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ID:
132976
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Political scientists have been caught by surprise by some of the world's most dramatic political transformations. To assess how the discipline fared in explaining two of the most large-scale and unexpected developments of the past decades, we compare scholarship around the time of popular mobilization in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Arab world in 2011. We argue that while scholars cannot be expected to predict utterly extraordinary events such as revolutions and mass mobilization, in these two cases disciplinary trends left scholars ill-prepared to explain them. Political scientists used similar paradigms to study both regions, emphasizing their failure to develop politically and economically along the lines of Western Europe and the United States. Sovietologists tended to study the communist bloc as either anomalously totalitarian or modernizing towards "convergence" with the West. Likewise, political scientists studying the Arab world focused disproportionately on the prospects for democratization or the barriers to it, and they now risk treating the 2011 protest movements essentially as non-events if they are not clearly tied to institutional democratic reform. By broadening their research agendas beyond a focus on regime type, political scientists will be better prepared to understand future changes in the Middle East and elsewhere.
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| 2 |
ID:
163230
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| Summary/Abstract |
The literature maintains that oil creates a curse on development in countries with weak national institutions at oil discovery, but offers little guidance on the specific institutions that help leaders avoid the curse. We trace rent distribution in Kuwait and Oman, apparent outliers that experienced development despite their weak national institutions at oil discovery. Unlike other examples of the oil curse, Kuwait and Oman contained a strong informal institution that compelled rulers to spend oil revenues on human development: a balance of power between leaders and their domestic rivals. Because informal balances of power are also present in countries with strong formal institutions that avoid the oil curse, this article suggests that the presence or absence of informal balances of power may help account for whether oil is a blessing or a curse.
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| 3 |
ID:
142169
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| Summary/Abstract |
In July 2013, the cover of Time magazine announced that Egypt has both the world's “best protesters” and “worst democrats.”1 In the same month, the cover of The Economist asked, “Has the Arab Spring failed?”2 The media oscillated between euphoria over the democratic potential of “Facebook revolutions” and dismissal (or even gloating) when they did not seem to pan out. This response to the Arab uprisings is part of a broader trend. Popular accounts of mass uprisings tend to label them neatly by color (orange, green, rose) or season (spring, winter). They give an oversimplified portrait of mass mobilization as teleological: Protests are “successful” if they quickly bring about a stable democracy, and “failed” if they do not. This is often matched by a fascination over whether protesters are “like us” — by their use of social media, rejection of extremism, embrace of Europe and free markets, or hatred of dictatorship. Indeed, debates about the success or failure of mass uprisings often reflect a problematic obsession with the question of whether protesters are “ready for democracy.”
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