It’s perhaps a mark of the times that the optimism surrounding the potential for social media to positively impact society wrought by the Arab Spring has dissipated into a more dystopian world of fake news and mass disinformation.
Did the Arab Spring provide a happiness boost to citizens involved however? That was the question posed by recent research from HSE University, which set out to explore both whether the revolution shared characteristics with past revolutions, and whether it was effective in raising the happiness levels of those involved.
Understandably, the paper highlights the dissatisfaction with the status quo that sits at the heart of most revolutions, with relative deprivation a key factor. This highlights the gap between expected welfare and actual welfare, and can be caused by authorities failing to deliver on promises.
Relative deprivation
This concept of relative deprivation has become a common means by which to assess political processes around the world, but it remains a somewhat fuzzy concept with little clarity over how it should be measured.
The researchers attempted to improve on this via a 10-point scale designed to measure ‘subjective feelings of happiness’ (SFH). It’s a scale in which a happy person might be expected to have a degree of economic success, while living in a stable democracy with high levels of freedom. They might also be a part of the dominant majority and occupy positions towards the top of the social ladder.
The researchers attempted to explore the role subjective happiness played in the Arab Spring, and whether it could serve as a useful gauge of relative deprivation. They ranked the countries involved in the Arab Spring according to the sociopolitical destabilization index, with countries like Qatar ranked at the lower end, and those such as Egypt and Libya at the highest end.
These were then compared with the 2010 SFH values, and the comparison revealed that those countries with the lowest-intensity protests were also those where citizens were subjectively happiest. Indeed, those countries also appeared happier than citizens of countries with higher GDP per capita.
This suggests that revolutionary sentiments are often driven by largely economic rather than socio-psychological factors, but the researchers delved deeper and applied the sociopolitical destablization index data to the findings. This revealed that the change in subjective happiness between 2009 and 2010 showed that socio-psychological factors deserve greater weight in assessing the genesis of the Arab Spring.
The findings underline the complexity of such movements and the triggers that support them. Religious, historical, demographic and political factors all play a part in determining sociopolitical destabilization, and so relative deprivation is one of many possible triggers to revolutionary activities.
It’s a concept the researchers plan to test in other countries around the world, and across various other political processes, to test just how robust it, and the concept of relative deprivation, is.
