Content area
Full Text
This article seeks to uncover the idiosyncrasies of democracy and democratization in the Middle East. Based on the existing literature, it utilizes variables such as internationalization of national economies, Islam, Arab culture, subordination of women, economic development, education, elites' efforts at maintaining control, oil, and political institutions in its empirical investigation. This article also analyzes the new trends of democracy in the region that began with the Arab Spring in December 2010 and questions how this recent wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East and its aftermath can contribute to the understanding of democracy and democratization in the region.
INTRODUCTION
Why does the Middle East lag behind the global trend of democratization? This has been the central question that scholars and policy analysts working on the Middle East have had to tackle for decades. The so-called third wave of democratization that began in 1970s doubled the number of democracies in the world by the 1990s. It spread all around Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, as well as Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe. However, the Middle East was left out of this trend.
Because authoritarianism has persisted in the region, scholars have spilled considerable ink on the question of why the Middle East has remained stubbornly resistant to democracy. Despite the lack of satisfactory explanations, a huge body of scholarship has developed. Marsha Pripstein Posusney (2005, 3) outlines how the literature on democratization can be evaluated under two main categories: "...the 'prerequisites' school, whose arguments posit economic, cultural, or institutional necessities for transitions from authoritarianism to begin; and the 'transitions' paradigm, which sees democratization as a contingent choice of regime and opposition actors that can occur under a variety of socioeconomic and cultural conditions."
Since 2011 the Arab World has experienced various changes. On December 17, 2010, the young fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest police harassment in the town of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. As the fire of protest swept through the Middle East and North Africa, some of the authoritarian regimes in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen were ousted. The uprisings generated some forms of repression and/or civil war in Syria and Bahrain; they also led to limited reforms in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the...