab Reform Initiative, POMED, the Project on Middle East Democracy, and the Project on Middle East Political Science, I want to welcome you to this morning's session that focuses on a very important and timely topic of public opinion in the Arab world. Now at the core of USIP's mission is the effort to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflict. It's a goal that the Institute pursues across the full life cycle of conflict from conflict prevention, early warning, understanding the roots of conflict through conflict management, mediation, negotiation, all the way through to post-conflict peace building. And we do this through a wide range of activities, research, policy research, and applied research, educational programming, training, and track two unofficial diplomatic initiatives. And not surprisingly, the Institute is very active in the Middle East and has been so in most of the 30 years of its existence. We're implementing programs on the ground and partnering with local organizations and funding the work of scholars, NGOs, and practitioners. And key to those efforts is the advancement of knowledge about conflict and the development of tools to understand and peacefully resolve it. And that brings me to today's program and the initiative behind it, the Arab Barometer. Funded in part by a couple of grants from USIP, I'm very proud to say, the Arab Barometer is a collaborative effort consisting of individual scholars and institutions in the U.S. and almost a dozen countries in the Arab world. For almost a decade now, the Arab Barometer has been taking the pulse of and providing important data and analysis on Arab publics, tracking public attitudes during one of the most turbulent and uncertain periods in the history of the modern Middle East. Now today's session will focus on the findings of the Arab Barometer's most recent survey, that is the third survey in this series that began in late 2012 and wrapped up earlier this year, I think, in late spring. And joining us today to present those findings are some of the key players. Indeed, most of the leadership of the Arab Barometer is with us. You have their bios, but I wanted to briefly introduce them in the order that they will speak. First is Dr. Mark Tesler, Samuel J. Evilsfeld Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mark is really the dean, I would think, or one of the deans of Middle East political science, who I've known for many years. And together with Amani Jamal is one of the two lead scholars in the Arab Barometer initiative. Mark is co-authored, or co-authored, edited more than a dozen books on public opinion in the Middle East and on related topics. And his book on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is really one of the indispensable references on the conflict. Mark will be examining attitudes toward political Islam and democracy throughout the region and how they have those attitudes have evolved since the Arab Spring. Second is Dr. Khalil Shkaki, who is the director of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan. A Columbia PhD and original member of the Arab Barometer, Khalil has been conducting survey work among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for over 20 years. He too has published numerous works on Palestinian public opinion and on other themes related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. And I do travel more or less annually when I have an opportunity to the Middle East. And when in Palestine, I make it a point to stop in and try to see Khalil, who is always very generous with his time, and consistently provides incisive analysis, a critical dose of ground truth that is thoughtful, informed, and informative. Khalil will focus on the impact of perceptions, personal security, or lack of it, on the belief that democracy is appropriate for one's country. Next is Dr. Michael Robbins, the project director of the Arab Barometer. Michael is a University of Michigan PhD, whose research on Arab public opinion, political Islam, and political parties you will find in a number of well-known journals. He is a former research fellow at Harvard's Belfors Center for Science and International Affairs. And I note that Michael won the APSA Aaron Woldowski Award for the Best Dissertation in the Field of Religion and Politics in 2013. And he will provide a comparative assessment of the views on governance issues during the Arab Spring over time, and will highlight the differences in public opinion between countries that experience leadership change and those that didn't. Rounding out this stellar panel is Dr. Amani Jamal, also a University of Michigan PhD. Amani is the Edward S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton and director of the Mamduha S. Bob Center for Peace and Justice. Like the others. On the panel, she too has a remarkable bio and impressive set of academic credentials and achievements. The bio you have lists a number of the fruits of her labor, including barriers of democracy, a book that won the 2008 APSA Best Book Award in Comparative Democratization. And Amani will be discussing social justice and how perceptions of it have changed since the Arab Spring. She'll be examining economic outcomes corruption and the relationship between citizens and government. The panelists will be taking each for about 15 minutes, and that should leave ample time for questions and discussion. I would ask that you turn off or silence your cell phones. And before turning it over to the first speaker, I wanted to ask Steve McInnery from Po-Med to come up and say a few words. Thanks, Steve. I don't have too much to add to your comments about the importance of this project, but just briefly I mean the project of Middle East Democracy, the organization that I run, I was excited to be co-sponsoring this project and this event this morning. Amani Jamal is also a non-resident senior fellow with our organization. For a lot of us here in Washington that study the Middle East, a lot of us travel frequently to the region and we frequently hear anecdotal impressions about the changes in opinion on the Arab Street across the region. It's very exciting to have this project to give concrete data and analysis and so that we don't have to rely simply on sort of anecdotes in terms of the very dynamic changes in the public opinions across the region and in different countries that in response to the sort of dramatic changes that have unfolded in the region, especially since 2011. It's also exciting that their barometer project, which began before 2011, has had the opportunity to expand and conduct public opinion polling since then in countries where it was strictly forbidden prior to that time. So I think it's exciting to see some of the changes in the region lead to more information and better understanding here and elsewhere about what's happening in the region and about sort of public opinion across the Arab world. So thanks and look forward to hearing remarks from all of our speakers on a wide variety of topics in the region. Thanks. Thank you. And we'll just do it from here. So I want to start by thanking USIP not only for hosting this event and giving us this opportunity, but for, as Steve mentioned, the two grants that we've had for the second and third wave of the barometer, they've been very important. I also want to give a big thanks to MEPI without whom we wouldn't probably have an air barometer. They were the generous funder of the first wave that enabled us to get going back in 2006 and we're really very grateful for all the support we've had. We've been fortunate to have support also from the International Development Research Center of Canada, from the United Nations Development Program and a few other places. So we just want to acknowledge kind of who has made this possible for us and say how much we appreciate it. So we're each going to try to talk for just 15 minutes or so which means we're not going to be able to go into much detail. We can follow up in Q&A if there's interest. I'll be talking about attitudes toward political Islam and by that I simply mean the responses that people are giving to a number of questions that ask about the role that Islam should play in government and political affairs. You'll see some of those questions in a minute and won't go into great detail. There really isn't time, but this is to give you a feel for what the data are all about, what the surveys are all about. So what's coming up by hope is a list of all the surveys that have been done by the air barometer. We've done three waves and wanted to show you exactly what those involve, where they were done, what time they were done, sample sizes. I'm not going to talk much about methodology but we can talk about our sampling procedures or our data quality control procedures if that's relevant. I also want to say that I'm sure this is going to come up in a second so I can kind of tell you what you'll be seeing. We've worked in 14 countries over three waves, a total of 29 surveys. Maybe one of the most important things to mention and that's part of the reason that we're having this launch right now is that these data are available to the public. They're in the public domain and we encourage you to download them yourselves in analyzable form. They're in SPSS formats but they can easily be converted to data or something else. And to make use of them for your own policy, academic, other purposes, these are, this is a public good. You'll see that we've done it some places three times, some places two times, some places one time it keeps going off. I bet it's a screensaver or something that maybe kicks in. I can head and talk. You kind of get a sense of what's up there. And where we do it depends first and foremost on the conditions in the country. We've done surveys in the last two waves in Tunisia and Egypt. We weren't able to do it in either of those countries for reasons that you all know before that. Second consideration is whether we feel we can get data that we have confidence in. We managed to do a survey in Saudi Arabia in the second wave that we had confidence in. We couldn't get agreement on an adequate sampling plan to do the third wave and so Saudi Arabia is not in the third wave. There are nine countries in which we did, we were present, we did both the 2011, a little bit at the end of 2010 but mostly a group of surveys in 2011. That's the second wave and the third wave mostly that Steve mentioned, mostly in 2013, a few in early 2014 and a couple at the very end of 2012. So I'll be comparing those. Those nine countries are listed here and I guess we're going to have them at some point I think, so they're working on it. So those countries include, well I'll include Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan. If that's not nine then I forgot one. So let me go on to talk a little bit about political Islam now. So there are three questions in the slide that would show you the ones that I'm focusing on. It's part of, and I do have them here on a different piece of paper so I'll read them to you if it doesn't, if they don't come up. So there's a lot of different questions about how people feel about the role Islam should play in government affairs. I've picked three of them. For our purposes here I'm analyzing them just one at a time just to give you some basic descriptives and a sense of what's in the data. There are other questions that are not here and in many of the analyses we've actually combined them into indices and done a little bit more complicated analysis. The three questions are would your country be better agree or disagree or strongly agree, strongly disagree? Would your country be better off if more people with religious, strong religious beliefs held public office? Religious leaders should influence decisions of government and religious practices are private and should be separated from social and political life. So there are three different kinds of questions here. In general the questions correlate with one another and they all seem to be more or less measuring the same thing. But there have been some occasions when they don't exactly correlate and we've been able to do some more complicated pictures of the way people think about Islam's political role. But for our purposes we're not going to have time to do that. I can say a little bit more about it in Q&A if that's of interest. But for our purposes we're simply going to take them as general indications of how much or how little support there is. The majority response to all three questions is that Islam should not play a role in political life. But there's a fairly good division, varies a little bit across three questions. If we had the slides up there you would see the differences from question to question. But in one question, for example, a question should people with strong religious beliefs hold public office? 