About

Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on governance and development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries. He is the co-Editor of the Journal of Democracy of the National Endowment for Democracy and serves as the Faculty Director of the Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative and the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places. His scholarly work includes authoring the book 'Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt' and co-authoring 'The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform.' Masoud holds an AB from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Yale University, both in political science. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics and leadership and is actively involved in sponsored research projects related to Egypt and Middle Eastern governance.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Political economy
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Anthropology
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Divining Syria's Future

  Journal of democracy · 2025-03-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: When rebel forces seized Damascus on 8 December 2024, toppling the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Syrians were presented with another chance at democracy after decades. If the current moment provides Syrians the opportunity to revive the efforts of their forefathers, the risk of disappointment remains considerable. Syria's poverty and its hostile neighborhood further complicate democratic consolidation. The ascension to the presidency of Ahmad al-Sharaa, commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of Syria, or HTS), raises concerns due to his past authoritarian practices and uncertain democratic commitments. Despite these challenges, it is impossible not to have at least a sliver of faith in Syrians' capacity to finally achieve democracy.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2022-07-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A large body of literature highlights the importance of structural prerequisites or contextual factors for ensuring democracy’s emergence and survival. These include economic development, macroeconomic performance, state capacity, religious and ethnolinguistic homogeneity, democratic cultures, and the existence of democratic neighbors and international patrons. And yet, history provides numerous examples of democracies that have persisted in the absence of these things. Chapter 1 analyzes the correlates of democratic survival for third-wave democracies and finds that structural factors cannot account for several long-lived democracies that have emerged since the mid-1970s. The “hard” cases of Argentina, Benin, Timor-Leste, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine show that contextual factors may facilitate democracy, but they do not fully determine its endurance. Instead, the introduction and the chapters that follow it illustrate that democratic survival depends on the constraints that important political actors, such as political parties and militaries, face. These constraints may be external, in the form of institutions and the countervailing power of other actors, but in many cases they are internal, in the form of deeply ingrained commitments to democracy that cause actors to prioritize it over other desiderata.

  PublisherDOI

• Cancel Tocqueville?

  Journal of democracy · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Islam and Islamism

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract Studies on political Islam have evolved greatly, far outpacing how many other comparative political scientists treat religion in politics. Well before the Arab uprisings, MENA specialists were already making substantive contributions to inquiries about how the sphere of religion interacted with the politics of governance, mobilization, and identity. This chapter examines popular hypotheses that Islam facilitates the persistence of authoritarian regimes over democratic ones, either by inculcating antidemocratic political values and/or explicit preferences for authoritarianism in Muslims or simply because Muslims vote for Islamist political parties. It then turns to the scholarship on Islam and political violence, and specifically addresses debates over the role of Salafi-jihadism in inspiring violence. Finally, the chapter shows how political shifts in the MENA region have opened up new areas of research on the role of religion and religious political actors in multiple sectors of politics.

  PublisherDOI

• The Arab Spring at 10: Kings or People?

  Journal of democracy · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Ten years after the onset of the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa are torn between two visions of progress: a democratic one that seeks to replace the leaders who dominate the region, and an ostensibly modernizing one that seeks to replace the people who inhabit it. Though the latter project is currently ascendant, it is likely to founder on its own internal contradictions. Arab publics may be ambivalent about democracy, but the region retains considerable democratic potential.

