The “arab Spring” Stress Test: Diagnosing Reasons for Revolt1

Two stories characterize the Middle East in general—and the Arab world in particular. They are robust authoritarian regimes suffering economic dysfunction under the stifling “institutional stagnation” of Islamic law. Neither story is credible. In this paper I draw on rather standard economic and demographic data to construct a model of the trajectories to political revolt in 16 Arab countries. This work shows rather standard economic phenomena at work in the Arab world since 2000. This effort suggests that an attentive observer of 5-6 plausible explanatory variables could have predicted—by the summer of 2010—which Arab countries would very soon fall into political chaos, and which ones would not. I call it the “Arab Spring Stress Test.”