Anderson highlights many different factors that attributed to the failure of political scientists to successfully analyze the Middle East in the ways they were attempting to. One such way was the over emphasis of political scientists to attribute the United States’ actions and policies in the Middle East region for more than they could possibly have been. She doesn’t say that the U.S. didn’t have significant sway in the region but she believes that many political scientists attribute many of the changes in the Middle East to the U.S. when they couldn’t have had that amount of influence. She also believes that many western analysts ran into problems during their studies of the Middle East in regards to how they measure political change. She states that many political scientists measure change in the amount of democracy and globalization a nation undergoes and in this region many western ideals were met with resistance. Another issue political scientists ran into was the slow decline of democracy in the region. Many were looking for trends in the expansion of democracy but they just weren’t there. As time went on and the governments of the once Ottoman Empire began to form identities and govern themselves; democratic ideals began to fade and many political scientists were not able to gather the “empirical or analytical” evidence that they were looking for. Democratic trends that political scientist were looking for weren’t there. The failure of democratic nations to emerge in the Middle East comparatively to the rest of the world from the 1970’s to 2000’s challenged the general notion that the inevitable rise of democracy was in fact inevitable. Many political scientists came to this conclusion as democracy had failed int he region. From the prospect of its emergence post WWII to the complete collapse of almost all democratic nations by the 2000’s the region contradicted what many political scientists wished to believe.
