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The collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by the spread of democracy, advancement in human rights, and the introduction of market reforms throughout the world. The Middle East has been no exception to this trend. There, in response to mounting economic crises and domestic pressures, several governments introduced democratic and economic reforms. This article investigates the progress that Middle East states have made on the path to political liberalization. In particular, it explores whether democratic reforms vary between regional republics and monarchies. To do so, the study analyzes patterns and trends associated with the distribution of political authority and human rights. The article employs five dimensions in this process, including electoral procedural democracy, liberal democracy, personal integrity rights, subsistence rights, and economic freedom. On the one hand, our findings comport with the view that Middle East states have not made significant progress toward institutionalizing procedural democracy and civil liberties. On the other, they lend support to the notion that liberalization is occurring in the region, particularly among monarchies.
Notes
1. Seymour M. Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 53, No. March (1959), pp. 85–6.
2. David Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: The Free Press, 1968).
3. Tatu Vanhanen, Prospects for Democracy: A Study of 172 Countries (New York: Routledge, 1997).
4. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Will More Countries Become More Democratic?’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 99, No. 2 (1984), p. 199. Louay Bahry, ‘Elections in Qatar’, Middle East Policy, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1999).
5. John Esposito, and James P. Piscatori, ‘Democratization and Islam’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3 (1991), pp. 427–40; Saad Eddin Ibrahim, ‘Crises, Elites, and Democratization in the Middle East’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1993), pp. 292–305; Muhammad Muslih and Augustus Richard Norton, ‘The Need for Arab Democracy’, Foreign Policy, Vol. 83, No. 2 (1991), pp. 3–19; Augustus Richard Norton, ‘The Future of Civil Society in the Middle East’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1993), pp. 227–44; Alan Richards, ‘Economic Imperatives and Political Systems’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, (1993), pp. 217–27; Alan Richards, ‘Economic Roots of Instability in the Middle East’, Middle East Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1995), pp. 175–87; Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Larbi Sadiki, ‘Towards Arab Liberal Governance: From Democracy of Bread to Democracy of the Vote’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1994), pp. 127–48.
6. Michael L. Ross, ‘Does Oil Hinder Democracy?’, World Politics, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2001), pp. 325–61; Giacomo Luciani, ‘The Oil Rent, the Fiscal Crisis of the State, and Democratization’, in Gassan Salame (ed.), Democracy without Democrats: The Renewal of Politics in the Islamic World (London I. B. Tauris, 1994). Ross does show very well that certain states seem to are less likely to experience disallow democratization where oil revenue is a significant contributor. However, he does so by comparing those rentier states in the Middle East to non-oil-producing states in the West. This is problematic due to the dramatic contrasts in cases. Our argument gives greater clarity to the effects of oil production primarily because the study is an MSS analysis of states in a particular region. The primary difference between these states is the type of government. Thus, this study should allow for a more enhanced understanding of oil's impact on states of the Middle East.
7. Bahgat Korany, ‘Arab Democratization: A Poor Cousin?’, Political Science and Politics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1994), pp. 511–13.
8. Jill Crystal, ‘Coalitions in Oil Monarchies’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 21, Vol. 4 (1989), pp. 427–43.
9. Lipset (note 1), p. 86.
10. Barry Rubin, ‘The Military in Contemporary Middle East Politics’, in Barry Rubin, and Thomas Keaney (eds), Armed Forces in the Middle East: Politics and Strategy (London: Frank Cass, 2002).
11. Lisa Anderson, ‘Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, No. 1 (1991), p. 2.
12. Ibid. p. 4.
13. Michael Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
14. Richards and Waterbury (note 5).
15. Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); Richards and Waterbury (note 5).
16. Ellen Lust-Okar and Amaney Ahmad Jamal, ‘Rulers and Rules: Reassessing the Influence of Regime Type on Electoral Law Formation’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2002), pp. 352–55.
17. Donna E. Arzt, ‘The Application of International Human Rights Law in Islamic States’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1990), p. 6. Jack Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Conceptions of Human Rights’, in Frederick E. Snyder and Surakiat Sathirathai (eds), Third World Attitudes to International Law (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 341–57; Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 2, (1993), p. 22; Bernard Lewis, ‘Islam and Liberal Democracy’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 271, No. 2 (1993), pp. 89–98; Ann E. Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 45–50; Bassem Tibie, ‘Islamic Law/Shari'a, Human Rights, Universal Morality, and International Relations’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1994), p. 289; R. J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
18. Abd Allah Ahmad al-Na'im, ‘Human Rights in the Arab World: A Regional Perspective’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2001), pp. 701–32; Ibrahim Awad, ‘The External Relations of the Arab Human Rights Movement’, Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1997), pp. 59–77; Jill Crystal, ‘The Human Rights Movement in the Arab World’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1994), pp. 435–54.
19. Daniel Brumberg, ‘The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2002), pp. 56–68.
20. Raymond Hinnebusch, ‘Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East: An Overview and Critique’, Democratization, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2006), pp. 373–95.
