After advancing by waves for decades, democracy appears to be retreating. Since the year 2000 over two dozen democratic governments have slid toward authoritarianism. Last year the National Endowment for Democracy warned of a "global assault on democracy." This rollback in free government comes from the heights of dictatorships but also from the pits of public opinion, where nationalist insecurity boosts jingoists and autocrats. It extends from hardened dictatorships in the Middle East to suddenly shaky democracies, like Hungary and Poland, in the EU. Fears are trumping ideals, as anxious publics endorse resolute, exclusionary states. Recent studies overlook this global context when they treat the Arab states as peculiarly dysfunctional. No doubt, the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 produced fewer stable democratic regimes (one) than Eastern Europe's revolts in 1989 (six). To be sure, initial political openings in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen ended in shocking amounts of militant violence and state repression. Furthermore, intra-state conflicts and inter-state tensions have only risen since 2011. The clash of religious zealots and unrepentant despots makes it highly unlikely that Arab governments will legitimate themselves through popular consent any time soon. The paper delivers an alternative narrative, based on the author's recent four-month research stay in Egypt and an original dataset on recent democratization. At the country-level, evidence shows Egyptians express support for General-cum-president Abdel-Fatah El-Sissi at levels and in ways that cannot be wholly ascribed to state coercion; El-Sissi's highly controversial tenure to date appears to address a broadly felt sense of uncertainty. The experience of Tunisia, the Arab world's strongest standing representative democracy, supports this conclusion. Military authoritarianism did not return in Tunisia, but citizens in the country nonetheless express concerns about the suitability of democracy—and accompanying preferences for a well-functioning government, even if it is non-democratic—that match attitudes in Egypt. Cross-regional evidence helps to explain the mechanisms at work: Electoral democracy remains tenuous among low-to-middle income countries around the world. Both Egypt and Tunisia fall in this "danger zone," where challenging material conditions regularly drag countries back into authoritarianism. In these situations, specific religions and cultures matter less than general sources of livelihood. Democratic "legitimacy" can be eclipsed by non-democratic formulas that immediately provide—or promise to provide—economic and human security, which a political transition may not yield and may actually jeopardize.

Increasing inequality across the globe has revived a century-old debate relating political legitimacy to redistributive policies. Advanced democracies and entrenched autocracies alike have seen the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” widen since the Third Wave of Democratization in the early 1990s, underscoring the importance of unpacking the relationship between redistributive economic policy and regime legitimacy. The literature on redistribution in MENA is dominated by rentierist explanations that predicate political legitimacy on social benefits financed through aid or oil rents. Comparative political economy construes redistribution in democratic contexts as a social good that citizens demand from governments in exchange for political stability. While these works provide a basic rationale for redistribution, they do not explain why authoritarian governments choose to redistribute and what impact this choice has on a regime's capacity to rule legitimately. In this paper, I show that governments that redistribute land cultivate less political legitimacy than those who do not. While income redistribution is rare in MENA states, capital-intensive redistributive policies in the form of land redistribution is a common feature across the Maghreb and Levant in the post-independence period. I advance the hypothesis that regimes are more likely to redistribute land to expropriate the incumbent landowning elite. In cases where landowners are part of the ruling coalition, redistributive policies increase political uncertainty and undermine elite coalitions, decreasing the regime's legitimacy. Using an original database detailing all instances of land reform in sovereign MENA states since 1900, I present statistical models that suggest land redistribution negatively impacts regime legitimacy in the absence of elite divisions. These results are robust to two measures of political legitimacy: regime duration and political stability. Historical case studies of land redistribution in Jordan, Tunisia and Syria substantiate this quantitative finding. This study contributes to the MENA and global literatures on political legitimacy with new empirical evidence that clarifies the relationship between economic policies and political order.

Global findings suggest a positive effect of oil rents on human development, yet this result is exclusively driven by the tremendous gains in human development in the Middle East, in particular the GCC countries. Why is this the case? What prompted rulers in the MENA region to share the wealth of oil much more widely than elsewhere? Based on British archival sources, this paper develops an explanation for this puzzle and highlights the unique convergence of foreign-sponsored subversion and systemic vulnerability in the Middle East as the key drivers behind the broad-based distribution of rents. More generally, this paper emphasises threats to the incumbent elite during moments of regime formation as an important explanation of authoritarian legitimation strategies. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods in a mixed-methods design, the paper proceeds in two steps: first, we establish a seemingly positive effect of oil rents on human development at the global level, which – at closer inspection – turns out to be exclusively driven by high-rent countries in the MENA region. Second, we use archival material from the British Foreign Office and the former Political Residency in the Gulf to demonstrate that the unique confluence of leftist subversive threats, emanating from the region’s ‘progressive’ states, and the weak capacity to defend themselves without foreign assistance heightened rulers’ sense of insecurity and induced them to follow a strategy of preventing nascent revolutionary threats by distributing oil rents more widely. In particular, we focus on three episodes to substantiate this claim: Kuwait pre- and post-1956, which marks the ascendancy of Arab nationalism under Nasser; Oman’s reaction to the Dhofar rebellion in the late 1960s; and the inception of the UAE’s development strategy also in the late 1960s.