Monarchies and Protests in the Arab Uprisings: Path Dependencies or Political Opportunities?

Abstract

This article places the “monarchy-republic gap” into a larger theoretical context of shifting paradigms of research to explain why monarchies in the Gulf faced fewer protests than other regimes in the Middle East in 2011. In so doing this article synthesizes the New Institutionalism focus on stability with the emphasis of social movement theory on changing patterns of political contention in order to reconceptualize the notion of regime in a way that draws from larger social science debates rather than a narrow usage common in Middle Eastern Studies. It argues that three mechanisms of monarchism — the distribution of decision-making power, the distribution of economic resources and the distribution of cultural norms — can better explain the variations in protests between the Gulf monarchies and other regimes as well as within the Gulf monarchies.