The late Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." To this day, the governments of the Arab World are still primarily dabbling in the latter. To understand why, an ambitious research project was launched by the American University of Beirut's professor Samir Makdisi and the Dubai Economic Council's Ibrahim ElBadawi, resulting in a new book, entitled "Democracy in the Arab World: Explaining the Deficit" (Routledge; 331 pages; $78.60), which comprises their own work alongside 18 renowned scholars.
Funded by a $339,000 grant from the Canadian International Development and Research Center (IDRC), the three-year research project employs a double-pronged approach to the issue of why the Arab World has been so slow to embrace true representative government.
Firstly, Makdisi, ElBedawi and World Bank Economist Gary Milante develop their own cross-country model (EMM model) by testing various elements specific to the Arab region with the objective of identifying which of them explain the persisting Arab " democracy deficit" despite the region's notable socio-economic development in the past 5 to 6 decades. Among others, these elements include regional wars, oil rents, religion and colonial history—something the researchers coin as the 'Arab Dummy' variable.
The three scholars then run econometric regressions within these parameters using a variety of existing tools and indices to measure the extent to which real democratic government has taken hold in the region. The most notable conclusions drawn from this study are that oil wealth and conflict, particularly the ongoing Palestine conflict, are the most relevant factors constraining the democratization process in the Arab region.
"These are the specific characteristics of the Arab region that explain the democracy deficit unlike other regions where settlements of conflict and economic development led to the democratization process," says Makdisi. Given the importance of the conflict factor, he believes that if the Palestinian question in particular is justly resolved then oil wealth, which has been used to co-opt elites and maintain autocratic power, would be insufficient in preventing the rise of pro-reform groups who would, in turn, demand a change in existing social contracts.
