Clientelism and its discontents: The role of wasta in shaping political attitudes and participation in Jordan

ABSTRACT

For citizens in the Middle East, is wasta an accepted traditional practice or a form of corruption that has harmful effects on society? Scholarship remains divided on how exactly to view wasta, with some scholars pointing to its role in fostering in-group ties and providing a problem-solving mechanism, with others charging that wasta promotes poor governance and weak accountability. What citizens think rarely enters the picture. In this article, I argue that Jordanian citizens consider wasta a negative force in society, one that divides them from each other and makes them feel disengaged from the political life of their country. I use evidence from thirty-seven interviews with Jordanian youth, and data from the Jordanian NGO Leaders of Tomorrow’s ‘FADFED’ initiative, a novel qualitative method for gathering opinion data from citizens. This article challenges scholars to take wasta’s role in state-society tensions in the Middle East more seriously.

KEYWORDS:

• Clientelism
• wasta
• political participation
• Jordan
• tribes
• Palestinians

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Eric Davis, John Entelis, Robert Kaufman, Daniel Kelemen, Marc Lynch, and Amanda Marziliano for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

FADFED data are available via the ICPSR data repository at https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2022.2114064

Notes

1. http://dosweb.dos.gov.jo/DataBank/Population_Estimares/PopulationEstimates.pdf.

2. For reasons of security, interview respondents are identified only by background and sex, which is common practice for interview research in the Midde East. I have kept and securely stored interview notes so as to protect respondent identity as per my IRB protocols.

3. I am trained and conversationally proficient in Arabic, so it was not cause problems for interviewees to choose Arabic or switch between the two languages.

4. This N = 76 does not count illegible responses or responses that were not related to the wasta questions. This was a particular issue in Mafraq, where Al Albayt University was the FADFED site and some respondents ignored the prompts and instead listed complaints about the university.

5. Photos of all sheets are available online. Translations from the Arabic in the article text are my own.

6. Transjordanian female, interview with the author, 23 April 2015.

7. Palestinian female, interview with the author, 4 April 2015.

8. http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/const_ch1–3.html.

9. Palestinian female, interview with the author, 24 April 2015.

10. Data from the Arab Barometer’s Wave V (2018–19), found at https://www.arabbarometer.org/survey-data/.

11. Transjordanian male, interview with the author, 23 April 2015.

12. Transjordanian male, interview with the author, 25 April 2015.

13. Palestinian female, interview with the author, 23 April 2015.

14. Transjordanian female, interview with the author, 15 April 2015.

15. Transjordanian male, interview with the author, 12 May 2015.

16. Transjordanian male, interview with the author, 28 April 2015.

17. Transjordanian male, interview with the author 30 May 2015.

18. Transjordanian female, interview with the author, 30 March 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant from the U.S. Department of State.