The prevalence of authorit-arianism in the Middle East and North Africa should not be attributed to these states' lack of necessary prerequisites for democracy, but to their exceptionally strong coercive apparatuses that actively inhibit the development of representative government, Harvard University professor Eva Bellin said.
Middle Eastern and North African states have such exceptionally strong authoritarian mechanisms in part because of their unusual wealth derived from oil and gas rents. By contrast, the agencies enforcing authoritarian governments in a number of sub-Saharan African nations fell apart largely because they were poorly funded.
Across the globe, nations spend on average about 2.7 percent of their budgets on law enforcement. Middle Eastern and North African nations spend about seven percent funding these institutions. In Saudi Arabia, law enforcement spending reaches 14 percent.
The coercive institutions of many Middle Eastern countries have also benefited from unusually high levels of support from other nations.
They have received such high amounts of international support because many Western countries are strongly interested in ensuring that they can safely import Middle Eastern oil. Western countries have also lent their support to Middle Eastern regimes in order to prevent radical Islamists from gaining power.
After the speech, an audience member of Syrian descent brought up the point that Western states may have lent strong support to authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes that have been willing to make peace with Israel.
Their coercive apparatuses are also robust because of the highly patrimonial nature of their military and security institutions, and the weakness of popular movements that might rise to challenge authoritarian regimes.
Several audience members challenged her model because specific countries did not seem to fit well within it.
For example, one student argued that several fairly robust Middle Eastern and North African popular movements fought successfully against colonialism, including Moroccan movements in the 1930s and Algerians in the early 1990s.
Bellin qualified her argument, though, by stating that her model is only intended to explain the prevalence of authoritarianism within the Middle East and North Africa as a broad region, not to account for any individual authoritarian regime.
The picture becomes "more textured" when one accounts for the histories and particular conditions within any individual country, she said.
Bellin also discounted some commonly cited explanations for the singular robustness of Middle Eastern authoritarianism.
For example, she does not believe that the prevalence of Islam, a religion which is seen by some as inherently hostile to democracy, can single-handedly account for Middle Eastern authoritarianism.
She noted that various scholars have said the same thing about religions ranging from Catholicism to Confucianism. Nonetheless, diverse voices and traditions exist within every religion, some of which are much more or less compatible with democracy than others.
There are several Muslim countries outside the Middle East, including Bangladesh and Indonesia, which do have more democratic governments by comparison.
Likewise, some scholars have blamed the Middle East's physical isolation from Europe and the United States for its failure to democratize, yet this geographical problem seems not to have prevented countries in sub-Saharan Africa from successfully establishing democracies.
