(Hoover Institution) Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo - We would like to say that democracy is coming to the Middle East and North Africa, but there are good reasons to curb our optimism. It is one thing to force a tyrant from the presidential palace. It is quite another to create a durable democratic political system. The states that make up the Middle East and North Africa are among the world's oldest - and have persistently settled into patterns of autocratic rule since their creation. The fact that protestors are demanding both democracy and economic opportunity provides an important clue as to why the region tends to converge on non-democratic political systems. Briefly stated, societies that are characterized by extreme inequality tend not to provide fertile ground for representative political institutions. Research that we are conducting on the long-run determinants of democratic and autocratic political systems suggests that social structures are the outcomes of long historical processes; they are not created by the stroke of a pen.
2011-04-08 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive