DONDENA Seminar - Neil Ketchley

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“State Dependency, Education, and Protest: Evidence from the Arab World” 

SPEAKER: Neil Ketchley (Oxford University).

ABSTRACT:

Does public sector employment make graduates less likely to protest in autocracies? Scholarship on state dependency argues yes, with implications for bottom-up democratization in late-developing economies with expansive public and higher education sectors. This paper tests whether this explains participation in six major protest episodes in the Arab world. We find that well-educated public sector employees were actually more actually likely to mobilize in Algeria and Egypt, while we estimate null effects for state dependency on protest participation in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Tunisia. Further analyses show that educated public sector employees in Algeria - a critical case for the state-dependency argument - ultimately prioritized political rights over personal economic concerns. Importantly, these preferences only became visible following a political shock. The findings place bounds on the external validity of the state dependency thesis and identify the conditions under which the educated public sector in autocracies can suddenly become protest-prone.
 

BIO: 

Neil Ketchley is Professor of Politics and Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His first book, Egypt in a Time of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award. His research on protest and activism in the Middle East and North Africa has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Comparative Political Studies, among others. In 2025, he won the Fred Halliday Award, given to an outstanding mid-career scholar of the Middle East.