55% said no and 45% said yes. So there's a division with a slight majority. The gap is a little bit bigger on the other two questions but it's not all that different. And the other point to be made from that you would see if the slide were up there is that just taking the nine countries as a whole in what's called pooled analysis, we're just taking them as a group. We're not looking yet at individual countries that it's almost the same in 2013 in Wave 3 as it is in 2011. It's not the case for every single country but taking the block of countries as a whole, so here's where we, well better, that's the one. So you see the questions, you see the distributions. Majorities want to oppose religion and politics as measured by these questions but there is substantial minorities. And there isn't a big variation when we take the countries all together from Wave 2 to Wave 3 from 2011 to 2013. But if we look at some individual countries we see the next one, unless I'm pressing the wrong one, back one. This is the benefits of being first. There we are. So the short story in Egypt is that, this is Egypt, I'm going to show you a little bit on Tunisia and Iraq as well. I'm not going to try to go through every single country. That really as you would pretty much expect knowing what's been going on in Egypt in the last couple of years there's been a big drop off in support for political Islam. The first survey was conducted not only before Morsi was in power but before the parliamentary elections that were won by the Freedom and Justice Party. So it's after the Arab Spring had begun and Mubarak had left, but the new government hadn't yet come into power. The second period, Wave 3, was done after a little bit more than a year after he had been in power, after his regime had been in power. And we see, it would be surprising if it weren't the case knowing what's been going on in Egypt, although there's obviously a lot to discuss about who's responsible for what in Egypt and we get into those conversations. But in terms of the things measured by this question, and Mubarak would be better for our country with more religious people in office, religious leaders should influence government decisions, significant declines in the percentage of people who answer those questions in a way supportive of political Islam. And also not only is there an overall decline kind of in every single category, but a shift to strongly disagree. So it's not that the more people disagree that Islam should play this political role as measured by these questions, more people strongly disagree. If you look at the very first set of graphs over there, strongly agree has gone from only 20% to 36% strongly disagree. So the next slide probably won't spend much time on this. I want to try to keep within my time frame. I wanted to disaggregate a little bit and see if certain categories of the Egyptian population experience more or less change than that fairly dramatic change or the fairly dramatic decline in support for political Islam that we saw in the previous slide. And so there's a lot of different things. I don't have age in here, for example. I don't have whether they're urban or rural. But I did want to look at at least a couple of things to give a sense for how it is often important and instructive to disaggregate the data. And so I looked at better educated women, better educated men, less well educated women, less well educated men. And a couple of things stand out that we might talk about in terms of what it tells us in Q&A, if that's of interest. It's women who are more supportive or less likely to be unsupportive even though the majority is unsupportive. And it's particularly women who have had less than a secondary school education. Well, that may suggest that some of the support for political Islam is coming from the categories of the population that are most traditional. But we can perhaps talk about that. The main point I wanted to make with this slide was that not only do we not see the whole picture when we put all the countries together, their individual country stories, we don't see the whole picture if we look at just the whole country. There are individual demographic dynamics that are shaping what's going on inside the country. And this gives you a little bit of a picture. And you can see where there were bigger drops. There were drops everywhere, but those who were more supportive to begin with, women in general, and especially less well educated women, they dropped the most, as we can see by that very last row. Okay, the next one, please sleep. So this is Tunisia. And the interesting thing about Tunisia is that if we simply take those who either agree or agree strongly and compare them to those who disagree and disagree strongly, that Islam should play an important role in political life as measured by these two questions. We don't get much of a difference. The proportions who say, yeah, I agree, or I agree strongly that Islam should play an important political role is about the same in the 2011 survey, which was done before the elections in October of 2011 that brought in a bit of power. And then the survey that was done in February of 2013 after it had been in power for a little over a year, we don't get, if we divide it just in terms of, if we just cut it and disagree, the percentages are about the same. So it hasn't fallen off the way it has in Egypt. What we do find, it's very low to begin with. So Tunisia is one of the countries where there is less support than most of the other countries to begin with, but that support has remained constant in the aggregate, in dichotomous terms. But if we look at the shift from disagree to strongly disagree, look at that first graph, only 19% said no, we don't want legislators to have influence over government decisions. I strongly feel that. In 2013 38%, twice as many, strongly disagreed, not just disagreed. And if we look also at the upper levels there, we can see that although the shift isn't as big, those who strongly agreed that Islam should play a political role went from 4% to 10%. So there's been a polarization. There hasn't been so much an aggregate shift, but the people who support political Islam are more likely to support it strongly. And those who oppose political Islam are particularly likely to oppose it strongly. And well, that's happened in Tunisia since these surveys were done, and we have the results of the recent election. But I think the difference between Tunisia and Egypt is instructive in terms of, one, there's a drop off overall, and the other, it's actually more polarization. So I want to look quickly at Iraq. How am I doing on time? I'm probably... Good. Okay. So in Iraq, I have some of these same questions, and what I want to do here, just given kind of what's going on there today, to just compare the views of the different sectarian or confessional or ethno-nationalist communities, the different sectarian communities. And the two things that stand out is that both in the 2011 survey, and in the 2013 survey, there is one group that stands out, there's division in all three groups. None of the three groups, the Sunnis, the Shi'i, and the Kurds, none of them are entirely homogenous. There's important divisions within, and something that would be worth exploring would be what accounts for those variations within each community, and is it the same thing that accounts for the variation in each one, or does each one have its independent story about what's driving people in one direction or another. But when we look at aggregate figures and just compare the groups, we see them in 2011, is the Sunnis who stand out as strongly disagreeing, strongly disagreeing or strongly disagreeing that religious leaders should have influence over government decisions. And the others are somewhat divided and somewhat skewed in the opposite direction that maybe it's important that Islam play a political role. I've only given you one of those three questions just to keep it simple, but so the Sunnis stand out and they emerge as the more secular in their orientations, possibly in terms of what we know about the legacy of Sunnis under Saddam, but maybe there are other places to look for the explanation. In a lot of this I'm trying to give you the broad picture inviting you whether we have time to do it collectively here or not, inviting you to reflect on what the lessons of these findings might be and what we want to do with this information. If we shift to 2013, it's the Sunnis still stand out, but now they stand out as being more supportive of political Islam, whereas it's only 21% were supportive in 2011, now it's 51.6. There's still a division, there's more of a division than were before, but whereas the other groups have moved toward greater opposition to Islam playing a political role I don't know if we can conduct it to ISIS, given this goes back to 2013, but in terms of what's going on in the Sunni community they're becoming more favorably predisposed to Islam playing a political role, and the other two communities are shifting in the opposite direction still divided, but in the opposite direction disproportionately likely both in and of themselves and relative to Sunnis to want to keep Islam out of politics. So there's a little bit on three of the countries that have something to say. Next slide, please. So let me go back one quick second for the past one. So on the way actually, no this is the one I wanted actually this is the one I want to speak. Yes, thanks. So the last battery of questions I'm asking and you'll tell me if I have time to do all of them or if I leave one or two on the table. So I'm going to say what the rest of it is, I won't have time to go over all of it but you'll know what's out there and we can come back to it if this time. I wanted to ask, so I've been comparing the degree to which people do or do not support Islam playing an important political role based on these three questions that I've been using. So now I'm asking the question, well those who do and those who do not support political Islam as measured by the questions that we're using to what extent do they have different worldviews about other things and I'm asking that with respect to three different elements. One, do they have different views with respect to democracy? Are they more or less likely to support democracy and that's what this slide is. I'm also asking are there differences with respect to how they feel about gender equality? Do those who support political Islam are they less likely or maybe even more likely or no difference in terms of how supportive they are of gender equality? And the last comparison I'm making, I know I won't have time to get to this but I'll be happy to answer about it if we have time, is interpretations of Islam. We have all this contestation about what does Islam really say about important political issues? What does it say about the rights of non-Muslims? What does it say about the way women should dress? So we've got a kind of complicated setup in which we have to tell people that as you know there are many Muslim scholars who come to different points of view about what's appropriate and what's inappropriate, which Islamic provisions imply and how they should be interpreted on these important questions. And so here's one interpretation that one sometimes here do think is the correct interpretation or not. So we're comparing those who do support and those who do not support political Islam on these three categories of political and cultural and religious assessments. This is the one on democracy. It's the most clear cut. It shows that there isn't any meaningful difference in terms of support for democracy among those who do and do not support political Islam. The way to read it is to read down in terms of columns. This is just one question. Democracy, whatever its limitations, is better than any other political system. This is actually part of a battery of questions, so it's a good representation of a number of other questions. There are additional questions. I think Halil will probably talk about some of this about whether you think democracy applies to your own country, what you even understand democracy to mean. So those are things we have looked into. For purposes here, I simply want to compare the level of support for democracy or the degree that democracy is an appropriate political system for those who do and do not support political Islam. And if you read down you want to be comparing wave two in the middle cell to wave two in the cell on the far right. So in wave two 82% say yes, I do agree it's the best political system among those who want democracy with Islam and those who are more secular in rotation, yes I want democracy but leave Islam out of it, they're only 84%. So there's a little bit more of a difference in wave three but the basic point is that the numbers are always high, there's broad support for democracy at least as a principle of governance, which is what this question measures. And neither does that support change much from wave two to wave three nor does it differ much between those who support political Islam and those who say I'm a good Muslim, this is important to me, but please leave religion out of political life. The next slide which I think I'll just, you'll see what's up there and we'll kind of skip over it, no, wrong way. The next slide breaks down