Political Attitudes and Participation Among Young Arab Workers: A Comparison of Formal and Informal Workers in Five Arab Countries Impacts: Evidence from Turkey

Political participation by citizens is important to ensure good governance and the accountability of policy makers’ decisions and initiatives. However, this issue may be especially difficult in contexts of high informal labour, defined in this paper as workers not enrolled in the formal social security system. This paper examines the topic of political participation among young workers in five Arab countries: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. It compares both formal and informal sector workers using data from the European Union’s 2018 SAHWA survey (http://www.sahwa.eu/). Amongst other variables, the paper tests the impact of informality on political participation. It uses four proxies for political participation to compare formal and informal workers in the case study countries: (1) affiliation to a political party or movement; (2) frequency of participation in political meetings/campaigns or participation in politics via the Internet; (3) frequency of speaking about politics and economic issues with peers; (4) voting in elections (both general and local). By controlling for demographic and socio-economic variables, the analysis uses discrete choice model to test the impact of this informality on the four proxies of political participation. An important contribution of this paper is to incorporate job satisfaction into the analysis. The results indicate that informal workers are less likely to participate in key political behaviours such as belonging to political parties, participating in political meetings and speaking about politics and voting with peers. The paper proposes some key policy implications arising from the analysis