The Real Reason Many Arabs Don’t Believe in Democracy

Years of corruption and economic exclusion have hollowed out public faith in politics. Restoring belief in democracy will depend on whether it can finally deliver prosperity.

The Arab world remains one of the few regions where democracy has yet to take root. Latin America experienced its democratic wave, Eastern Europe dismantled its walls, and even Africa now counts more democracies than dictatorships. But from Casablanca to Basra, genuine political pluralism is still elusive.

The numbers are brutal. According to the Arab Barometer’s Wave VIII survey, faith in democracy has collapsed. In Iraq, support has dropped thirty-four points since 2012. In Tunisia, the so-called Arab Spring “success story,” it has fallen twenty-eight points. In Lebanon, twenty-six. Across the region, overwhelming majorities now agree their countries need “a leader who can bend the rules if necessary to get things done.” Eighty-eight percent of Iraqis say so. More than seventy percent of Tunisians and Lebanese agree.

This is not a cultural rejection of freedom. But it is a rejection of what passes for democracy in the Arab world. Citizens wanted dignity. What they got instead were hollow parliaments stuffed with cronies, ministries auctioned off to sectarian bosses, and economies so sclerotic that young people dream not of building startups but of landing government desk jobs that may never come.

As Ibrahim Elbadawi and Samir Makdisi demonstrated in their econometric study, there is something deeper here than modernization theory can explain. Even after controlling for education and income, a “negative and highly significant Arab dummy effect remains,” evidence of a stubborn democracy deficit. Wars that might spark transitions elsewhere only entrench tyrannies here. And rents, whether from oil, aid, or monopolies, rot institutions and buy silence. To paraphrase Larry Diamond: easy money corrodes governance, distorts accountability, and makes authoritarianism easier to sustain.

But the real betrayal is economic. For decades, Arab economies have been strangled by crony capitalism. Well-connected firms hoard credit and licenses while genuine entrepreneurs are locked out. Across the region, small and medium-sized enterprises—the backbone of any healthy economy—receive barely eight percent of bank loans. In wealthy countries, that figure is three times higher. The result is suffocation: a young man with an idea in Cairo or Baghdad must beg family for capital while the state lavishes subsidies on bloated monopolies.

The human toll of this failure is immense. Youth unemployment in the Arab world stands at nearly twenty-eight percent, the highest in the world. Female participation in the workforce is lower than anywhere else, under twenty percent. And sixty to eighty percent of formal jobs are still in the public sector, where citizens wait years for secure jobs that governments can no longer afford to provide. A pyramid scheme that cannot sustain itself forever.

So when Westerners ask, “Why don’t Arabs believe in democracy?” the answer is not that Arabs hate freedom. It is that freedom has never fed them. Democracy, as practiced here, has been an empty theater where elites squabble over scraps while the lights go out and air conditioning fails in 100-degree heat. If ballots only lead to bankruptcy, why would anyone choose them?

The Arab Barometer captures the result with painful clarity: citizens are turning back to alternatives they once tried to overthrow. Support for strongmen has surged. Many now prefer benevolent dictatorships that promise services without rights. In Jordan and Mauritania, majorities say they would accept Islamic law as the basis of governance even if it excluded elections. In Tunisia, youth who grew up after the Jasmine Revolution are now less supportive of democracy than their parents, who lived under dictatorship.

This is the cruel inversion of the Arab Spring. Freedom was demanded. Chaos followed. Now order is king.

Yet here lies the paradox: the same Arab world that has failed to democratize is bursting with young people who could power it forward. Half the region is under twenty-five. It is the youngest, most educated generation in Arab history. It is a generation that has scrolled TikTok, coded apps, and built small businesses against all odds. It is a generation that has heard the slogans of freedom and experienced the bitterness of betrayal.

If democracy is ever to mean more than a slogan, it must be tied to prosperity. And prosperity will not come from bloated states or generals in sunglasses. Unleashing entrepreneurs, dismantling monopolies, opening access to credit, and integrating markets is the only path forward that leads to success. The entrepreneurship policy brief puts it simply: entrepreneurship is a “pathway to inclusive prosperity,” the only viable approach to sustainable growth, innovation, and jobs. For every one percent rise in self-employment, unemployment falls by more than one percent over time.

But entrepreneurs today face a stacked deck. Starting a business in the Arab world can cost nearly a third of the average income per capita. In OECD countries, it costs just three percent. Crony capitalists with political ties monopolize contracts, cheap credit, and licenses. Banks prefer lending to governments and giant conglomerates. The financing gap for small and medium enterprises is estimated at $180 billion. A system that denies young people the ability to create and work is a system that teaches them despair.

The protests of 2011 were as much about jobs as about freedoms. So were the uprisings of 2018 that rocked Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon. In both waves, young people demanded an end to corruption and unemployment. They were promised reforms, only to be swiftly betrayed.

RAND warned a decade ago that elections without institutions would collapse. It was right. Institutions cannot be built without citizens who can think freely and work freely. That is where civil society and entrepreneurship meet. That is also where the seeds of real democracy must be planted.

And this is where Ideas Beyond Borders has carved out a rare space of hope. RAND’s prescription was to invest in civil society and education. The entrepreneurship report called for freeing entrepreneurs to build inclusive prosperity. IBB is doing both. By translating books banned by censors, building media platforms that challenge dogma, and supporting young entrepreneurs, IBB is doing what authoritarian regimes fear most: creating citizens who are independent in both thought and livelihood.

Democracy will not arrive in the Arab world by parachute, by foreign lecture, or by the next military coup in the name of reform. It will come when citizens no longer need to beg for support, when their minds are free, their stomachs are full, and their hands can build, when dignity is not a promise on a poster but a paycheck earned honestly.

That is why many Arabs no longer believe in democracy as they have known it. And that is why the real task is not to mourn that disbelief, but to show through ideas, jobs, and opportunity that democracy can still deliver.

Until then, elections will remain largely performative. Yet beneath the surface, momentum for change continues to build—it only needs the right conditions to take root.