‘Enlarging the social basis of small Gulf states’ certainly does not refer to the entry of masses into politics; yet, for two decades now, the seemingly immutable –or designed to be so- alliance between ruling families and the powerful merchant elites has come under strain from more popular, more religious-minded and later incorporated parts of the citizenry. Although these relatively newcomers on the political scene reinforced at first the rulers’ side of the bilateral contract, they seem nowadays to have grown into independent and vocal critics of the alliance, leading to political stalemate in both countries. In Kuwait, the executive and legislative powers have been waging a internecine war paralysing the country’s decision process since at least 2006, while in Bahrain, the government is desperate to enlarge its Sunni support to thwart its Shiite majority opposition. How fragile has the initial social contract become? To which extent has its legitimacy been affected? And above all, is it renegotiable and how? These are the questions that this paper intends to address. Based on a 1.5-year fieldwork in the two countries, it will contend that the two regimes are now faced with the pressing demands for a renegotiation of the social contract from newly empowered segments of their citizenry and that unsurprisingly any attempt to level privileges is indeed being resisted by the beneficiaries of the former social contract. After recalling the composition of the founding alliances (rulers-city dwellers in Kuwait, ruling family-Sunni tribal elements from Najd in Bahrain), this paper will identify the mechanisms accounting for the citizenry enlargements. It will show how, in Kuwait, the policy that turned the historical clientele of the merchant elites into state’s services recipients and state’s supporters eventually backfired when this supporters, emancipated from its state patron and rallying followers along tribal-religious lines, started to challenge the legitimacy of the founding alliance and fiercely renegotiate it. Similarly, the paper will assess how successful has been the steady program of naturalisation of foreign Sunni elements in Bahrain in counterbalancing the effects of the enfranchisement of the indigenous Shiite population in 1999, eventually addressing the question of whether these freshly-made citizens, unlike in Kuwait, will proved staunch enough to salvage the already damaged legitimacy of the existing social contract.