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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010, waves of protest have ebbed and now largely faded across the Arab states of the Middle East, and authoritarian politics there appear to be stronger than ever. Has dissent disappeared, or merely become harder to notice? I argue in this article that clientelism serves as an important locus of latent dissent in the Middle East, one that calls into question the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, though it often happens away from public view. Employing data from four waves of the Arab Barometer, however, I show that the more citizens perceive clientelism to be prevalent in society, the less likely they are to willingly obey their government when they disagree with it. This finding is most pronounced among those most on the fence about obeying the government in the first place, and during periods in which overt dissent is least apparent. Clientelism beliefs also increase support for democratic alternatives in the most recent data. In addition, while clientelism should increase voting and election-related mobilization, I find inconsistent results across time. This article complicates our current understanding of the role clientelism plays in authoritarian states, and it sheds new light on the "client side" of the patron-client relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]