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How are state leaders adapting their citizen-building strategies for globalization? What outcomes are they achieving, and why? Bedouins into Bourgeois investigates an ambitious state-led social engineering campaign in the United Arab Emirates, where leaders aimed to encourage more entrepreneurial, market-friendly, patriotic, and civic-minded citizens. Extensive ethnography - including interviews with a ruling monarch - reveals the rulers' reasoning and goals for social engineering. Through surveys and experiments, social engineering outcomes are examined, as well as the reasons for these outcomes, with surprising results. This fascinating study illustrates how social engineering strategies that use nationalism to motivate citizens can have paradoxical effects, increasing patriotism but unexpectedly discouraging or "crowding out" development-friendly mind-sets.

How are state leaders adapting their citizen-building strategies for globalization? What outcomes are they achieving, and why? Bedouins into Bourgeois investigates an ambitious state-led social engineering campaign in the United Arab Emirates, where leaders aimed to encourage more entrepreneurial, market-friendly, patriotic, and civic-minded citizens. Extensive ethnography - including interviews with a ruling monarch - reveals the rulers' reasoning and goals for social engineering. Through surveys and experiments, social engineering outcomes are examined, as well as the reasons for these outcomes, with surprising results. This fascinating study illustrates how social engineering strategies that use nationalism to motivate citizens can have paradoxical effects, increasing patriotism but unexpectedly discouraging or "crowding out" development-friendly mind-sets

AbstractResearch suggests that interacting with women may encourage civic and prosocial attitudes, yet findings to date have been limited to democracies notable for their egalitarian norms. Using simulated contact experiments under controlled conditions, this article tests hypotheses for the first time in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, arguably "hard cases" given persistent norms of patriarchy and gender segregation. Yet, despite stronger contexts for male dominance, results suggest that interacting with women may indeed steer Saudi and Kuwaiti men toward more civic and other-regarding orientations, including aspects of tolerance, egalitarianism, openness, and community rule-following. These findings add much-needed comparative perspective to experimental research on mixed-gender dynamics and align with broader work highlighting the benefits of diverse interactions for groups and nations.

AbstractDo experts rationalize and legitimize authoritarian governance? Although research on expert actors in contexts of democracy and international governance is now extensive, scholarly work on their role in authoritarian settings remains limited. This article helps open the black box of authoritarian decision-making by investigating expert advisers in the Arab Gulf monarchies, where ruling elites have enlisted them from top universities and global consulting firms. Qualitative fieldwork combined with three experiments casts doubt on both the rationalization and legitimacy hypotheses and also generates new insights surrounding unintended consequences. On rationalization, the evidence suggests that experts contribute to perverse cycles of overconfidence among authoritarian ruling elites, thereby enabling a belief in state-building shortcuts. On legitimacy, the experiments demonstrate a backfire effect, with experts reducing public support for reform. The author makes theoretical contributions by suggesting important and heretofore unrecognized conflicts and trade-offs across experts' potential for rationalizing vis-à-vis legitimizing.

New approaches to citizen-building are flourishing, yet theoretical tools are lacking and empirical research is limited. This article contributes in several ways. Theoretically, it offers a reconceptualization of the traditional "making of citizens" framework, aiming to adapt it to contemporary needs and concerns. Empirically, it offers an examination of the content of civics curricula as well as original data on the outcomes of an ambitious state-led social engineering campaign in the United Arab Emirates, where leaders seek to build more "globalization-ready" citizens—more entrepreneurial, market friendly, patriotic, and civic minded, yet still loyal to the regime. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find evidence that social engineering is succeeding in some respects but backfiring in others, giving rise to citizens not only more patriotic but also more entitled—in other words, entitled patriots. Findings contribute to knowledge of state-led social engineering and citizen-building in the contemporary era.

Recent studies of autocratic liberalization adopt a rationalist approach in which autocrats' motives and styles of reasoning are imputed or deduced. By contrast, I investigate these empirically. I focus on liberal social engineering in the Persian Gulf, where authoritarian state efforts to shape citizen hearts and minds conform incongruously to liberal ideals of character. To explain this important but under-studied variant on autocratic liberalization, I present evidence from rare palace ethnography in the United Arab Emirates, including analysis of the jokes and stories ruling elites tell behind closed doors and regular interviews with a ruling monarch. I find that autocrats' deeply personal experiences in the West as young men and women supplied them with stylized ideas about how modern, productive peoples ought to act and how their own cultures underperform. The evidence also reveals that such experiences can influence autocrats, even years later, leading them to trust in Western-style liberal social engineering as the way forward, despite the risks. Ethnographic findings challenge the contemporary scholarly stereotype of the autocrat as a super-rational being narrowly focused on political survival, illustrating how memory and emotion can also serve as important influences over reasoning and can drive liberal change.

This paper challenges conventional wisdom about the drivers of international community at the individual level. Presenting new data and a novel natural experiment approach to the study of cross-border contact and international community, it tests some of the key microfoundations of international relations theory about how a sense of shared international community may arise and evolve among individuals. The hypotheses are tested using survey data from a large sample (n = 571) of American study abroad students in a range of universities across a treatment and a control group. Surprisingly, findings do not support the main hypothesis that cross-border contact fosters a sense of shared international community. However, the second hypothesis drawn from the liberal paradigm, suggesting that cross-border contact lowers threat perceptions, is strongly supported. The 'Huntingtonian' hypothesis that cross-border contact heightens nationalism also garners wide support. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for theory and future research, especially the potential of rethinking the drivers of international community at the individual level to rely less on a sense of shared identity and essential sameness, and more on a feeling of 'enlightened nationalism' and appreciation for difference. Adapted from the source document.

Given that the fictional narratives found in novels, movies, and television shows enjoy wide public consumption, memorably convey information, minimize counter-arguing, and often emphasize politically-relevant themes, we argue that greater scholarly attention must be paid to theorizing and measuring how fiction affects political attitudes. We argue for a genre-based approach for studying fiction effects, and apply it to the popular dystopian genre. Results across three experiments are striking: we find consistent evidence that dystopian narratives enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action. Yet we find no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust and efficacy, illustrating that fiction's effects may not be what they seem and underscoring the need for political scientists to take fiction seriously.