where I just showed you for each of the countries so you can, this is it, this is it. And it simply shows to what degree people I know I'm not going to have time to go through this, I want to respect the time so we have time for Q&A. Let me just say this does what the previous slide did, comparing those who do support and who do not support political Islam with respect to their views about democracy for each of the nine countries that were in both wave two and wave three and it shows that there were bigger changes in come countries, smaller changes in other countries. In some countries there is pretty much of a consensus, in other countries there's pretty much of a division. You can probably see it although there are a lot of numbers in there, if we took a little more time I'd point out a few things to you and we might want to come back and talk about individual countries. And the next two slides which we probably don't even have time to show, one does comparisons with respect to gender equality and the other does comparisons with respect to interpretations of political Islam. If those are things we want to talk about later on we can put the slides back up or I can at least summarize some of the findings but it's to give you a sense of what we're doing with this, what the data are all about in the hopes that some of you will want to acquire them and do your own analysis. This is all very descriptive, univariate analysis, also maybe in Q&A we can talk about some of the more complex operations we're trying to do with these data but with that I'll leave it and thank you very much. Okay, thank you Mark, Khalil you were up. Thank you. What I have to say is really very broad and I don't even have the luxury of doing what Mark did, looking at some of the countries. I will basically be comparing the various countries and the question that I'm looking at is why we're finding in some countries, this is not where we want to start why we are finding in some countries that there are more people now than two, three years ago who think that democracy is not appropriate for their countries. That's not me. Are these yours? No. Mine was this one but go to the first slide. That's not the first slide. Right, okay, let's go to the first one right after this. The next one. Okay. The Arab Democracy Index is a way to measure actual progress in many Arab countries with regard to democracy. This is not based on public opinion surveys but we do take some of the questions in the Arabometer along with a review of constitutions and legal documents and actual practices on the ground by different countries and this is about all the Arab countries we have. We have nine countries. This is the overall index and it shows that between 2010 and 2012 there has been an increase in both means what we call means is things on paper and practices the actual implementation of governance on the ground and there's been actually the Arab Spring has brought about changes overall in the nine countries we've looked at if we look at the next slide we can see that various values have also improved and institutions has improved rights and freedoms has improved significantly equality and social justice has also improved. The only one that really hasn't improved much is rule of law in transition phases. We see that rule of law sometimes not respected as much. Go to the next slide you can see what happened in the nine countries some of them are not actually included in the Arabometer but as you can see there has been progress for the first time in fact in some time in many of these countries in terms of democratization putting aside the democracy index now let's look at public opinion. The next slide will show the question we've asked and good that I'm next to Mark because Mark has already told you we have done these and I'm just using nine countries just like Mark because three other countries which we have done in the latest wave we haven't been able to do in the previous wave and as you can see there really hasn't been a lot of change in terms of the belief of the Arab masses on the democracy despite of all of its problems is still the best system there is so in theory that's what I would emphasize in theory people seem to think democracy is great and if you look at the changes they're really really minor the next slide however shows a different question and that is is democracy good for your country? Is democracy appropriate suitable for your country? This shows us the differences between AB2 and AB3 and the minuses is where we have seen really negative changes in this regard good and the next slide shows this in red what you see in red is Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia most importantly Egypt and Tunisia again and as you can see in both places particularly in Egypt there has been a significant change in people's attitude with regard to whether democracy is appropriate for their countries and look at the next question this is the same thing this is just a different way of asking it are citizens in your country ready for democracy? Is democracy something that they are prepared for and as you can see a similar trend emerges between AB2 and AB3 most importantly in again Egypt and Tunisia and now go to the next slide the next slide is an attempt to explain why we are finding these things so this is just a hypothesis that we're looking at we're trying to assess why people are changing their mind about the appropriateness of democracy to their country in the post Arab Spring environment one of and I've tested three hypothesis one that says it is because the Arab Spring brought about a lot of instability a lot of insecurities and so people who are insecure or feel instability most tend to fear democracy and tend to feel that democracy brings a lot of instability maybe which is not really appropriate for us in this slide we're comparing this is the data from the latest and here we ask people do you feel more or less secure compared to a year ago a year ago is still the Arab Spring so after the onset of the Arab Spring and what you've seen so far do you feel more or less secure there's another way of asking this I'll show this in a minute and as you can see in the country's most important to us right now Egypt and Tunisia there has been significant drop in perception of security the drop is also everywhere else look at Lebanon there is a 72% negative trend with regard to security there's people saying a year ago 76% of the Lebanese for example saying that a year ago security was better go to the next slide and it will show us the comparison between the AB2 and AB3 and you'll see a similar trend perhaps not as bad as I've shown you in the previous slide but look at Egypt from 52% people feeling safe and secure now remember Egypt was actually done in the first year of the Arab Spring similarly with Tunisia but the feeling of security is a really huge in Egypt minus 1.9 in Lebanon minus 13 Tunisia minus 14 overall minus 5 so the countries that we're interested in certainly are countries that have seen a decline in the perception of security go to the next slide now we're going to look at some other things for example living conditions do you feel that your living conditions compared to other people in your country are better or worse and as you can see in Egypt those who said it was worse are in the minus 10 for Jordan for Lebanon and for Tunisia once again the issue of living conditions seem to be a factor here as well and looking at the next slide this is a political issue so we have looked at one political one economic one security related on the question of do you feel equal to other citizens in the country comparing AB2 to AB3 you can see Egypt again coming out but not Tunisia or the others so this doesn't really seem to be telling us a great deal about that question but I thought I would look at one political indicator go to the next slide so this is basically everything we've been talking about just looking at the gaps the first column is about the appropriateness gap and we Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia are the most important here support for democracy doesn't really change a lot it's still very very high despite the fact that there are some minuses there for security however you can see clearly what I've just shown you the 45, the 72 the 6 and the 7 and the overall minus 16 so there is a perception that security conditions are worsening looking at the living conditions we can see that too seem to be affected obviously it seems that when security conditions are worsening living conditions would worsen equal citizenship is not there with the exception of Egypt really go to the next slide I think we missed one didn't we? Right so this is an example about our country that so appropriateness actually increased which is Algeria on top more Algerians think that democracy is actually appropriate for their country I don't know if Michael wants to mention this in his talk but he wrote about Algeria and at the same time Dan so this goes counter to what I have just said about the role of insecurity and living conditions however has improved however look at equal citizenship things have actually improved significantly and in Algeria in particular there are other indicators really that show that Algerians have much greater confidence in their government and the effectiveness of their government then we have seen in many other places okay so now we can go to the final slide support for democracy didn't decline certainly but more people particularly in Egypt Tunisia Jordan and Lebanon wonder if their countries are ready their people are ready for democracy the explanations the security seems to be the strongest so far economics seem to be an additional explanation but the political is not so much however as Mark has indicated the decline in political Islam is also an indication that people are dissatisfied with political Islam in some places look at Egypt Mark didn't mention this in his presentation but in 2011 when we asked the Egyptians do you trust the Muslim brothers 47% said yes 47% and what was the answer two years later 20 from 4070 to 20 so there is a decline in certain countries most notably in this case Egypt but also in Tunisia and there is also the elections recently actually show that this decline in support for political Islam is in fact taking shape and leading to certain political behavior electoral behavior as we saw so I finish okay thank you Khalil we will move to Mark well thank you as the other side the findings I'm going to present are generally fairly broad looking at the country level there's a few that we can talk about some of the differences between within the country and Q&A but it's basically an overview it's actually on the PDF file so what I'm going to talk about is some of the change that we've seen across a number of of the different indicators that we have in the error barometer between AB2 and AB3 and primarily focusing on a number of issues really to the economy, really to governance, to citizenship and then a bit about reform as well so basically I divide these into three different sets of countries that we can look at in this and although this could be debatable to some degree there's first the change countries and this is places we saw a leadership change in Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, can you go back a couple to the beginning and so in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen we see a leadership change and for the countries that we have we have no change in leadership Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco the regime all survives and then we have four other countries which have had which domestic events probably play a greater role than thinking about necessarily what the Arab Spring has done that Iraq has a very unique place within the Arab world Palestine, Sudan and we can talk more about that. I'm going to present some data from these countries as well since we have it when we focus less on them throughout the report. The real comparison here is going to be between the change countries and the no change countries. So there's really five key takeaways that I would forward here. The first is that context really matters and Khalil just talked about this to a bit to some degree but we see a huge change in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia and some of this may be dependent on the time when these surveys were done and all these three countries and a few months after the Arab uprisings began and the other countries in the second way they were done around the time the uprisings were taking place a bit before so certainly context may matter as we look at that. The second is that Morocco and Kuwait tend to be outliers that they generally tend to be different than the other other three countries in their grouping but so again it's clear that context does matter next slide. There's also however that said there's a convergence in attitudes between the four change countries and this is a bit surprising given some of the differences that we see between them but the general interceptions of