Rentierism

Rentierism mainly consists of governments, specifically those with small amounts of people in leadership positions, controlling trade of their most profitable/abundant resources and using the money made to funnel right back into the government so that the leaders can remain in power. This money is used in different ways, whether it is to strengthen the military, pay off political opponents, etc. In this situation, the resource rent is oil. Typically, most of the worlds oil comes from one source, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a monarchal government, meaning that the ones making a majority of decisions for the country are the King and the prime minister. With that said, I believe that the reasoning for the political and social damages is the unusual size of rents occurring.

From the readings, there is not much reason to determine the bad political climate is due to outside forces are the reasons why these powerful political figures remain in power. It is most certainly due to the unusual/large size of the rents. Ross makes a large point about the resource curse. The resource curse is the continuous “coincidence” that countries who are rich in natural resources, in this case oil, tend to be corrupt. It is a continuous pattern because oil makes a lot of money, so these powerful figures want to claim the monetary gain from these transactions solely to fund themselves. If it were a much smaller demand for oil, then these countries and specifically their leaders can not stay in power as they do not have the sheer vast amount of cash being made from their oil trade. The last concept I will mention is Ross’ Rentier State Theory where governments for countries which has a lot of oil heavily rely on the revenue they make as previously stated. However this has a negative outcome as they rely much less on things such as taxes as they are already making enough money off the oil. This leads to there being less concern about the citizens as the government then does not feel accountable for their citizens as the citizens wouldn’t really contribute anything to the government unless they are in a government position. This does not fare well with democracy as in a democratic state, almost everyone can participate in government whether it be work or by simply voting. This wouldn’t occur in an oil rich state due to previously stated issues with accountability for their citizens. Thus Democracy can not form as there is a huge wall between government and citizen, something that would need to come down if they were to want to build a democratic state.