Theoretical Approaches to the Prevalence of Authoritarianism

Abstract

Approaches to monarchical survival are at the center stage of a wider debate on regime types, processes of liberalization, and authoritarian survival in the Middle East.1 The literature on democratization, and on democratic transition in particular, provides a conceptual starting point for the debate on authoritarian survival in the Arab world. Since the early 1980s, there has been an upsurge in academic interest in the processes and potentialities of democratic transition. This attention was triggered in large part by democratization of the remaining authoritarian regimes in southern Europe as well as in Latin America. Combined with regime openings in East and Southeast Asia, and then most dramatically the transformation of former communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Europe, these trends were considered by many observers, especially in the West, as parts of a larger, global democratic trend, known as the “third wave of democracy,”2 and which sustained an explosion of new scholarship on democratic transition, breakdown, and consolidation.