political and economic conditions tend to be worse in countries where we had a leadership change or experienced leadership change than those without and by extension that in the no change countries we also see a general convergence at a higher level. The third point is that the class of the state represents a fundamental problem in countries with a leadership change and by this I mean that a number of the points that the state, a number of the services and some of the basic functions of the state seem to be struggling much more in the states that had a leadership change than didn't so for instance ratings of police tend to be much lower, basic services tend to be lower and this is somewhat surprising the state is actually undertaking significant reform in the countries that had a leadership change than those that did not and the fourth take away is that concerns in the Arab uprisings remain major problems corruption remains a major problem throughout this region, I'm going to let Amanda talk about that a bit more later but there's another interesting point which is the political rights are often deemed no better in the change countries than the non change countries so what we can take away from that is that in some ways some of the key issues and some of the change you might expect to see are not necessarily taking place and finally the recalibration by the regimes that survived their spring seems to be succeeding at least showing some signs of success in the public opinion data that reforms that were taken by the countries without a leadership change have actually seemed to yield tangible gains in public opinion so with that let's actually look at the data so first on the economic outcomes this is a question asking whether economic outcomes are very good and you can see a significant difference in the third wave data between the countries that had a leadership change and those that did not, those with a leadership change say that the county is doing much worse that's not entirely surprising given some of the economic changes Tunisia was in recession and some of the other dislocations that they've experienced but again there's a significant difference between the two countries however what's interesting is that the economic optimism has remained more or less similar between the countries that despite the negative economic outcomes in the change countries that generally there's a high degree of optimism that is at least as high as the no change countries and it sometimes exceeds it so Libya Tunisia and Yemen all have fairly high percentages somewhere near over half saying that in three to five years that they expect economic outcomes to be better. Egypt's the exception and again some of this may be due to the timing of the poll right before the cool against Morsi however again optimism is still abound so there does seem to be hope that remains on economic issues but to compare this in the shifts in economic optimism you can see some of the key differences here that in the change countries Yemen perhaps things couldn't have gotten any worse but you know there seems to be some degree of optimism that has increased is in the third wave. Tunisia and Egypt there's been a dramatic decline and this is something we've seen throughout the data that the initial optimism that was present has declined somewhat but still in Tunisia remains relatively high in the no change countries though there's been the opposite trend to a degree that there's been an increase in economic optimism that in Algeria and Jordan we see increases of 25 and 13 percentage points so suggesting that some of the shifts that there have been important shifts in countries that didn't experience a leadership change as well looking at government performance, government performance the percent who say the government's doing a good or very good job overall that we see significant differences between the change and no change countries as well the ratings tend to be significantly lower than in the no change countries and this could be a bit surprising given that in theory in the change countries the governments are theoretically representing the people to a greater extent but again that there's a low rating there's dissatisfaction abounds in this set of countries however looking at parliamentary performance another measure of how well the government's doing again this tends to be very low across the region that parliaments are not particularly popular I'm not saying a significant exception perhaps but that generally four and ten or fewer say that the parliaments are doing a good job and there's not really much of a difference between the change and the no change countries and so looking at the ratings of the police so how in a sense who's providing public security something that is a challenge for the state potentially in this environment we see that the performance of public security those who say the police are doing a good or very good job is significantly higher in the no change countries as opposed to the change countries the public security has continued to be at least perceived as doing a better job in those countries that did not experience any any leadership change again it tends to be fairly low in the change countries that four and ten or fewer and most say that the police are doing a good job looking at more specific indicators we see some interesting trends as well that how well is the government doing managing the economy we see a fairly high degree of similarities between the change and the no change countries Kuwait an oil rich Gulf state says that the government is doing fairly well imagine coming but elsewhere we see that fewer than four and ten and each of the countries say that the government is doing a very good job managing the economy but looking at another issue we see a very significant difference which is that the government's job providing health services the government's doing a good or very good job on this indicator varies dramatically between the change and the no change countries and the change countries we see again about a third or fewer saying that the government's doing a good job whereas in the no change countries with the exception of Morocco we see a very high level six and ten or more in all the countries again Morocco is a bit of an exception but there does seem to be a significant difference in perceptions about basic services and how the governments are doing so to look at this a bit more what we see is that in the change countries unsurprisingly given some of the dislocations of the Arab Spring that there's been a significant decrease in the rating of how the government's doing providing health services across the region there's also been a somewhat of a decline though in the no change countries in Morocco and Jordan but an exception again is Algeria and some of that we can talk about more in Q&A but it does seem that the timing of the survey may be perceptions of government were very low at the time and the survey was done again in AB3 but again overall that there tends to be a similar trend in the ratings of health services that there is a decline with the exception of Algeria so to look at this a bit more the rating of the government the government rating versus economic performance in the change countries it tends to be lower with Yemen it's a bit higher but overall it's about the same or lower and the no change countries though what we see is that the government ratings actually exceed by significant percentage the rating of government's performance on economic on managing the economy in all countries that there's between a 7 and 19 point difference however if we look at the government rating versus health services we see an interesting trend here that and again in the countries that had a change that generally it's a lower rating however in the no change countries we see a fairly similar rating between how the government's doing overall and it's how it's doing on health services which I think with again the exception of Algeria but in the other three countries it suggests that there may be a perception that services are how citizens are potentially rating the government and that's decline in services in a sense in the state capacity and the change countries is something that's really hurting the government and how it's being perceived that economic outcomes have been fairly poor for some time but again the government's ability to provide health services and provide basic services is something that suggests is pretty important across the region so to look a bit at how citizens are viewing their governments and the rights that they have between these two different countries we see that the freedom of criticism of government tends to be higher in the countries that had a leadership change that's not entirely surprising but again I think it is a bit surprising at how high it is in the countries that did not have a leadership change you have six and ten or more in most of these countries saying that they can actually criticize the government without fear one of the surprising findings we see is that in the no change countries this has increased fairly dramatically between the second wave and the third wave then Algeria and we don't have Morocco here because we don't have Morocco from the first wave but where we've asked this question in wave two and wave three we see that in Algeria and Jordan that the percentage has increased dramatically fifteen and thirty one points respectively and the countries that have experienced a leadership change we see in Yemen but there's been a slight increase but it hasn't changed dramatically so the regimes in the no change countries have done something to at least change this perception in the region the question about a freedom to join political parties the percentage say this freedom is guaranteed to a great or medium extent is actually not that different between the change and the no change countries again a somewhat surprising finding that one would think that in the change countries this would be something that was higher than in the no change countries but we don't see a significant difference here part of that is due to what we see in the no change countries again that Algeria and Jordan we see a dramatic increase in the percentage of citizens who say that they can join political parties or have this right and the other countries in Yemen it's changed slightly and in Tunisia it's up slightly but again there's a significant change in the countries without a leadership change so then the question becomes down to reform how is the government doing it promoting reforms this is one of the major demands of the Arab Spring and so it's interesting to look at again the comparison here that the citizens in change countries are actually less likely to say government is undertaking serious reforms than they are in the change countries in Tunisia and Yemen about half say that the government is undertaking serious reform and it tends to be lower in Libya and Egypt however in the countries that did not experience leadership change we have to see a higher percentage more in three of the four countries say the government is actually undertaking serious reform the exception is Morocco but again this is still about the same level as in Tunisia or Yemen that there seems to be a greater credibility of the efforts of these regimes to undertake reform in the eyes of citizens and to some degree this difference may actually reflect some of the changes that are in perceptions in Tunisia and Egypt particularly that there's been a decline that the government doesn't seem to be able to meet the demands of citizens that it's been ineffective in actually undertaking serious reforms for some time at least in public perceptions and that this could explain some of the trend however again in Yemen it tends to be a bit higher that citizens are now more likely to say that credible reform is taking place in the no change countries though it's actually been fairly high in both the second and third waves which is I think again somewhat surprising but in Algeria that this has increased and again the government in April of 2011 undertook a series of reforms aimed to try to officially try to increase the rights of the political rights of citizens and it does seem that this may be paying off to some extent however one of the other changes that we see is that there's actually relatively few citizens are saying that they want reformed or perceived rapidly again I think this may hit at some of the things Khalil is talking about about the desire for stability and the loss of security that generally the pace of reform citizens are saying that it should be gradual instead of rapid and so again about six and ten or more in all countries say that it should be a gradual pace of reform as opposed to particularly rapid and again the changes though are not very dramatic between the two waves this actually is something that in Yemen and Tunisia we see being consistent between the two waves the same in Jordan and Morocco again Morocco being from maybe one but in Algeria we see a great desire for