No abstract

Not long ago, two safe generalizations could be made about the Gulf monarchies: ruling families dominated their politics, and oil dominated their economies. In recent years that has begun to change. In Kuwait the parliament challenges the political predominance of the ruling family. Meanwhile, Dubai and, increasingly, the other emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have made real progress in diversifying their economies away from oil—at least until the recent economic crisis. Yet political liberalization and economic diversification have not gone hand in hand: Kuwait's economy remains dependent on oil, and the United Arab Emirates remains resolutely authoritarian. This is no accident. Kuwait's high level of political participation encourages its dependence on oil while the UAE's economic diversification requires a lack of political participation by citizens. The reasons for this are specific to the peculiar political economy of these labor markets: in these richest of rentier-states, there is little need for the class compromise between capitalists and workers on which capitalist democracy usually rests.

In very rich rentier-states, such as Kuwait, citizens have a smaller immediate stake in the success of the nonoil economy than do citizens in nonrentier economies. This is because the nonoil sector does not pay much in the way of taxes, nor does it employ many citizens. For the most part, citizens work for the state or state-owned enterprises, and their paychecks are ultimately funded by oil revenues. Foreigners dominate private-sector employment. Kuwait's parliament—by far the strongest in the Gulf—reflects the interests of citizen employees of the state and is widely seen as an obstacle to private-sector growth. In the United Arab Emirates, by contrast, citizens have little political voice. Public policy instead reflects the interests of capitalists (especially ruling families) in the development of a diversified economy.

No abstract

Several Arab monarchies have held reasonably free elections to parliaments, though all remain authoritarian. This article compares the Arab monarchies with parliaments in other parts of the world, including both those that became democracies, and those that did not. From this I derive a set of prerequisites, potential pitfalls, and expected stages in the monarchical path toward democracy. This helps us to understand not only the democratic potential of the parliamentary experiments in the Arab monarchies, but also the role these parliaments play in the political life of these authoritarian regimes.