Scholars of rentier states have theorized that oil revenues allow ruling regimes to build extensive patronage networks, thus fending off pressures for political voice. When oil revenues fall, regimes are likely to experience severe crisis, as populations mobilize against the regimes. The Gulf states do not fit the model. Their regimes were able to survive the oil price downturns of the mid-1980’s and the late 1990’s. Moreover, the internal logic of this thesis cannot explain the periods of increased political activism in Kuwait. If high oil revenues placate domestic constituencies, then we should see heightened domestic political activism when oil prices are lower. That is not the case in Kuwait. Domestic organizing to pressure the government to re-establish the parliament began in the late 1980’s, as oil prices were increasing, not in 1986 when they had plummeted. Oil prices held steady in the post-invasion period of the early 1990’s, when political life resumed with vigor. The oil price downturn of the late 1990’s did not witness any particular increase in Kuwaiti political activity. The wave of activism which led to the 2007 parliamentary elections came at a time of very high oil prices. I hypothesize that the Kuwaiti state was able to develop a number of administrative instruments – both coercive and cooptive – that allowed it to ride out periods of low oil revenues. I will explore the hypothesis that greater political activism is spurred by regime crises rather than fiscal crises: that Kuwaitis increase their political activism at times when the ruling regime has either sought to increase its powers unilaterally or has been weakened by external shocks or internal divisions.