The Peninsula qt
By Sidi Mohamed
DOHA: Seventy four percent of Arabs support democracy compared to 17 percent who could be said to oppose it, according to the results of the 2017-2018 Arab Opinion Index announced by The Arab Center For Research and Policy Studies yesterday.
The survey is based on face-to-face interviews conducted with 18,830 individual respondents in 11 separate Arab countries.
The results announced yesterday at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies showed that when people were asked the question of how much they are able to criticize the government using a sliding scale, with one being the least ability and 10 being the most ability. The average number was 5.6 regionally, with respondents in Saudi Arabia being predictably the least able to criticize the government, and respondents in Lebanon and Tunisia being the most.
Regarding their view of Arab Spring, close to a majority of Arabs (49%) regard the peaceful protests which formed the Arab Spring of 2011 positively. There is a consensus among respondents which believes that the original uprisings were directed against dictatorial regimes, as popular movements aimed at supporting the transition to democracy and in protest against financial and administrative corruption.
The Arab public is neatly divided, too, over the present state of the Arab Spring and its future outcomes: fully 45% agreed with the statement that the Arab Spring “will achieve its aims,” despite acknowledging present setbacks. This is compared to 34% who agreed with the opposing statement that “the Arab Spring has come to an end,” and that the old regimes have returned to power.
About the role of religion, most Arabs define their own religiosity in one of three ways: “Religious to some extent” (65%) or “Very religious” (21%), and only 11% of Arabs defined themselves as “Not religious”.
When asked to look at specific US foreign policy areas, vast majority of Arabs had negative views of US policy towards Palestine (87%, up from 79% last year); Syria (81%) and Iraq (82%).
The fieldwork was carried out by an overall team of 840 individuals (half of whom were women), who conducted 45,000 hours of face-to-face interviews, covering a total of 760,000 kilometers across the population clusters sampled.
