Why are there no arab democracies?

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 93-104

  Diamond, Larry ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77249103556     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. By "Middle East" I mean the 19 states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). When I refer to the Arab world I mean the 16 Arab states of this region, namely Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
2. There are 22 members of the Arab League, though one of them (Palestine) is not yet a state. Of the other 21, five are better analyzed within the context of sub-Saharan Africa: Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, Somalia, and Sudan. Of these, Comoros is the only democracy today. Mauritania was briefly a democracy not long ago, and Sudan has seen two failed democratization attempts.
3. Alfred Stepan and Graeme B. Robertson, "An 'Arab' More Than a 'Muslim' Democracy Gap," Journal of Democracy 14 (July 2003): 30-44.
4. The eight democracies are Albania, Bangladesh, Comoros, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Turkey.
5. Of the 47 countries that Stepan and Robertson list as Muslim-majority, I exclude from my analysis only Nigeria, where no one really knows what the overall population is or what the balance is between religious groups. And I have included two countries (Brunei and Maldives) for which they did not have data.
6. Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Culture (Washington, D.C: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992), 5-6.
7. We have documented these broad levels of support in numerous Journal of Democracy articles over the past decade, some of which were recently gathered together in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, How People View Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
8. Mark Tessler and Eleanor Gao, "Gauging Arab Support for Democracy," Journal of Democracy 16 (July 2005): 82-97, and
9. Amaney Jamal and Mark Tessler, "The Democracy Barometers: Attitudes in the Arab World," Journal of Democracy 19 (January 2008): 97-110.
10. Jamal and Tessler, "Attitudes in the Arab World," 101.
11. Jamal and Tessler, "Attitudes in the Arab World," 102.
12. See for example the Table in Tessler and Gao, "Gauging Arab Support for Democracy," 91.
13. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 65.
14. Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5-6, 15-17, 213-21, and 236-242
15. The most heavily oil-endowed Arab countries are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Libya, and Algeria, in that order. Saudi Arabia has the world's largest set of proven oil reserves at about 267 billion barrels, or nearly 20 percent of the world total. Nearby Iran ranks third in the world with roughly 140 billion barrels of proven reserves.
16. Eva Bellin, "Coercive Institutions and Coercive Leaders," in Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michele Penner Angrist, eds., Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 31. Middle Eastern countries spent on average 6.7 percent of GNP on defense in 2000, compared to a global average of 3.8 percent. Bellin sees Arab regimes in the Middle East as being unusually "robust," in that they are "exceptionally able and willing to crush reform initiatives from below" (p. 27). But this is true of many authoritarian regimes. Arab autocracies have also proven more supple and adept than others.
17. Daniel Brumberg, "Democratization in the Arab World? The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy," Journal of Democracy 13 (October 2002): 56.
18. Michele Dunne and Marina Ottaway, "Incumbent Regimes and the 'King's Dilemma' in the Arab World: Promise and Threat of Managed Reform," in Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy, eds., Getting to Pluralism: Political Actors in the Arab World (Washington, D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009): 13-40.
19. Julia Choucair, "Illusive Reform: Jordan's Stubborn Stability," Carnegie Papers No. 76, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2006, 7. Available at www.carnegieendowment. org/fileslcp76-chou-cair-final.pdf
20. Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy, "Fighting on Two Fronts: Secular Parties in the Arab World," in Ottaway and Hamzawy, Getting to Pluralism, 41.
21. See www.usaid.gov/our-work/features/egypt
22. Sean Yom, "Jordan: Ten More Years of Autocracy," Journal of Democracy 20 (October 2009): 163.
23. Huntington, Third Wave, 102.