When we talk about “Rentierism”, we refer to a situation in which a state owns natural resources and the rents are paid by foreign actors. We know that Middle East countries are the biggest producers of oil in the world, so a question among Middle East scholars came up: is it possible that oil wealth could be strictly correlated with the lack of democratization in the region?
Firstly, it’s necessary to understand how “rentierism” phenomena is held. Taxation: it differs from country to country, but it is assured that where we find higher oil wealth we’ll have less heavy taxation. Governments that fund themselves through oil revenues and have a large budget are more likely to be authoritarian, the ones who fund themselves through taxes and are smaller are more likely to become democratic. And that happens because states that don’t own a taxation system invest the money on military forces. Why do they invest so much in this? Is it to repress popular insurrections and pressures, or maybe for a high level of internal instability? Well, for both reasons. Taxation is relevant in society in order to create a “social contract” with the population, so that people know what’s going on with their money. But as we said, governments with a huge amount of financial incomes tends to prevent the formation of social groups that are independent from the state and could potentially request for political rights.
Now if we want to be more specific, we can distinguish how the rentier effect works in the different countries of the area. We don’t find it in countries with poor availability of natural resources like Morocco or Lebanon, but in states where resources are rich. But it is also deserving to say that there is also a difference among resource-rich ones: in RRLP it is less impactful than in RRLA countries, where indeed due to larger concentration of people there is more reliance in repressive actions and lack of independent middle class.
So yes, oil wealth does great and remarkable damage to democratization in most of Middle Eastern countries, because these governments, or better, the people in head, don’t really know how to manage their prosperity without submitting and treating poorly their own citizens, depriving them of being recognized as human beings.
Citation: Ross, Michael L. 2001 “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?”
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