Gov 365N/MES 323K

Questions for Class 24: April 17, 2008

Focusing this week on issues of democracy and democratization

First from last time:

  1. 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).
  2. 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)
  3. 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?
  4. 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?
  5. 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
  6. 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.
  7. 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?