Why Are Some Authoritarian Regimes More Likely to Fail? Parliamentary Clientelism and Regime Breakdown in the Arab World (original) (raw)

Abstract

Why do authoritarian legislatures support regime durability? Existing literature utilizes country-level or case study data, but lacks detailed, within-country evidence on rent distribution to citizens which is needed to understand why authoritarian legislatures support regime durability. Drawing on original surveys from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Jordan conducted 2007-2014, this paper shows that institutional setting and resource endowments systematically shape parliamentarian-citizen linkages and have implications for regime stability. Socially-embedded, personalistic linkages are more common in monarchies and oil rich economies than resource-poor and single-party dominant regimes. Yet, non-personalistic linkages are less effective than personalistic linkages in fostering government satisfaction. By empirically demonstrating variation in the social embeddedness of rent distribution and its impact on citizens’ attitudes, this paper extends literature on political clientelism, authoritarian institutions, and regime breakdown and helps explain why resource-poor, single-party dominant regimes (i.e., Tunisia, Egypt) were vulnerable to regime challenges during the Arab spring.

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