stability I think this is somewhat interesting given that in the second wave the survey was done about three months after the Arab Spring but now you know at that time Algerians were very likely to say that reform should proceed you know very quickly but now that they've again changed to be less supportive of reform in Egypt again at the end of Morsi's presidency we see a decline from the first wave but again there is a desire for change by some Egyptians and we can talk more about that in Q&A so overall the basic conclusion is that country context and country history both seem to matter that there are significant differences between the country however citizens in the changed countries seem to be somewhat disappointed by the results of the Arab Spring to date the state seems to be too weak in many ways to meet their expectations that reforms are not proceeding the government services have declined but that's also indicative that citizens continue to have fairly high expectations of their governments and so there seems to be a demand that the government perform at a higher level by contrast the citizens in the no change countries seem relatively more satisfied with government performance the limited reforms in these countries that were taken particularly in Jordan and Algeria after the Arab Spring a period of influence public opinion in ways that are favorable to the regime that the regime took some reforms and received some benefits however again there seems to be a decline in perceptions about basic services that overall the government's performance has declined somewhat but not to the extent it has in the other countries so thank you okay thank you Michael I'm going to click her well okay thank you so much I want to also thank the USIP and POMED for all their work here and for sponsoring this event it's really a great pleasure to be here and thank you all for attending so the theme of the talk that I'll be discussing is also joint work with Michael Robbins but I'll try to talk about social justice in the Arab world changes since the Arab Spring and the reason why the emphasis is on social justice is that if you were watching the protest during the Arab Spring one of the key themes was social justice this idea of idala or justice so some of the key takeaways from this talk will be about economic outcomes economic issues, economic disparities if you may remain a key topic that is on the mindset of most Arab citizens there are some citizenship issues like corruption and wasta that remain endemic although we see that perceptions of political rights or the perception of citizens being able to exercise political voice has improved we're not seeing that on the economic realm so when you're thinking about reform or democratization and democratization trajectory and what not we often think about the political dimension of that but what's appearing in our data is that the economic dimension is very very important we also find that there are few citizens a few citizens are satisfied with their government or the state of democracy and human rights so although there's been an improvement in overall assessments of political rights people are not very happy with the course of democracy and as my colleagues have pointed out that perhaps because either the pace of reform has been slow there are a lot of heightened expectations democracy brought Islamic governments in some countries and those Islamic governments didn't perform well and furthermore when we think about what democracy means to ordinary citizens in the region they're linking to democracy economic assessments, economic outcomes and not so much political so while the political situation has perhaps improved slightly the economic situation in many especially in the changed countries has deteriorated and furthermore citizens believe that international factors are actually an impediment to reform so this is also trying to if you're not sort of pessimistic enough just kind of round it out okay so the economic equality the percent of citizens in the third wave who say that their monthly income or their household income covers their daily expenses and they're able to save you'll see that in most again there's this very nice improvement in Algeria and the wave three or at least it's the country where you have the highest percentage of people saying that they can save and they can cover their expenses the important point is to look at the change the two change countries here which are Egypt and Tunisia they're only a quarter of citizens say that they are able to save well a little bit more than a quarter but certainly less than a third saying that they are able to cover their monthly expenses or to save so that's something to worry about when we think about those who participated in the protest the nice thing about the Arab Barometer especially the second wave of the Arab Barometer is that we were able to go into these countries especially in Tunis and Egypt right after the Arab Spring protests so we adopted a protest battery a series of questions that had been administered on other cross-national surveys especially in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on protest behavior during the colored revolutions and we asked similar questions during the Arab Spring and primarily we were interested in what was happening in Egypt and Tunisia but we were also able to ask this protest battery in other Arab countries where we saw significant protests but not necessarily changed again what you do see is that in terms of the protestors themselves they were slightly better off than the average population in the country so this idea that the protests were coming out from the bottom segment of the population or they were the most impoverished I think the consensus is gradually emerging that the protestors or these were middle class protests and so these were a more youthful generation that had achieved some level of education or a good level of education had some level of income but there was also this idea of dashed expectations they were not being able to realize and actualize their potential so the youth generation that was better equipped with education and some human capital if you may was hitting a ceiling very early on in their careers hence creating the grievance structure that we witnessed hence creating the frustration that led to a lot of the protests and you'll see that this is the case in almost all of the countries that the protestors were better off than the non-protestors now when we ask people what they think of as the most important challenges facing the country the majorities in each of the countries are citing the economic issues economic issues on this list you have things about political rights or political issues or specific issues about governance but the economic issues are the ones that are most salient and again I want to draw your attention to the fact that they're most salient in the transitioning countries and why do we emphasize this is that it's increasingly becoming our conviction that any reform agenda needs to seriously look at the economics of all of this not just the politics moving forward if you think if you look at then the differences between wave 2 and wave 3 on the importance of or the salience of economic issues being important you'll see that in Tunisia the difference now is almost 19 percentage points you also see a similar trend in Egypt I mean in Egypt it was very very high anyways it was at 83% in wave 2 now it's at 88% so again things have deteriorated economically there's a lot of economic frustration but you also see frustration in Lebanon is mounting in terms of people basically trying to state that the economic issues remain a crucial issue you see this in Algeria you see this in Palestine so again in terms of thinking about the economics of all of this it's very present here now do you think about immigrating this is a question that we've looked at and we think it's an interesting question because basically it's sort of this idea we know that there's a significant brain drain in the region we know that there are a lot of citizens wanting to leave their countries because they don't believe that they're going to be able to meet their economic expectations or actualize their human capital you see that in countries like Lebanon almost 36%, 38% of the population wants to immigrate in the transitioning countries you see that there's a lower number of the population that wants to immigrate about slightly more than 20% but this also means that those who are not immigrating have higher expectations of what their countries should be doing for them so there is that sort of again that pressure and that frustration in Morocco, Algeria, Jordan you see that there's higher levels of people who want to immigrate more importantly is that when we break this down by cohort it is the youth population that youngest generation from 18 to 29 years of age who is most likely to say that they want to immigrate right and so then in Tunisia you have a good chunk about 42% of the youth population saying they want to immigrate in Egypt not so much it's only about a third of all these countries, almost 50% of the youth population wants to immigrate or would like to immigrate and if we look we break this down by protest behavior among those who did protest and didn't protest you'll see that the protesters on average were more likely wanting to immigrate again I guess this idea of frustration and grievances really accumulating among the protest population is there corruption and within the state across the board majorities agree that there's a lot of corruption in the state and unlike some of our other statistics these statistics remain quite stable across time so there aren't really improvements in the assessment of corruption but again if you look at the attitudes between protesters and non-protestors you'll see that this opinion was especially more prevalent in the protest population so again this frustration with the level of corruption in the state importance of WASTA to obtain a job or the importance of a clientelistic tie to get a job in other words merit matters less than who you know in terms of obtaining employment you'll see that again vast majorities believe that it's very important this has also been a stable statistic most important feature of democracy so now to contrast the economics and the political when we ask people whether they think one of the more important features of democracy is say for example political equality vast minorities agree with that statement so in other words especially if you might want to take a look at the two key Arab Spring countries Tunisia and Egypt about 8% of Egyptians about 9% of Tunisians will say that political equality is an important feature of democracy now this is not that people don't want political equality is that when they're thinking about democracy they're thinking about the economy they're thinking about again this idea of social justice being manifested in this notion of economic equality, economic opportunity the ability to have some dignity in terms of what you earn transparency, less corruption WASTA not mattering and so these structural issues the fact that these attitudes have remained stable is reason to be concerned about any future course of reform in the Arab world can citizens influence government again there is a decent level on average citizens do believe they have some political influence and they can influence the government policies especially in the Arab transition in countries almost in Egypt I can't read that but it's like 85% in Tunisia 75% political leaders care about the needs of the citizens again Egypt Egyptians almost 55% Tunisians almost at about 31% believe that the political leaders do care we unfortunately don't have the across time on these but nevertheless it's something that we do want to pay attention to in wave 4 as we get ready for that the government takes the opinions of citizens seriously you'll see that in Egypt the idea is that there is some level of seriousness or at least the government officials do take the opinions of citizens seriously in other countries unfortunately that's not the case we're about especially the countries that didn't witness change citizens don't believe that the government takes their opinion seriously so there is some also political frustration here and satisfaction with government performance again the worry is in places like Egypt and Tunisia you're never getting above 30% on satisfaction with government performance so although the political liberties have somewhat improved people are still skeptical of the ability of governments to represent them effectively the state of democracy and human rights Jordan gets the highest scores here people can still debate on whether Jordan is really moving towards this course of democratization rights in Jordan a lot of people do value the stability of the monarchy even though it's not necessarily the most democratic country but they are also seeing that their economic situation hasn't really deteriorated the way it's deteriorated in other Arab countries so