CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Mohamed, Ahmed Ezzeldin abdalla |
|---|---|
| Title | Working in the Shadows: A Cross-National Analysis of Everyday Resistance |
| Summary | This paper provides a pioneering attempt to analyze the phenomenon of everyday resistance to material dominance cross-nationally using large-N analysis. Building on the existing literature on everyday resistance, we test for a set of hypotheses tackling the structural, institutional, and attitudinal factors associated and determining the extent of everyday resistance. To undertake this task, the paper firstly revisits the theoretical conceptualization of everyday resistance before arguing that the informal economy offers the most convenient proxy for everyday resistance to material dominance that is comparable cross-nationally. Then, we proceed to testing our hypotheses by employing Pearson’s correlation and OLS regression analyses to a dataset of around 90 countries compiled from different sources. Our findings suggest that everyday resistance to material dominance is more likely to burgeon in societies at earlier stages of development with more dependence on agricultural economy and burdened by inefficient institutions, lower levels of social trust, high latent anti-authority attitudes, and low levels of public display of contention. When it comes to the causal drivers of everyday resistance, the results indicate that a certain institutional set-up of loose executive institutions, supportive legal institutions, and fragmented horizontal social structure, form an opportunity structure for everyday resistance to grow. Within this institutional arrangement, resisters tend to base their opposition on “de jure” more than “de facto” material domination, while being fueled by latent anti-authority attitudes. Interestingly, the scale of everyday resistance is likely to expand under repressive regimes without being independent from different forms of public display of contention. |
| Supervisor | Greskovits, Bela |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/mohamed_ahmed-ezzeldin.pdf |
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