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Since the onset of the "third wave" of democratization in the mid-1970s, the world has seen a significant increase in the number of countries governed by democratic regimes. By the end of the 1990s, such regimes guided the lives of more than half of the world's population.1 In the Arab world, however, the impact of this political revolution has been limited.
The 1980s and early 1990s did witness halting moves toward democratization in some Arab-majority countries, when a number of Arab governments-confronted with popular anger fueled by poor economic conditions, official corruption, and human rights abuses-enacted programs of political liberalization. Yet for the most part, such reforms were designed as part of a containment strategy aiming to increase regime legitimacy at a time when calls for political change were increasingly intense and widespread. Not surprisingly given their strategic purpose, most of these democratic experiments were slowed or even abandoned during the 1990s. As Lisa Anderson wrote in 1999, the Arab political landscape was soon littered with "the remnants of so many of the democratic experiments-from the spectacular crash and burn of Algeria's liberalization to Tunisia's more subtle but no less profound transformation into a police state, from Egypt's backsliding into electoral manipulation [and repression of Islamic movements] to the reluctance of Palestinian authorities to embrace human rights."2
The last few years have once again brought political reform in some Arab societies-among these are Bahrain, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, and, to a lesser extent, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Palestine. Although progress for the most part has been tentative and partial, it is possible to have a meaningful debate about whether the glass of democracy is half full or half empty in some of these countries. On balance, however, despite progress in selected cases, the depressing description of the region offered by Anderson at the end of the last decade remains generally accurate.
According to Freedom House's 2004 Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, not one of the Arab League's 22 member states is fully Free, and only seven of them are Partly Free. In her January 2004 Comparative Politics essay introducing a series of articles on the resilient and enduring nature of authoritarianism in the Arab world, Marsha Pripstein Posusney concluded that "these articles leave little...