probably this is playing a major role in explaining this outcome in the other Arab countries especially the transitioning countries you'll see that there's a lot of skepticism about the ability of democracy if you may and my colleagues spoke about this in their presentations and if you see that if you see if we divide this among the protest population versus the non-protest population you'll see that on average the protesters had better assessments of their countries on the state of human rights and democracy again if you compare this slide with the economic grievance slide it also indicates then that the protesters who were out there protesting in Tahrir and Tunisia they were protesting on perhaps economic issues or those were much more dominant issues than just the politics although in Jordan here the protesters were less happy about the state of political rights and these are the non-change countries and even in Algeria although there's been a lot of there's been a lot of enthusiasm about the changes in Algeria if we look at those who were protesting they don't seem to be that happy one dimension of the when we think about this argument of social dignity and we think about some of the statements or some of the concerns of citizens who were protesting another dimension of this is the Arab-Israeli conflict and whether this is an impediment to reform when Arab citizens talk about dignity they're talking of course about economic dignity political dignity, social dignity but they're also talking about dignity for the Arab region and so this still remains a big sore point for many citizens in the region so the percentage of citizens who believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is an impediment to political reform this remains a considerable issue about 68% of Egyptians believe it's an impediment to political reform 54% of Tunisians you'll see that in Jordan it's 76% in Palestine it's 87% 84% so the idea that a peaceful solution bringing peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict or at least a real solution to it based on let's say a two state solution would pave the road for further political reform in the region when we ask in the third wave whether foreign interference is an impediment to political reform more generally you'll see that the best in most countries the majority believe that foreign interference is an impediment to reform the question is is foreign interference seen as for example western interference or is it seen for example as Saudi interference or jihadi interference this is not clear from this question we're still going to look at this more carefully to try to see whether it's western versus let's say regional influences but nevertheless this idea that foreign interference again this is a common theme foreign interference has harmed the reform efforts in Arab countries you see this also in Egypt you see this also in Tunisia and you know when we're in the ground doing work in these countries you often hear about people believing that there's a lot of foreign interference everybody's invested in the political reform project trying to micromanage it in ways this way or the other and that it's ignoring the average concerns of the ordinary citizen in these countries so the conclusion social justice is conceived of as bread freedom and dignity bread is a stance against poverty but as we have seen this is predominantly by those who are better off those who are better off are on the ground protesting for better economic opportunities we see that there's been improvements perhaps in the political opportunities and respective rights although there's still some very salient concerns among the Arab population and then there's the dignity issues encompass both the economic and the political although today the economic for no other reason then that's what the data is telling us and it's both at the domestic level and the international level thank you so much thank you for your punctuality all of you in a very full presentations we have about 40 minutes to open it up for questions and let me first call on Shibley Telhami who is a surveyor himself a couple questions I have about the data the first thing it has to do with the way you're speaking about and you know did you try to tease out a lot of people things by they think they're not corrupt or must corrupt they think they want the religion to play a big role in the politics in reality they're more effective so how do you try to tease that out and see what they mean by being central or understanding it the second is there were a couple of issues that I was always very clear about particularly the democracy being modern in terms of the deference by the way when was the last what was the date of the last fall when late 2012 to the early 2014 it went late 2012 to early 2012 to the early 2014 for instance it's almost getting to be a year old right and when we look at the data the first set that compared to issues showed security issues really should be quite dramatically that's not surprising in places like particularly Egypt that's talked about a lot but actually didn't show a lot of dramatic changes there the dynamics went down just a little bit but if you look at the data actually it was only minus one or something like that and yet you have this data that wanted to show the economy extremely important and so I wonder how do you recognize all those those kind of findings also in Egypt the last bit that the Yemeni did on sort of how they ended the state of democracy whether people want to develop in Egypt it's an amazing number of people who say yes and particularly if you take into account the year of transition typically you know end of 2013 to 2014 you have like an overwhelming majority say yes and more than anyone else in that yet when you look at the state of democracy you get Egypt the lowest numbers so how do you recognize all those findings in Egypt? Yeah, thank you Shibri so I'll let Khalil answer the question about the deterioration in the economy my sense is that the deterioration in the economy my sense in Egypt is that you started out really low to begin with and so you're already sort of hitting a ceiling of how frustrated people can be with the economy so although it's the number one concern it's a dominant concern the fact that it remains static is cause for concern so there's a lot of frustration on your question it was good to point out that although people think they can influence the government and we've seen that they basically with the turnover of leadership to CC there is a sense of political efficacy on average they're not very happy with the state of democracy and I guess this is also part of the fact that Egyptians on general have become increasingly more skeptical of democracy because it's brought them the Muslim brotherhood it's brought them less security it hasn't done much for them economically so I think the they're sort of being down on democracy is a result of that the question about economy that I looked at is probably another question you are concerned about Shibri there is a similar trend that I found with regard to the deterioration of security and the negative view of the living conditions not as big as it is with security but the issue that I looked at is not the economy at large but rather how you personally feel with regard to your status compared to the status of other citizens so the assumption is security conditions deteriorate everyone suffers but I suffer more than the others that is the issue that I am looking at in this case there is a gap but it's not really a wide gap so thank you for the question Shibri before I talk about the political Islam one let me just say that it's important to look at when the survey was done we're not in a position for better or worse to do it all the time and be totally up to date even if we had one today yesterday that we could talk about today it'll be out of date in a few months things go on but the timing of the surveys actually does make it helps to put the findings in context the Egyptian survey was done in the spring of 2013 when resistance and opposition to Morsi was building and there's discussions about whether he was sabotaged by the old regime or his incompetence but clearly the public was increasingly discontent and so we but before the rise of the movement against him and before he was yeah and I think if we were to go back and talk about Algeria some more which has come up a couple times it's sort of an outlier the timing is going to make a lot of sense and that will help us to understand the dynamics and carry away some causal stories not just 0.1, 0.2 in terms of your question about what people think about their leaders and how they understand about political Islam this is a good question we have a lot of different items on political Islam meaning well sometimes people say what do you mean by political Islam but we mean when it is that these various questions measure and we've given you three examples of the questions there are a lot of different things we can do some of which we have done and some of which we haven't done but you or I or others who are interested could take these data and do them one is just to what I did just present the findings to give you kind of a gross overview something else that I've been doing that I think is important is to construct a more refined multi-indicator multi-item scale so we really get more precise measures rather than just 25% say this and 30% say something different and then really we have captured a lot of variance and we try to account for that Ferris we've got hypotheses about what drives people toward one pole or the other of that continuum whether the drivers are the same for different categories of the population they vary by generation and whether all of that really depends on what was going on in the country at the time so we're constructing really much more elaborate kinds of explanations and finally something that I haven't done very much I've done a little bit of it that I think is most directly pertinent to your question can we derive some kinds of typologies by looking at these questions and by seeing how these questions interact with one another not just saying they all reliably and valiantly measure the same thing so we're going to put them in an index but kind of being high on one doesn't necessarily mean being high on another one more often than not that's the case but it's not always the case so for example the only one that comes to my mind is we did this with the Saudi data it's kind of an interesting case although each case it's interesting in and of itself so in Saudi there was pretty strong rejection of the proposition religion should be a private matter and separated from social and political life so they didn't seem to want to keep Islam out of my business but the question so you would think therefore they would say they would have answered very likely to be supportive of the question if men of religion should have influence over government decisions but they didn't want that so we get a sense we're beginning to get a sense that yeah people are distinguishing between Islam even as a political force even as a shape public policy even as it it guides a lot of the behavior that people engage in in everyday life but they're differentiating that from how they feel about their political leaders it's not a total answer but I mean it's a way to take some of these data and try to explore different combinations that come up from some typologies that give us a better and more complete and maybe a more sophisticated mapping of what people actually think okay why don't we take a couple of questions let's start here hi my name is Matar Rahim former MP from Bahrain my question is regarding the situation in the Gulf I don't know do you think it's fair to talk about to extract trends and patterns about the Arab world and the Arab region if most of the Gulf countries were excluded from the works here the first paper but there was there was no there was no ability to do it for three years and Kuwait was also there but Kuwait is out of the context of the Gulf as absolute monarchies my question how to deal with these difficulties to to have plots to measure the public opinion in the Gulf what alternatives can be done to have an idea about the region question question about generally the conduct public opinion surveys in the Arab world interesting from Mark Tessler's graphic I saw it correctly that Saudi Arabia was represented in a second wave not a third I'd like a comment on that in particular just generally with regard to the conditions and permissions required for the conduct at this rate talk about places that are difficult as versus easy some of us have done research and opinion research in the Arab world and know or think we know that it's not really easy those conditions generally but more specifically about official permissions required that would we have had for example had Saudi Arabia had a third wave the ability to break out responses between protesters and non-protectors for example like to hear about that thanks one more again thanks Tara