ABSTRACT
The Arab world initiated a short-lived move toward democratic practices in the 1950s that was reversed in the 1960s. While there was some limited progress on democratization in a few Arab states during the 1970s, the Arab world has generally failed to catch up with the rest of the world, falling further behind in the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the ushering in of the current era of globalization. Since the early 1990s, the distance between world and Arab median polity scores has widened dramatically, and authoritarian regimes have thrived in the Arab region, prompting the Arab Human Development Report (UNDP and Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, 2002) to note that ‘There is a substantial lag between the Arab countries and other regions in terms of participatory governance.’ Despite predictions of democratization following economic development, this gap is widening, even with the extreme wealth in many of these countries. Arab autocracies have tended to survive much longer than the median length of regime of their type in the world, suggesting that there is something unique about the process of democratization in the Arab world.
