There has been a wide-spread belief that elections with a wide franchise following removal of an oppressive dictator lead to establishment of a government that is not vulnerable to mass protest. At the same time, most of the post-World War II non-constitutional exits of recently-installed autocratic leaders were caused by elite coups, rather than popular protests. The recent experience of Egypt, where the democratic post-Mubarak government, a result of the Arab Spring, collapsed after having had almost uninterrupted protests since its first day in office, offers a striking counterexample to both of these patterns. We demonstrate that this is a general phenomenon: the same technological shock, arrival of social media, that makes the incumbent vulnerable, lays foundation for continuous instability of the subsequent democratic government. Our theoretical model, which incorporates protest into a Downsian framework, takes into account specific features of modern protests: the significant role of social media and the absence of the partisan or personalized leadership during popular unrest. Case studies of the Arab countries with and without large-scale protests corroborate our theoretical findings.

Much ink has been spilt over the study of the causes and reasons behind the rise of the Arab people in what was called the “Arab spring” or the “Arab awakening” after decades of stagnancy and silence. All attempts have been overwhelmed and distorted by the concurrent conditions of the Arab world in relation to its social, political and cultural structure. Despite the fact that the Arab revolutions that swept important Arab countries by the beginning of 2011 from North Africa to the Middle East fall under such criteria, still the causes and roots of these uprisings at this very moment indicate some inherent potential drives that are the result of years of simmering. Even more strikingly, the underpinnings of the Arab revolutions can be traced also to a distrust of people in their governments and a deep understanding of the new world order triggered by the 9/11 events and the invasion of Iraq. This paper traces the impact of the 9/11 events on the Arab mindset ever since the Iraq war and how it resulted in the turmoil of the Arab revolutions.

Thomas Friedman’s so-called First Law of Petropolitics (FLP) hypothesizes the existence of a causal relationship between oil prices and “the pace of freedom”. Such a principle has attracted considerable attention, as well as criticism. This paper argues that, in order to firmly establish the existence of relationships between oil prices and autocracy, it is crucial to go beyond axiomatic, as well as ideological, formulations. Instead, the focus should be to locate such a phenomenon within the more articulated and scientifically sound framework provided by Rentier State Theory (RST).

The aim of this paper is to provide a specific point of view on the protests that have characterized the Arab countries from December 2010 and are still going on. To understand some of the reasons behind these events, I propose a sequential game with asymmetric information on the likelihood of having a successful uprising. This means that on one hand the government choices may signal the true state of nature and on the other hand the citizens’ choices are a way to learn the truth. The model is simple and I assume specific parameters’ values to obtain a full characterization of the set of equilibria. This full characterization shows the interaction of three main factors in determining the possible resulting political regimes: the country’s wealth, the autocratic institutions and the general political mood. The complex interaction of these three variables explain why apparently heterogeneous countries may have similar political processes and apparently similar countries have different political situations.

Most, if not all, post-World War II non-constitutional exits from power by recently-installed leaders have been caused by elite coups, not popular uprisings. The recent experience of Egypt, where the post-Mubarak government collapsed after almost uninterrupted protests since its first day in office, offers a striking counterexample to this pattern. Our theoretical model, incorporating protest into a dynamic Downsian framework, features the significant role of social media and the absence of partisan or personalized leadership. In equilibrium, it is possible to have recurrent protests. Moreover, even non-radical incumbents with wide support can suffer from them. We show that recurrent revolutions feature the emergence of new dictators on the opposite side of the political spectrum.