Seminar Summary — Not All Jobs Are Created Equal: Public Sector Employment and Perceptions of Government Performance in Rentier States

Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo by Sascha Bosshard via Unsplash.

Over the past half-century, the Arab Gulf countries have experienced economic development at astonishing rates. Fueled by booming oil revenues during the 1970s and ‘80s, these countries, and particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), rapidly expanded roads, infrastructure, social services and more. With economic development came an influx of expatriates from around the world, many of whom are still employed in a range of blue- and white-collar jobs. Currently, the expatriate population outnumbers the native Emirati population in the UAE.

While the majority of expatriates hold private sector jobs, the opposite is true for citizens: about 66 percent of employed Saudis and 90 percent of employed Emriatis work in government. Unlike in the United States, where public sector employment is typically characterized by low wages, Saudi men working in the public sector earn about twice as much as they would have earned in the private sector. According to a 2015 Gallup Business Journal article, “Saudi citizens in the labor force have long expected—and felt guaranteed-—a secure job in the government sector.”

The ability to provide citizens with secure, high-paying government jobs is a characterizing feature of so-called “rentier states,” which derive a significant portion of revenues from allowing foreign entities to extract and profit from natural resources. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are classic examples of rentier states, drawing in billions of dollars every year in oil revenues. Scholarship dating back to the 1980s posits that rentier governments are able to redistribute large amounts of revenue to the citizen population in the form of favors such as guaranteed employment. Thus, governments can foster loyalty and allegiance among citizens through the distribution of benefits. However, little research has been done into whether the “rentier state effect” of seeking increased satisfaction with the government holds true at the individual level.

To better understand the relationship between citizens and their governments in rentier states, Nimah Mazaheri, Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Tufts University, and a team of researchers surveyed adult Saudi and Emirati citizens to determine whether people who are dependent on the generosity of the government via public sector employment are more likely to have stronger and more positive attachments to the state. Mazaheri presented the findings at the final session of the Fall 2022 Human Capital Initiative Seminar Series on December 7th, 2022.

The surveys, which were conducted from April-May 2018, utilized quota-based sampling to achieve a balance of respondents by gender, age, and province of origin. The Saudi sample consisted of about 600 individuals, 57 percent of whom were men and 43 percent of whom were women. Sixty-eight percent were college-educated, and the median age of respondents was 33 years. The survey of Emiratis involved approximately 560 individuals, a larger share of whom were employed than in the Saudi sample.

Survey respondents were asked to rate government performance across a range of indicators, including job creation, helping the poor, improving health services and more. The researchers found that the rentier state effect did align with survey responses, but with an important caveat: citizens who held public sector jobs were more likely to rate government performance higher than citizens not employed by the government, but only if the government job they had was a ministerial position. Citizens with non-ministerial public sector jobs held more negative views about government performance.

Government ministries, such as the Saudi Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Health, are executive branch bodies tasked with designing and implementing a specific area of public policy. In the Gulf states, Mazaheri noted that people with jobs at ministries are more likely to be older, better educated, wealthier and male, and that the jobs offer a greater degree of prestige, stability, opportunities for career advancement, supplemental privileges and geographic desirability compared to other jobs within the government. Further driving the ministry versus non-ministry discrepancy in attitudes towards government, Mazaheri added that non-ministry workers in the legal and judicial system, for example, are more likely to observe government waste, mismanagement and corruption.

Mazaheri and colleagues’ findings that public sector employment does not automatically foster admiration of government and that perceptions of government performance are highly dependent on job type are important contributions to rentier state scholarship. Furthermore, the findings defy the assumption that citizens of rentier states exhibit blanket compliance with their authoritarian governments. The citizens of rentier states constitute a demographic who clearly hold nuanced views shaped by their everyday experiences and who are deserving of further scholarship to clarify their preferences and relationships with their states.

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