What the World’s Middle Classes Are Really Protesting

Still-smoldering protests from Egypt to Brazil have set off a race among scholars and journalists to identify the roots of this summer of discontent in the emerging world. Each major theory starts at the bottom, with the protesters on the street, and notes a common thread: young, Twitter-savvy members of a rising middle class. In this telling, the protests represent the perils of success, as growing wealth creates a class of people who have the time and financial wherewithal to demand from their leaders even more prosperity, and political freedom as well.

This is a plausible story, often well told. Yet it is a bit too familiar to be fully persuasive. The middle class has indeed been at the vanguard of protests since the French Revolution. It has played an important role in Turkey, Brazil and Egypt since May and in earlier outbreaks of unrest in a half-dozen other emerging countries since 2011. But bourgeois rage can only explain so much. The middle class has been rising for many decades; in the last 10 years, rapid economic growth has spread with rare uniformity across most nations in the emerging world. So why are protests erupting now, and in only a scattered selection of emerging countries?