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Abstract:  Does public sector employment make graduates less likely to join anti-regime protests? Recent scholarship argues yes, with implications for bottom-up democratization in late-developing economies with expansive public and higher education sectors. This paper examines how that thesis travels to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region marked by segmented labor markets, developed tertiary education, and persistent authoritarianism. We find that well-educated public sector employees were more likely to join anti-regime protests in Algeria and Egypt, while estimating null effects for state dependency in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Tunisia. Supplementary analyses demonstrate that for educated public sector employees who protested in Algeria -- a critical case for the state dependency argument -- a desire for political rights and freedoms outweighed economic considerations. Crucially, preference falsification in the pre-protest period helped obscure these attitudes. The findings caution against linking authoritarianism in the MENA to a protest-shy state middle class.

The Political Science Seminar Series is convened by Desmond King. For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact politics.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.