Suchergebnisse

The oil-producing states of the Arab Gulf are said to sink or swim on their capacity for political appeasement through economic redistribution. Yet, during the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, in Bahrain and all across the Arab Gulf, ordinary citizens showed an unexpected enthusiasm for political protest directed against governments widely assumed to have co-opted their support with oil revenues. Justin Gengler draws on the first-ever mass political survey in Bahrain to demonstrate that neither is the state willing to offer all citizens the same bargain, nor are all citizens willing to ac

This article theorizes three layers of impacts of the Coronavirus crisis on internal GCC politics, and then identifies potential causal mechanisms operating at each level. A first and primary layer concerns governance, and revolves around the state's performance in managing the virus outbreak. A secondary level relates to scarcity and inequality, and is linked to the state's handling of economic and social knock-on effects of the pandemic. A tertiary level is connected to peer comparison, and involves GCC states' (lack of) coordination of political responses at the regional or sub-regional level. Several key factors emerge from the investigation as potent catalysts for new political dynamics in the Arab Gulf states. One is the unusual availability and clarity of information about state performance surrounding Covid-19, which stands in stark contrast to the general lack of reliable governance indicators for GCC and other MENA countries. Another is the universal nature of the Coronavirus shock, which allows Gulf citizens and residents to make direct comparisons of state performance and policy responses that may reveal a disproportionately negative (or positive) personal or collective outcome. Third, the person-to-person transmission of Covid-19 shatters the traditional social and geographical segregation of Gulf societies, with once-isolated communities now directly and profoundly impacted by each other's behavior, preferences, and incentives. Finally, variation in resource endowments and political institutions across the GCC precludes easy regional harmonization of post-Covid social and economic policy, once more inviting individual comparison with relatively advantaged or disadvantaged peers in neighboring states.

This paper explores the attitudes of expatriate workers towards the future of migration to the Arab Gulf states. We conduct an online survey and framing experiment administered to more than 2900 expatriate workers in Kuwait and Qatar. We find that Arab migrants are less supportive of future migration than other migrants and also exhibit high levels of ethnic-group bias in favor of fellow Arabs. Evidence from the framing experiment suggests that Arab migrants disfavor Indian workers, even though workers from South Asia are less likely to pose competition for jobs. Our findings provide empirical evidence for ethnic boundary policing within the migrant community and speak to the conditions that encourage anti-migrant sentiment and in-group favoritism among Arab expatriate workers in the Gulf region.

AbstractThis paper proposes a framework of immigrant acceptance that accounts for both group-level and individual-level characteristics and conducts a novel test of the cultural threat hypothesis. Immigrants' individual traits are conceptualized as secondary to their identity-based claims. The empirical strategy leverages a set of survey experiments conducted in the extreme rentier state of Qatar, where naturalization poses tangible negative financial consequences for citizens by expanding the pool of government welfare beneficiaries. Findings demonstrate that citizens are willing to share citizenship with a narrow ethnic in-group while individual cultural and economic attributes are lower-order determinants influencing economically vulnerable citizens. Importantly, answers to direct survey measures are at odds with these findings, demonstrating their susceptibility to social desirability bias.

How do perceived inequalities in allocation impact citizen satisfaction with state-distributed benefits in rentier societies? Resource-rich rentier regimes are widely theorized to maintain the economic and political satisfaction of subjects through wealth distribution. Yet, while qualitative research in the rentier states of the Arabian Peninsula has identified unequal distribution as a source of discontent, the relative importance of objective versus subjective factors in shaping satisfaction at the individual level has never been systematically evaluated. Here we assess the impacts of inequality on the nexus between wealth and satisfaction among citizens of the richest rentier regime in the world: the state of Qatar. Using original, nationally representative survey data, we test the effects of two separate mechanisms of unequal distribution previously identified in the literature: group-based discrimination, and variation in individual access owing to informal influence. Results show that perceptions of both group- and individual-based inequality dampen satisfaction with state-distributed benefits, irrespective of objective socioeconomic well-being. The findings demonstrate that even in the most affluent of rentier states, economic satisfaction derives not only from absolute quantities of benefits but also from subjective impressions of fairness in the distribution process.

This article introduces the concept of bargaining power as a framework for understanding varieties of migration experience and behavior. We argue that migration and settlement experiences vary according to a migrant's leverage — or bargaining power — afforded by their individual cultural and socioeconomic capital (internal bargaining power) and their home country's political and physical security characteristics (external bargaining power). These two dimensions of bargaining power interact with a host country's social and political structures to produce specific experiences of (dis)advantage. We apply our framework to the Arab Gulf states, where large and diverse foreign populations experience complex and interconnected forms of inclusion and exclusion. Utilizing data from a nationally representative survey of a highly diverse sample of foreign residents in Qatar, we use our framework, first, to generate a typology of Gulf migration experience and, then, to statistically predict migrants' reported life satisfaction in the host country and intentions for long-term settlement. We also use widely available secondary data to examine objective correlates of bargaining power, offering an alternative pathway for future research that does not require individual-level survey data. We conclude by describing the relevance of our bargaining power framework to the study of varieties of migration experience in other migration regimes.