This paper addresses the question of how service delivery (SD) affects state legitimacy (SL) and conflict (C) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, drawing particularly on frameworks that move beyond a state-centric approach. Focusing on the majority-Arab countries of MENA, the paper aims to: (1) offer a preliminary explanation of the distinctiveness of this region in light of some of the main findings of the introductory paper by the lead guest editor Timo Kivimäki and (2) explore the potential of a social policy perspective in explaining the relationship between SD, SL and C. This is achieved by combining research insights acquired through extensive qualitative social policy research in the MENA region with a re-reading of the existing literature on SD, SL and C. To support a comprehensive re-examination of the issues at hand, the paper also draws on the 5th Wave of the Arab Barometer micro-level survey (ABS) on Arab citizen perceptions of socio-economic conditions in their countries and macro-level social welfare expenditure data from the World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI). By bringing insights from the social policy literature on the MENA region into conversation with broader research on the relationship between SD, SL and C, we identify several distinctive features of service delivery in the MENA context and examine their implications for state legitimacy and conflict.

Informal employment has long been a feature of Arab economies and as such, better understanding of the political participation of informal workers is important, especially given their involvement in social uprisings, such as during the Arab Spring in 2011. This paper tests for the first time the impact of informality of labour on political participation in five Arab countries: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. By using the European Union’s 2015–2016 SAHWA survey and logistic regression models, we are able to show evidence of an association between political participation and informality through the negative impact of the latter on four indicators of political participation: affiliation to political parties/movements; frequency of participation in political activities; frequency of speaking about politics; and voting in elections. Furthermore, the paper confirms that age, gender and education are significant predictors of political participation in the countries analysed. We argue that these findings have relevant policy implications.