Siegel Georgetown University I appreciate your focus on economic issues especially I was especially intrigued by the questions about immigration and the prevalence of WASDA and I was curious given the focus on economic issues if you looked at the responses to these questions based upon economic position in society right like if a family is saving money or if a family is making enough money does that impact the responses to these questions and their particular economic grievances so I'll take the first question and part of the answer to the second question so the gulf is really important and we do not leave it out by desire we we did we I mean we had Bahrain once we were really very lucky we had a team on the ground and we were able to do it and we have confidence in that sample Kuwait I mean this is not easy those who have done it know it's not easy we feel we've got really good data and we've got a really good quality control procedure and there's occasionally we push back with the team occasionally we're forced to throw out a small number of surveys we've got some stories we can tell about that I think they don't add up to the conclusion the data are problematic it's rather that we take it very seriously and if we put forward the data we've got confidence in them we'd like to do more in the gulf and a few other places as well the good news and you know I mean I could talk about what our experience with Bahrain was what our experience with Kuwait was or even Saudi Arabia maybe I'll say something about that it isn't particularly useful to go into particular cases to say that we these countries are important we're not really trying to general I mean to some extent we're generalizing about the Arab world but we're making clear what countries are and are not in that sample so that people will not draw implications about other countries moreover is a lot of the things here have shown it's particularly important to look at individual countries and not generalize or look at countries that have had a kind of experience of those who haven't had a kind of experience so there's certainly no thought that one size fits all and we're claiming to say this is what Arabs in the Middle East think beyond that I want to say we have funding to do three gulf countries in the next wave and the question is going to be not so much what countries we could maybe even get funding for a fourth I don't have that yet I had it myself question is going to be can we get the sample we need to get it to get a survey that we think we'll have confidence in and the answer to that and this is part of the answer to this we have a pretty elaborate procedure some of it is done here but most of it is done by a team at the University of Jordan in the Center for Strategic Studies that's one of our I mean with a number of different kinds of partners who play different roles particularly important for this so we require the submission of a sampling plan and information about how interviewers are going to be trained these are all face-to-face interviewers and in wave two we got something and sometimes we push back and we say well we like this and we don't mean to be elitist about it but there's some problems here we need you to solve before we can go ahead and in Saudi we managed to get satisfactory answers to those questions in wave two we did not in wave three the people we were dealing with came kept coming back with plans that wouldn't have given us the data that we would have had confidence in and in the end we didn't do it so we're hoping that we will have three or four countries in the Gulf I think we have two for sure but we're looking for one or two more and we're in conversations with people so there's something under discussion we'll see what happens about whether we can get when the data come in I mean we subject them to additional quality controls and assessments Michael is one of several people who are deeply involved in that so it's like I said at the beginning it's partly are there conditions and that comes with a question of permission in some of the countries we don't need permission happily either they just don't seem to worry about it or we're working with an institution that kind of has permission to do this Jordan would be like that in other countries they do need permission doesn't necessarily turn out to be very hard to get but sometimes it takes time that's the Moroccan experience in some countries you can't do it without permission and it's hard to get permission that was the case in Egypt in the first wave we had an Egyptian member of our steering committee and they came back and said well could you take off a few questions and we agonized alright we'll take them off no that wasn't enough so we don't have a first survey and then of course funding is important too we don't have all the funding we need to do all the countries where we can do it but so there are permission issues there are quality control issues and beyond that it'd have to go country by country but I think that gives you a feel in Iraq I would say that there are a few provinces where it couldn't be done I mean where our team said it's just there's security issues and so we said okay we'll live with that and we try to correct by waiting there's a lot of specifics that come with this we worry about them I think we do about as good a job as can be expected in terms of dealing with them but not every problem is soluble and some countries you just can't do for one reason or the other yeah I mean certainly to your point we try our best to get every country and I mean we do go through the we do check the data rigorously and so I mean it is something that we've worked hard on we haven't we have began to look at some of these we have began to look at some of these issues we haven't looked at them necessarily in the lens that you're talking about but fortunately the data are available so you can do it if you want but it is something that I think is really interesting and we have seen one of the things we've done particularly at this point is looked at younger or older cohorts and surprisingly that actually makes less of a difference than one might think across a number the structure of the family and things like that but some of the initial differences we've looked at by trying to break it down a little more has not yielded some of the differences we might have expected other questions the question is really related to time in the government country with government change versus country with no government change all the parameter if I saw this correctly favored the country with no change seems to be a little more better off than one who would change so the question is since the government with no change no change of government been around for a long time 10, 15, 20 years or more versus the new one maybe only 2, 3 years do you think is an element of time based on your crystal ball assessment if we want to look at 10 years from now 5 or 10 years from now would be the data will change more in favor of the government would change versus the government with no change so the timing is the timing is critical factor here another question up in front here Nizad for the project on Middle East democracy I have two questions the first is the extent to which you manage to get to the reasons behind the opinions so to the extent to which for example you know that the theory was that people were demonstrating because they felt the problem is corruption and if you have a democratic system it will not be corrupt and therefore the economy would be better or was it that no it's a question of equality and therefore they wanted democracy because of equality if you could elaborate a bit on that the second is the extent to which you felt confident that people were really giving their sincere answers in places like Egypt or other places where people might have after answered differently precisely because of the situation we're afraid of saying what they thought they won't say okay and one more there's a gentleman right there hi thank you this is really interesting I was just curious if because Libya is for the first time has been surveyed if any you have any observations related to Libya and then secondly getting to your definition of democracy do you feel that all of the respondents shared a common definition when you use the word democracy and who would you name as the democracy is right now in the art world thank you I'll say something about time there's no doubt that when there's change and transition security becomes important and rule of law is sometimes also the first victim of the transition as we saw from the democracy index which is not about public opinion this is more much wider tracking of what happens with the various democratic values including rule of law and when there's a revolt uprising and significant change this affects the environment the issue of stability and security becomes a very very important issue at a one point in the immediate aftermath of the transition in some places like in Egypt the state is gone in the eyes of people so they want the state back and they want the state back even if it is not democratic they just want it back and the agency is important one that they trust seem to be the army in most of these countries the armies with very few exceptions the armies are admired more than anyone else and so stability we want there is a personal insecurity that comes with transition state is gone in terms of delivering a lot of things therefore admired and respected people simply are telling us they want the state back however if indeed the new regime is able to bring back rule of law if it is able to enforce law and order and we go back two years later we definitely will find different answers the fact that we are now finding for example that more people are questioning their appropriateness of democracy to their societies had to do with that temporary perception that security is gone I want my state back to that end I mean to say in a slightly different way I mean one of the things that is really interesting is that as we look across this we have shown you a lot of changes a lot of the differences that are popping out from the data we see we didn't show you with some of the things that remain the same throughout the survey a lot of the values questions remain fairly similar and so we see as a process of learning and updating about behaviors and expectations based on what is taking place and I think Algeria one of the interesting findings we have is that we have it from the first wave we have it from the second wave right after the Arabs uprising about three months later and then we have it from the third wave about two years later in the April of 2013 we see is that public opinion shifted dramatically between A1 and A2 but it has returned fairly closely to what it was in wave one now there is some dramatic shift that has taken place and so certainly I think with the factors that Khalil is highlighting there how this transition plays out that we would expect that citizens would update their opinions based on how this plays out and certainly we have seen that in some of the places we have been in a unique position to really look at the change and be able to control for a number of factors really isolate that this is where Algerian public opinion was shortly after the uprising before a lot of the events took place that have caused some of the challenges to the countries across the region so certainly I think that that's a factor to the point on Libya we actually outside have a paper on Libya specifically written with one of the field director sorry the person who directed the field work there so I encourage you to pick that up one of the things we can say is that certainly the credibility of institutions in Libya is just so low that it's it's I mean that's really one of the things we saw there's no trust in any institution any party, anything really and so how do you begin to build that system up and some of the questions were not really designed it was a survey that was we designed the survey much before it went to the field in Libya so it's not necessarily about a lot of current events but some of those items were added about some of the political actors and so but generally there seems to be no consensus and one of the things that we found that was particularly interesting is that normally across most of the countries what your desired political system it tends to be something that resembles a parliamentary democracy with at least a plurality saying that this is what they want and in Libya that we actually only had 25% saying that they wanted something that resembled a parliamentary democracy only about 15% saying they wanted any type of political system other than that and so that there really wasn't even a model that there's no vision for what this would look like and I think that trying to build that would be one of the major challenges beyond just bringing stability is trying to get some agreement on that Go for it. So first on the question of timing not much to add to what's been said but just to reinforce your point that it