21. Carsten Q. Schneider and Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘Liberalization, Transition and Consolidation: Measuring the Components of Democratization’, Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5 (2004), pp. 59–90.
22. Michael Herb, ‘Princes and Parliaments in the Arab World’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 58, No. 3 (2004), pp. 367–84.
23. Polity IV Project 2004. Country Report Data. www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/.
24. Freedom House, Freedom in the World Country Ratings 1972–2003, www.freedomhouse.org; Reporters Without Borders, Press Freedom Index 2005, www.rsf.org.
25. Gibney and Dalton's Political Terror Scale, http://www.unca.edu/politicalscience/images/Colloquium/faculty-staff/gibney.html
26. United Nations Human Development Report, http://hdr.undp.org/en/; World Bank Development Indicators, www.worldbank.org.
27. The Heritage Foundation, Economic Freedom Index 2006, www.heritage.org.
28. Polity IV does not provide scores for Lebanon and Palestine.
29. This model was first introduced by Stephen Lohse as part of his Master's thesis, and was further developed by Sahliyeh and Lohse. For more details, see Stephen Lohse, ‘US Foreign Assistance and Democracy in Central America: Quantitative Evaluation of US Policy, 1946 through 1994’, MSc thesis, University of North Texas, 1996; Emile Sahliyeh and Stephen Lohse, ‘Measuring Political Authority in the Arab World’, Paper presented at the Middle East Annual Meeting, San Francisco, November 2001.
30. Lohse (note 29), p. 5.
31. Sahliyeh and Lohse (note 29), p. 7.
32. Lohse (note 29), p. 9.
33. Sahliyeh and Lohse (note 29), p. 8.
34. For a more in-depth discussion on the benefits of the Press Freedom Survey created by Reporters Without Borders, see Christina Holtz-Bacha's conference paper, ‘The Difficulty in Measuring Freedom of the Press Worldwide’, presented at Institut fur Publizistik, Johannes Gutenburg-Universitat, July 2004.
35. Christina Holtz-Bacha, ‘The Difficulty in Measuring Freedom of the Press Worldwide’, Paper presented at the 2004 conference of the International Association for the Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), Porto, Alegre, Brazil, July 2004, p. 10.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. The definitions for levels of repression in this paragraph are quoted from Mark Gibney's web page (note 25). For a complete definition of the categories of political terror, see Mark Gibney and Matthew Dalton, ‘The Political Terror Scale’, Policy Studies and Developing Nations, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1996), pp. 73–84.
39. Note the following: a) For Elite Accord (1–10), higher values indicate a more open political process; b) for Mass Accommodation (1–16), higher values indicate a more competitive electoral process with executive accountability, c) for Democracy (1–26), higher values indicate a more democratic environment, d) for Civil Liberties (1–7), lower values indicate better performance on civil liberties, e) for Press Freedom (1–100), lower values indicate better performance on press freedom, f) for HDI (0–1), higher values indicate better performance on subsistence rights, g) for Repression (1–5), lower values indicate better performance on personal integrity rights, h) for Economic Freedom (1–5), higher Economic Freedom Index values indicate poorer performance on protectionist policies.
40. The mean scores weight countries equally – they are not population-weighted.
41. Ted Gurr, ‘A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (1968), pp. 1104–24. Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
42. Lipset (note 1); Zehra F. Arat, ‘Democracy and Economic Development: Modernization Theory Revisited’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1988), pp. 21–36.
43. Richard M. Merelman, ‘Learning and Legitimacy’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 60, No. 3 (1966), pp. 869–79.
44. Inglehart (note 41).
45. Gregory F. Gause III, Oil Monarchies. Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1994).
46. Rubin (note 10).
47. Ibid.
48. Lust-Okar and Ahmad Jamal (note 16).
49. Rubin (note 10).
50. Hudson (note 13).
51. Gause (note 45), p. 25.
52. Richards and Waterbury (note 5).
53. As Lipset (note 1) argues, the ‘existence of deviant cases cannot be the sole basis for rejecting the hypothesis. A deviant case, considered within a context which marshals the evidence on all relevant cases, often may actually strengthen the basic hypothesis if an intensive study of it reveals the special conditions which prevented the usual relationship from appearing’ (p. 70).
54. Lust-Okar and Ahmad Jamal (note 16).
55. Ibid.
56. Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘Modes of Transition and Types of Democracy in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe’, Paper presented at a workshop on The Transition to Democracy, Washington DC, National Academy of Sciences, October 1990; Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle, ‘Popular Protest and Political Reform in Africa’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1992), pp. 453–89.
57. Bratton and Van de Walle (note 56).
58. Ibid.
59. Rubin (note 10).
60. Oksana Antonenko, ‘Russia's Military Involvement with the Middle East’, in Rubin and Keaney (note 10), pp.; James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics in the Middle East (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishers, 2000), pp. 68–92.
61. Bill and Springborg (note 60).
62. Ibid.
63. Hinnebusch (note 20).