Survey Resources

This page will contain resources for students or scholars interested in conducting survey-based research in the Gulf states, based on my personal experience.

Popular posts

The End of the GCC Crisis

Image
I have published a policy piece in Al-Monitor titled " Concerns Over Finances, Not Iran, Will End Qatar Crisis ." It argues, as the title implies, that economic considerations in the blockading countries are likely to be the primary motivator of the (perhaps impending) end to the Qatar embargo, rather than common Arab Gulf fear of an increasingly belligerent Iran. This is because the Qatar blockade has created a split in the GCC fiscal reform agenda, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain moving forward with unpopular austerity measures -- especially direct taxation -- while Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman have deferred structural changes to the rentier state. The result is a sort of "good cop/bad cop" dichotomy in the Gulf, where some GCC citizens continue to live under the previous, relatively more generous economic regime while others do not. The close GCC fiscal policy coordination of 2015-2017, which was meant precisely to avoid such discrepancies that could l
Read More

Economic Inequality in the Rentier State

Image
Just published (online) in Political Research Quarterly is a coauthored paper that assesses the effects of perceived inequalities in distribution of welfare benefits in rentier states.  That is, does it matter that some rentier citizens receive more financial patronage than others, so long as everyone is rich in absolute terms?  The answer, as one might expect but contrary to classical rentier theory, is yes. We use data from a 2013 national survey of Qatari citizens conducted by my institute, SESRI, to show that perceived unfairness in distribution—both among citizens and between citizens and expatriates—dampens satisfaction with the rentier subsidies that people do receive.  More specifically, Qataris who perceive high levels of distributional unfairness report substantially lower satisfaction with state benefits, irrespective of their objective wealth (household income). 
Read More

Survey Attitudes in the Arab World

Image
Back in 2017 I was awarded a grant from the Qatar National Research Fund for a study of how people in the Arab world experience and view public opinion surveys. Some of the findings have been referenced before in an article I wrote for the Washington Post on the dangerous political weaponization of survey research in the Middle East. But the first proper academic product of the study has now been published (online) in the British Journal of Political Science . The coauthored paper examines, for the first time in an Arab country, attitudes toward public opinion surveys and their effects on survey-taking behavior. (Believe it or not, the use of surveys to measure attitudes toward surveys is a real thing, and in Western contexts such research dates to the 1950s.) A key conclusion of our study--and a surprising one perhaps--is that Arabs tend to hold quite positive views of surveys, both in absolute terms and relative to non-Arabs. Indeed, a primary motivation of the study was
Read More