This dissertation project examines why authoritarian regimes in several Arab countries relinquish policymaking authority to conservative state institutions with vastly different preferences than their own. Further, the project seeks to explain why some regimes engage in this type of powersharing and others do not. The researchers argue that this loosely defined form of `delegation' is a primary tool used by Arab authoritarians to systematically neutralize, and in some cases discredit, their religious-based opposition. In addition to building a theory that explains why autocrats relinquish power to these conservative agents, the project also seeks to identify the conditions under which this type of political powersharing occurs. The researchers explain why some Middle Eastern regimes, like the regimes in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait, and Jordan, engage in such a strategy and others, like the regimes in Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, do not. The project's explanatory contribution will be enhanced through the incorporation of both a cross-national, cross-time statistical study of 18 Arab states as well as a longitudinal comparative dimension where two countries, Egypt and Syria, will be examined in-depth at multiple points over time. The researchers have selected Syria as a "negative" case of the phenomenon under discussion, though it is similar to the "positive" case, Egypt, in a number of significant ways. Political scientists specializing in comparative politics have long been puzzled by the persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East as well as the failure of countries in the region to make the transition to democratic government.
Broader impact: This project will forward our collective understanding of how authoritarian regimes in the Arab world operate with profound policy implications for the 280 million Arabs currently living in the shadow of authoritarian government as well as for the Western and other nations that deal with these regimes both diplomatically and militarily. Arab autocrats are among the most long-lived in the world with ruling regimes surviving for thirty, forty years or more. This research project provides a partial answer for this phenomenon building on a growing literature on authoritarian institutionalism that has emerged in comparative politics since the 1990s.