really is important and I think Algeria is really an interesting case when it was survey was done there early when the Arab Spring was just taking place and there had been already some changes in Tunisia and Egypt saying well we want change too what's wrong with us after they see how things have turned out and we come back to them in 2013 and they're also looking at Libya and Yemen and well maybe what we have isn't so bad after all so those are important insights but they can't understand them independent of when the survey was done and it really tells us how events and then the unfolding events shape people's views and in fact we have been looking at the question about whether perceptions of how well or poorly the Arab Spring went in other countries affects what people think is good or bad about their own country a couple other questions I'll just take a few and then I think maybe Imani will hopefully take the rest in terms of whether people are telling the truth I forget who's the one that asked that well of course that comes up with all surveys so it's not unique I would say we do worry a little bit not so much about people not telling the truth but about social desirability in some senses I mean so are you going to say no I think democracy is terrible I mean so there may be a certain inflation what we try to do is one we usually ask multiple questions so although they can be consistently socially desirable and you can lie consistently if the questions are asked in different ways and require different kinds of responses it's likely to show up if that's not the case and that's generally described as reliability so we do reliability tests we also spend a lot of time on interviewer training and pretesting the instruments so I think some of this is unavoidable in any kind of surveys we think we're pretty careful compared to many but we know there's and I think we do what needs to be done in terms of assessing validity and reliability and you know we've drilled down I mean we found in a couple places there's a problem with one of the interviewers in this country maybe there are 13 interviewers the interviewers from one of them I won't name the country but we had to push back and we had a lot of conversations with the team leader there about that particular interviewer so we don't solve all the problems and I don't think anybody does and we know that some of them are there but we do kind of worry about this and I think we take it seriously so and did you ask the question about democracy and what people understand by it or somebody asked that so that's an important question I would say in terms of a bottom line that probably like people elsewhere including in the U.S. there's not necessarily a very sophisticated and conceptual understanding some people maybe more than others but I think it's probably not fair to say that most people who are asked about democracy have a real a deep conceptualization of it be like if you ask people here about the Bill of Rights or flag burning or controversial speech well you know it just means we have elections and I get to vote I get to have my vote counts so I think it's probably sort of generic as it is sort of everywhere we do a couple of things to try to unpack that I think Amani talked about one of those questions and she's actually done some more work on this so maybe you'll want to add but in terms of exactly what do people understand and to what extent is it associated with process to what extent is it substantive is it procedural so we try to get a sense of that and we see that there are differences if there's a common element that I think comes through that is the closest I think we can come to what people understand it will be organized around the concept of accountability I don't know exactly how this system works and don't ask me the final points about minority rights and this and that but it is a system that gives me a mechanism by which I can tell the government what I want and collectively people like me can try to press the government to be respond to us so this notion of accountability that's probably the the closest we have to a shared understanding of the basics beyond that like everywhere some people could say more and some people probably couldn't and and just one last question which is the question about whether how we sort of were looking at either constructing some of these questions or thinking about these questions what did they mean why we're looking at protest behavior whether they had political grievances or economic grievances we allowed you know we did there are some theoretical priors that we were examining but we were also being guided about the empirics of the case what we were hearing on the ground and the team leaders as well so we're trying to bring those two currents into the way we designed some of the questions to basically inform what was sort of going on I think we have time for just one or two more questions and let's just take these two Michael you spoke about this a little bit but my question is if you could speak about your findings and conclusions in terms of the different countries' expectations for change or their definitions of change and how that impacted their results responses Mr Solomon I refer to what Dr Khalil said about the crumbling of the state and then the yearning of the people to have the state back what first of all speeded up the crumbling of the state and why do people say that it is because of democracy or whatever thank you I think that expectations is obviously a very important question here and I think that the expectations and in some ways I think looking at the timing in the context is something that's so important for thinking about what do people hope for what do people want unfortunately we don't really have great questions to say what do you want I think most people want a functioning state that's reasonably representative not corrupt other things like that but the degree to which that differs by country I think is a bit hard to understand what we need to do that I think one case is looking at Yemen you can see that in Yemen expectations might be somewhat lower than in other places for instance and some of the changes that we see may reflect that that there was a big change but I think a lot of it would have to be inferred unfortunately it is I think down to timing down to what are people saying and trying to look at the results based off differences and expectations there's a number of ways we could potentially do that and there are other type of strategies to try and figure out the differences between countries but it would be something that would be very interesting to do your question actually is a very good one surprisingly you've concluded that they think there's a problem with democracy they actually don't they do not believe that the crumbling of the state as you call it is because of democracy to the contrary they actually think democracy is good when we ask them whether democracy is one system that promotes instability less order and so on they say no so the problem that we are witnessing here is that people looking at what happens on the ground when people saw demanding democracy there is a change that people call democratic they look at the behavior of their own elite what their government officials do what their parliamentarians do and what people do they go to elections and whom do they elect I don't like it so that is where the appropriateness democracy is great but it's not for us democracy is great but our people are not really doing the right thing people are not saying democracy is bad they are saying there is something wrong with us or with our elite thank you very much you said a few words about this but I wonder if you could say a few more about comparing these attitudes that we are seeing now in the aftermath of the Arab Spring with the aftermath of the third wave in eastern Europe and South America and also if any of you could venture some recommendations for US policy in light of your observations and your survey to head thank you thank you Andrew the first question about the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe after they democratized I think if you follow public opinion polls there you saw a reversion more and more people becoming much more supportive of the communist parties and why haven't we got to the second and third elections out and that's because again to the extent that there is economic grievances content or this idea that democracy was going to solve all the problems of the world and it really has delivered very little that this content was a case to kind of revert back to communism in a sense and at least some of these more more economic egalitarian parties doing a lot better than they did previously so again that's I guess more reason to say that you know economics here is at play it's really mattering a lot and then I think your second question about what does this mean for sort of like US policy democracy promotion if you may again I think the issue here is this is I mean the way I see it and I'm going to take more of like a pessimistic viewpoint is that this is a region that's wrought with war with conflict with jihadism right now Syria is falling apart Libya is falling apart Yemen is on the brink of falling more apart or coming back a little bit Egypt is on a straight path towards authoritarian reconciliation the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not resolved Iraq is a nightmare sorry this is a and so if we think that one of the only engines behind addressing some of the grievances is economic development the key past economic development right now in the region is economic globalization privatization investment the trade et cetera we all know that then the region is not looking good for that type of economic growth so then the question becomes what other economic opportunities are out there or what other economic options are out there and I haven't really heard a discourse about this that's emanating either from the policy establishment here when you're in the region almost every other country is talking about this but there aren't these coherent economic initiatives either that's sort of my worry so I think sadly we have to agree with that but I'll add something else and pick up on a question that I think wasn't I don't know if it was answered or not but whether or not the protesters were looking for economic satisfaction or political freedom what was this all about and I think we get it in words like dignity or words like justice that it's not one or the other it's fairness and I think that's that's something that needs to be added to the absence of economic development and any kind of strategies that might that our country or other countries might pursue for promoting development and trying to create more economic opportunity one of the things that was wrong in the first place was that what resources were there for public perception and probably in reality weren't being used for ordinary citizens and what burdens there were weren't being shared equitably and I think that's what that's what people want I think if everybody wants things to be better but if we're all suffering together and we're all paying the price well that's not ideal but that's at least justice and that's important and to the extent that society has some resources well what are they being used for educational system and development or are they being used for investments in hotels in joint ventures with wealthy Egyptians or wealthy somebody else's and foreign partners and so I think that's and we captured in dignity or justice these terms that unite all these things and say it's not just about economics it's about we want leaders that care about us and do the best they can for us and are less concerned about their friends being in power well it's hard to say exactly what that means for our for policy recommendations and varies from country to country and we have a lot of other interests to balance so someone else has to decide how we balance immediate short term strategic interests versus long term interests of trying to contribute to stability in the country and by extension something that advances our own interest but I think that's something that is really what the Arab Spring was all about and as we're talking about are there things we can do to promote some longer term stability and improve the welfare of people and when support for ourselves and our agenda in the process I think we can't just talk about you know they're crying economic needs and they need to be met yes that's absolutely critical but it ought to be in the context of pushing for some sort of justice along those lines and often that has not been the kind of policy we've followed okay thank you any other final comments here and if not we're going to need to wrap up I want to thank you for your questions also you can go to the Araborometer website and there is Araborometer.org Araborometer.org Araborometer.org Araborometer.org it's full of information data analysis there so do that and join me in thanking each of our panelists for some excellent presentation.