The contentious revolts comprising the Arab Spring have followed a curious pattern: they have predominantly upended republican autocracies while largely leaving the region’s authoritarian kingdoms intact. While Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and soon Syria experience the tumult of regime change caused by opposition uprisings, the eight monarchies of Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the five Gulf principalities meander on. Why? What accounts for the apparent resilience of Arab monarchies? Most studies suggest that these eight kingships today simply tend to repress less than their republican counterparts, relying instead on cultural affinities or institutional mechanisms of demobilization. Yet this begs the deeper question of why monarchies embrace cooptation over coercion in the first place. Combining cross-national fieldwork with cross-time analysis, this study provides a simple but innovative reason why Middle East monarchies today have been less likely to liquidate opposition in mass episodes than presidential rulers: they learned from their predecessors, namely the 40-some dynastic rulerships that control sovereign territory that collapsed in the region from the early 20th century through the 1970s, that coalition-building rather than coercive violence was a better strategy for survival. Whereas republican autocracies come in three varieties—militaristic, personalistic, and single-party—the principle of hereditary succession within monarchism generates a collective sense of membership among geographically proximate royal families today, including an increased propensity to learn why past brethren fell to mass uprisings, such as Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), and Iran (1979). Cross-national studies miss this cognitive mechanism in favor of cultural or institutional reasoning, because they do not analyze the far more numerous monarchies in the past which have fallen. When categorized into a qualitative dataset, monarchism does not appear as a durable regime type in temporal perspective: it has suffered an 80% failure rate over the past century. Moreover, whereas an equal number of republics have suffered regime transition after using either indiscriminate violence or co-opting tactics, the vast majority of fallen monarchies fell into a single category—they deployed large-scale brutality against popular uprisings, which triggered self-sustaining cycles of social mobilization and elite defections. Herein lays the final point. Over time, as more monarchies collapsed, those that endured have phased out violent responses to opposition and instead preferred coalitional strategies of co-optation. More than coincidence, I conclude that this historical pattern exposes a learning pattern that convinces royal dictators to keep most soldiers in the barracks when popular rebellions emerge from below.

The Arab uprising sweeping the Middle East and North Africa is effectively changing the political landscape in the region. But while some countries are undergoing popular social-political changes, some will not see the same social revolutionary, regime-changing impulse. Arab monarchies seem immune so far. While the sources of grievances and the patterns of diffusion are similar throughout the MENA region, the outcome has varied, which imposes key theoretical and empirical questions. The paper argues that regime type is a key variable explaining the difference in the outcome of the protest movement in the Maghreb region. The paper lends support to Brumberg’s argument that “kings have more institutional and symbolic room to improvise reforms than do Arab presidents.” The paper suggests that this is in effect constitutes a monarchical “advantage”, which has so far insulated these political orders against regime instability. Hence, while some have decried a crisis of authoritarianism, the current paper modifies that contention and argues for crisis in “republican” authoritarianism, for its “monarchical” variant is resilient and has so far managed to survive the Arab protest movement. Monarchical advantage is traced back to the colonial period when European masters established most of the republican states arbitrarily. Monarchies, on the other hand, feature a different state-regime relationship as remnants of political orders pre-existed the edifice of the modern state constructed by either French or British colonialism. Current monarchical regimes have managed to surround existing regime coalitions with modern colonially-created states. The Maghreb’s only monarchy in Morocco has continuously utilized this “advantage” as it has proved more resilient than many had expected, and has largely outmaneuvered the beleaguered February 20 movement. The monarchical edifice in Morocco has relied on the interplay between symbolic, historical, and coercive means subsumed under the authority of the Makhzen apparatus of the state. The state in Morocco is in many ways an authority in which a synthesis of two dissimilar systems, rational-temporal and symbolic-religious, coexists in the face of modern challenges to regime stability. Relying on this synthesis of authority, institutional flexibility, and a calibrated pace of reforms, King Mohammed VI has managed to slow the momentum of the protest movement of February 20 by offering a semblance of reforms, and to emasculate the “ruling” government of Islamist Party of Justice and Development in the aftermath of the legislative elections of 2011.

The fate of the regimes in the Arab world after 2011 protests has prompted scholars to ask how and whether different authoritarian institutions affect mass protest. Why did Mubarak fall, but not King Mohammed VI? Are the paths to regime change different in monarchies? The literature on regime change largely focuses on the shift from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones, with few distinctions made between monarchies and authoritarian republics. This paper argues that monarchies have a unique institutional feature that other types of authoritarian regimes lack: they can democratize without destabilizing the leadership by becoming a constitutional monarchy. Constitutional monarchy is desirable because it offers both democracy and stability. This possible outcome alters the calculus of regime opponents by providing an additional option unavailable to opposition forces in other kinds of authoritarian regimes. The promise of constitutional monarchy complicates coordination among regime opponents and affecting the kinds of claims they make. Arab kings did not survive the Arab Spring because they were more legitimate, smarter, or because they offered more meaningful reforms, I argue. Nor were kings invulnerable; monarchies can and do end through collective action. But the calculus that protestors face differs in monarchies. I illustrate this argument through a study of protest in Morocco during the Arab Spring and I propose ways to test it using historical data and large-N cross-national comparisons

The predominant model of dynastic monarchy (Herb, 1999) sees competition within monarchies as a natural and even beneficial element of family rule. While acknowledging the temptations of external coalition building towards building political advantage, it argues that internal cohesion will ultimately prevail due to threat of losing family power and through the mechanism of bandwagoning. This paper revisits this argument by examining the recent history of factional competition in Kuwait and Bahrain. Relative to other Gulf monarchies, these states demonstrate high social mobilization institutionalized in relatively robust legislatures and dynamic civil society organizations. As states, they also have exhibited vulnerabilities, both having been subject to foreign interventions, invited (Saudi National Guard forces in Bahrain in 2011) and uninvited (Iraqi forces in Kuwait in 1990). As such these monarchies reveal weaknesses and represent hard cases for regime stability. These more historically built attributes are further challenged by the temporal realities of 1) complicated successions or power imbalances within the ruling family and 2) the strenuous regional conditions of the Arab Spring. Thus for both temporal and structural reasons, it is reasonable to posit that if cracks were to appear in the model of dynastic monarchy, currently these monarchies would be the ones to show them. I argue that under these conditions, royal factionalism in these states is actually breeding instability rather than security. Royal rivals are extending their reach through domestic coalitions and foreign alliances in ways that are undermining the unity of the state. In Bahrain the ascendance of new royal factions has precipitated dramatic shifts in policies and ideology, exacerbating sectarian relations. Moreover, factional rivals have sought to augment their power through international alliances, inviting proxy battles and weakening the cohesion of the state. In Kuwait youthful contenders to succeed the current Emir have engaged in a no holds barred competition through the parliament, leveraging parliamentary clients to undermine the ministerial power and influence of their rival. This has lessened the effectiveness of both the government and the parliament, and has left the ruling family open to criticism of poor government performance and corruption, strengthening a youth-driven opposition. In reviewing the dynamics of dynastic monarchy in these two hard cases, the paper will strive to extend the implications for the stability of Gulf monarchies with the probability of a future decline in oil revenues and the continued populist demands of the Arab Spring.