ABSTRACT
The “Arab Spring” began on December 17, 2010, in Tunisia, where Mohamed Bouazizi, a vegetable seller in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire to protest mistreatment by local police and government authorities. Several basic economic and political factors differentiate the countries of the region, explaining some of the variation in the trajectories of the Arab uprisings. In the early days of the Arab Spring, debates about the relative importance of economic versus political factors permeated journalistic and scholarly discussions about the motivations for the mass protests across the region. Mass co-optation was achieved in large part through direct economic benefits in the form of subsidies for goods that were consumed relatively less by the poor, such as petroleum and energy. By the mid-1990s, the old social contract in post-independence Arab countries was already dead but had not been replaced by a new successful model.
