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2 The Discreet Appeal of Authoritarianism Political Bargains and Stability of Liberal Authoritarian Regimes in the Middle East Agnieszka Paczynska The liberal authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remain in power despite numerous internal and external crises. On more than one occasion, scholars and policymakers alike have anticipated that the region was on the verge of turning a corner on the road to democracy. Time and time again, these expectations have been dashed. The region’s ruling elites have proven very adept at adjusting to new political and economic circumstances and ensuring their survival. In recent years, there has been growing interest among Middle East specialists in explaining this regime resilience and in more explicitly connecting the politics of the region to comparative political theorizing about the processes of change.1 These studies have generated new insights into the political dynamics of the region and have sought to explain the persistence of Middle Eastern authoritarianism through the available theoretical lenses of comparative political studies while shedding new light on these comparative theoretical approaches. This chapter contributes to these debates by exploring how relationships between regimes and opposition groups have augmented the ability of regimes to successfully maneuver through politically challenging times. This chapter explores some of the reasons for the resilience of liberal authoritarian regimes. Using Daniel Brumberg’s (2003) classifications, these regimes include Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, and, to a lesser extent, Yemen. The region’s regimes have benefited from a number of structural features and tactical decisions. Rents and external financial support from abroad, combined with the lack of serious pressure from Western donors to implement democratic reforms, have provided regimes with the resources that have facilitated their retention of control over political life. The regimes have also benefited from the type of oppositions they have faced. In countries that allow the formation of political parties, secular political parties tend to be small, elite based, and often fragmented. Islamist parties, on the other hand, have been Political Bargains and Stability of Liberal Authoritarian Regimes / 35 better organized, but they remain illegal in many countries. Meanwhile, civil society organizations, although their numbers have grown in recent years, tend to represent particularistic interests and are not well placed to represent broad social coalitions. Regimes have been especially skillful at employing divide-and-rule tactics when dealing with the opposition, making alliances across ideological divides difficult to form. Simultaneously, the regimes have frequently struck political bargains with important social groups that might otherwise have challenged the regimes’ political position. By striking these bargains and meeting some of the key demands of these social groups, the regimes have neutralized them politically. It was initially thought that the recent wave of market reforms would foster the growth of an independent private sector that would facilitate the path toward democratization; contrary to initial expectations, those reforms have often had the opposite effect. They have strengthened rather than weakened the regimes’ ability to strike bargains with potential opponents and to distribute resources and patronage. Democracy and the Middle East Beginning in the 1970s, countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia began discarding autocratic regimes (Huntington 1993). During this time, and especially since the 1980s, Middle Eastern and North African states also experimented with political liberalization. Larbi Sadiki points out: “Between 1985 and 1996 the Arab world has experienced more than twenty pluralistic or multiparty parliamentary elections, twice the number that took place in the entire preceding period since the early 1960s” (2000: 71). Unlike in other parts of the world, however, these political liberalization experiments did not result in the establishment of democratic systems. Analysts working on the MENA have proposed varied explanations for the lack of democracy in the region. Some argue that Islam is particularly inhospitable to democracy (Kedourie 1994).2 Others point to the rentier nature of the region’s economies as the primary cause behind the prevalence of authoritarian regimes. Some note the robustness of the security apparatus in the MENA region that has allowed regimes here to more effectively repress and suppress dissenting voices, as well as the lack of foreign patron pressure to limit the deployment of repression against dissenters.3 Yet others note that the Middle East is characterized by weak civil society, low educational levels, high poverty levels, and continuing heavy state involvement in the economy, all factors that, as various studies on patterns of democratization indicate, may hinder the establishment of pluralist political systems (see Brynen, Korany...

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