  PublisherDOI

• The Prince

  Journal of democracy · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Prince Tarek Masoud (bio) MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman. By Ben Hubbard. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2020. 384 pp. Is there any less promising terrain for the emergence of liberal, democratic government than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Debates rage over the precise alchemy that transforms dictatorships into democracies, but whatever one's preferred ingredient, Saudi Arabia is almost sure to be bereft of it. The country's history is entirely authoritarian, its people denied even the barest hint of political participation. The Kingdom's performance on the Polity IV Index—a common measure of a country's degree of democracy—is impressive in its dismal consistency: Saudi Arabia has earned the lowest possible score every year since 1946 (the first year for which data are available), a feat unmatched even by tyrannies such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Hafez al-Assad's Syria, or Kim Il Sung's North Korea.1 Culturally, Saudi Arabia is tribal, patriarchal, and religiously conservative—characteristics ideally suited to the maintenance of absolute monarchy. Autocracy is even encoded into the Saudi economic formula, in which the ruling elite draws liquid from the ground, sells it to foreigners, and uses the resulting windfall to buy off would-be dissenters and to acquire implements of violence to deploy against those who cannot be bought. If all that were not enough, the Kingdom's peculiarly premodern form of government has been sustained by a geopolitical bargain with the world's most powerful democracies, which offer protection and support in exchange for uninterrupted access to the elixir that flows beneath the sands. Given the obstacles arrayed against it, how might the political emancipation of Saudis ever be achieved? If this question had been posed prior to 2 October 2018, one could have been forgiven for pointing to Mohammed bin Salman, the 34-year-old heir to his country's throne and, as the New York Times's Ben Hubbard reports in his penetrating new biography, the [End Page 172] real power behind it. When the crown prince—known in the West by his initials, MBS—burst onto the scene, he seemed to many (including the author of these lines) to be the deliverer that the Kingdom had long needed. No one, of course, thought that the man was a democrat, but he presented himself—and was presented to us by the likes of the Washington Post's David Ignatius and the New York Times's Thomas Friedman—as a modernizer in the tradition of Japan's Emperor Meiji and Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In this telling, MBS was a farsighted leader who recognized the need to liberate his country from both its addiction to oil and the shackles of old-time religion. To read MBS's "Vision 2030"—the national economic and social roadmap he put forward in 2016 (with the help of a passel of high-priced McKinsey consultants)—was to catch a glimpse of a Saudi Arabia that might one day be a candidate, if not for democracy, then for more participatory, inclusive governance than it had hitherto enjoyed. In addition to promising "a vibrant society," "a thriving economy," and "a tolerant country," MBS pledged to "adopt wide-ranging transparency and accountability reforms," and to "be transparent and open about our failures as well as our successes."2 This was not language one was accustomed to hearing from the leaders of that most absolute of absolute monarchies. With the talk came action. The same month that Vision 2030 was announced, a law was passed weakening Saudi Arabia's feared Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—a force of religious zealots primarily responsible for shuttering shops during prayer times, harassing women whose appearance they deemed improper, and generally cowing people into conformity with their cramped conception of the faith. "With a single royal decree," Hubbard writes, "MBS had defanged the clerics, clearing the way for vast changes they most certainly would have opposed" (p. 63). Nowhere was the prince's commitment to "unlinking the clerics from the monarchy" (p. 279) more evident than in his efforts to challenge the country's clerically sanctioned edifice...

  PublisherDOI

• ab.tab

  Harvard Dataverse · 2019-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  Arab Barometer data

  PublisherDOI

• Not Ready for Democracy

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Comparing Egypt and Tunisia, Tarek Masoud argues that the distinctive make-ups and strengths of civil society in those two countries explain why their transitions took different paths. He dismisses previous arguments about the role of the army or the democratic commitment of politicians, arguing instead that Tunisian civil society was stronger and had a less pronounced religious coloration than Egypt’s, with the result that its secular politicians could easily acquire a substantial political base, leading to more balanced electoral results. As no single party or camp had hegemony, leading politicians were forced to make the necessary political compromises. Masoud then builds on this conclusion to suggest a more structural argument: that the greater economic development, industrialization and urbanization of Tunisia explains why its civil society had those specific features that Egypt’s lacked.

  PublisherDOI

• Codebook.pdf

  Harvard Dataverse · 2019-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  Description of variables in each dataset

  PublisherDOI

• replicationAJPS.R

  Harvard Dataverse · 2019-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  Replication code

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kathleen Thelen

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  64 shared

• Sheri Berman

  64 shared

• Kathleen Thelen Is Ford

  University of Iowa

  64 shared

• Sara McLaughlin Mitchell

  University of Iowa

  64 shared

• Luis Ricardo Fraga

  64 shared

• Christopher Gelpi

  The Ohio State University

  64 shared

• Jason Brownlee

  The University of Texas at Austin

  13 shared

• Elizabeth R. Nugent

  12 shared

Awards & honors

• 2009 Carnegie Scholar