Gov 365N/MES 323K
Questions for Class 24: April 17, 2008
Focusing this week on issues of democracy and democratization
First from last time:
- And with what impact upon the development of active local
stock markets? Here is the
Saudi
Arabia stock exchange....recent
ups
and downs...and as it was
in 2006 before
the
collapse.
(See
your syllabus, with some graphs of relationships between
wealth, economic reform, information, and stock market activity).
- What do you think of Nikki Keddie's point that small states
tend to be more liberal than big ones? Take a look at Bahrain
today:
An
Island Kingdom Feels the Ripples From Iraq and Iran, NYT Apr
16, 2006
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
- Eva Bellin argued in your reading last week that MENA
capitalists are too dependent on their respective regimes to enjoy
any significant autonomy, much less aspire to democracy? But how
dependent are the new Arab Gulf capitalists and what might their
demands be?
- Under what political conditions might an independent Arab
bourgeoisie emerge? Discuss the relative possibilities of its
emergence under bunker, bully, monarchical and semi-democratic
conditions? To what extent, under what sorts of conditions, might
it act as a transnational bourgeoisie?
- Take a look at the Europe Union's Middle East Policy home page
- can we get ways of comparing performances of different countries
in the region by examining their reactions to a common stimulus of
the EU Partnership Initiative? (This may also help some of you
with your papers). Here is the link:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/med_mideast/intro/index.htm
- While on interesting sites, what do you think of the Internet
filtering - how liberal really is Bahrain, etc.?!! Internet
filtering in Yemen and related studies: See the Berkeley open
initiative country
pages.
- Finally, here are the
rankings
from the latest
Arab
Competitiveness Report put out by the World Economic Forum,
which meets with Bill Gates et al in Davos every year. How do they
correlate with our regime types - the bullies, bunkers,
monarchies, and conditional democracies?