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Grievances or Skills? The Effect of Education on Youth Attitudes and Political Participation in Egypt and Tunisia

Author

Listed:
  • Ragui Assaad

    (University of Minnesota)

  • Miquel Pellicer
  • Caroline Krafft
  • Colette Salemi

Abstract

There are two prominent accounts of the 2011 Arab Uprisings and the role of education in youth mobilization. The first argument focuses on grievances: this hypothesis rests on a link between educational attainment and youth job aspirations that the labor market has not been able to fulfill. These unfulfilled aspirations fuel grievances and, hence, protest. The other argument focuses on mobilization costs. The central hypothesis is that education provides the skills, knowledge and/or contacts that facilitate political participation. This paper assesses and attempts to disentangle these two accounts by examining the effect of education on measures of grievance, political knowledge, and political participation using rich youth surveys from Egypt and Tunisia. In order to partially deal with the endogeneity of education, we control for parental education and sibling fixed effects. We find a strong and robust correlation of education with political knowledge and political participation, but not with grievances.

Suggested Citation

  • Ragui Assaad & Miquel Pellicer & Caroline Krafft & Colette Salemi, 2002. "Grievances or Skills? The Effect of Education on Youth Attitudes and Political Participation in Egypt and Tunisia," Working Papers 1103, Economic Research Forum, revised 01 Jun 2002.
    • Handle: RePEc:erg:wpaper:1103
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Pellicer, Miquel, 2018. "The evolution of returns to education in the Middle East and North Africa: Evidence from comparable education policy changes in Tunisia," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 183-191.

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